Cory Rose

▶0:01HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. Always the first question that I love to ask is, tell me a little bit more about your career journey and what led you to your current role in HR?

▶0:56GuestCool. So I— let's start from the beginning and I'll give you the, the 30,000-foot view. When I went to college, both of my parents were like, go to college, study whatever you want to study, because you're going to end up in business. Everybody ends up in some sort of business. And so I was an interdisciplinary studies major with a minor in cross-cultural humanities and Africana studies. And so I've always been fascinated by different cultures and different points of view in the world, like how do people think, how do how do different cultures react to different situations, and putting myself in a situation where I am the odd man out, which I don't think is super common. And so when I graduated, I gravitated towards people. So my first role was an associate agent at Randstad. And so I started probably the first, I would say, 3, 4-ish years of my career in recruiting, whether that be doing like agency recruiting. Then I moved into corporate recruiting, and then I got to a point where I was like, I wanna understand once I attract this talent and once I'm bringing this great talent in, 'cause as a recruiter you get to talk to so many fascinating people. What happens to 'em though? What's their journey? Uh, is what I'm selling them actually happening when they come? You know, they come internally. And so from there, I took a job at the government, which was the most boring job I've ever had. And so if you wanna put that in the interview, you can. It was the most boring job I've ever had. It was so slow. But it was pre-recruitment and it was working at the NIH and it was during the time of swine flu where we were trying to figure out, looking at our diversity metrics, how many diverse scientists do we need to hire based on the EEOC and what was coming down from OPM, or what type of conferences should we be going to get in front of these different types of scientists or corporate employees that we need to hire? So I was getting that pre-HR, pre-recruiting of figuring out like, how do you do the org design? And then I would say I cut my teeth on really good HR at Deloitte. So I got a role with Deloitte with their federal practice out of the D.C. area. And there it was really learning that, hey, all of the good structural HR stuff is built for you. This is really to hone your skills of being a business partner, of understanding like, how do I really think about matching the right people to the right projects? But at the same time, how do we think about performance management? How do I get to know my business leaders and earn that trust with them to understand what are they trying to achieve and how does that people portion run alongside of what they're trying to achieve? And that's where I would say, like I said, I cut my teeth on like real good HR and then from there naturally flowed into HR manager roles, HR business partner roles, was lucky enough to get really involved in the HR tech scene, spent my time, was able to actually move abroad and actually work, live and work abroad, in which I was in a role a company called Delivery Hero in Berlin, Germany, where they don't operate in the US, right? And it's one thing to be a US-based person saying, I support an international team, but until you like live and work every day in that environment and really understand that, like, the big world picture view outside of America, like, you don't really understand like what HR looks and feels like if you're not sitting in that culture day to day. And it reminds me of going back to kind of college where it was like, I want to be the odd man out, and how do I figure out how to navigate, and how do I adjust, and how do I think about how different people and cultures are reacting to things. After I came back to the US, spent some time at Udemy, spent some time at Chime, obviously two kind of unicorn darlings in their own right. And then I made my way here to Tag. And so I wouldn't say that ending up in quote unquote big teeth was in my life plan. You know, Tag, we're a multi-retail healthcare brand. And so we've got 5 different brands that exist under the Tag umbrella. And what I got here was just a lot of interesting interesting insights into how different people think and a lot of persona building because we employ dentists, but at the same time we employ vets and we employ nurse estheticians that are putting Botox into people's faces. And so you've got a lot of different people and it's an interesting insight again into how people think, what are their motivators, what is— what are the things that they need. And so from a people perspective, there's no shortage of challenges, but at the same time a lot of rewards of like, how do I And how do my— how does my team as a center of excellence build programs and processes and policies that scale across all 20,000 of our employees? I have moved around a lot from a job perspective, also city perspective. I feel like I've lived all over the country, all over the world. But I will say that each time I've moved, it's to learn something new and put a new tool on my tool belt. And I know people have said that before, but for me it's really true. If you look at my background, I'd say I'm the Swiss Army knife of an HR person. If you were like, Hey, we need somebody to go find us a PEO. We want to expand into Latin America. Okay, I'm going to call Globalization Partners. I'm going to call Oyster. I'm going to demo them. Hey, we need to, we need to implement Workday. I've done 4 Workday implementations. Oh, we need to build out a comp committee with the board. Like, I can do that from my pre-IPO time at Chime. So it's an interesting thing that I've got a lot of tools on my tool belt, but I never want to stop learning. And so each time I move or each time I go somewhere else, like I'm learning something new from somebody really that I really admire and I really trust. And I would say at TAG, the thing I've learned most is a lot of change management, of navigating both legacy folks who have been here a long time through new folks from brands because we grow a lot through M&A. So that's a little bit about my career journey. And then even though I'm in the big corporate environment now, I stay fresh in the areas of— by being involved in People Tech Partners, I advise 4 different, 4 different HR tech companies, which is really exciting. To stay up to date on what's out there in the market? How do I help them figure out how to sell into people like me? So yeah, that's my journey in a long-winded approach.

▶6:40HostYeah, that's a great segue. And I love how international you are because it, it's something that resonates with me having been an expat 5 times. Yeah, I appreciate that, that perspective. I'd love to ask a question around some of the most significant trends you're seeing shape the HR landscape and how you're adapting within your organization to those trends and maybe even provide some color of what you're seeing in your role as an advisor to some of those new HR techs and some of the new emerging things that are happening.

▶7:14GuestI think the first thing as myself, as an HR practitioner, I always do when thinking about the trends is like, what's a trend and what's actually going to stick around? Because I think it's very easy to get distracted by brand new shiny thing. And I think brand new shiny thing for everybody everywhere is AI. Oh my God, it's gonna take my job. But when you really dig in, like where can AI and where can automation actually supplement the work that you're doing that's super heavy and administrative? And how can you lean into that? So I'm sure others, others have said AI, but that's obviously one area that's always coming up. I also think another area or trend that's swinging back is this idea of retention because people are scared to leave jobs right now. But how do we make sure that people are staying for the right reasons? And how are we rethinking recognition rewards specifically in budget-constrained environments, just given kind of the overall landscape of what's going on economically? But again, for us too, it, it goes back to then to our persona building that we do here is, okay, how do we keep these people engaged? But how do we keep the collective we engaged when they're all built somewhat differently and the North Star for each business is a little bit different or a little bit tweaked? And so I've got to put on my consulting hat of like, how do I make sure I'm navigating not one-size-fits-all approaches, but ways that we can provide impactful, impactful solutions to our people, making sure they're retaining for the right reasons and they're not just staying until the market swings or looks differently. And I think I'm always going to be cautiously optimistic to go with data. What is our people data telling us? What, what are the trends that we're seeing and what are the stories that we can tell? Because anecdotally, a lot of people can say everybody's leaving because of money. Is that actually true? What is the data telling us? So I, from a trend perspective, like I said, I think like the AI thing, but that's where I think you can use tools that bring those things forward, like AI, like these rewards recognition tools, benefits and wellness plans and different things that you can give your employees to make them want to stay. That helps really drive that engagement and that retention in a constrained environment.

▶9:22HostAnd what are some of the more significant challenges that you've faced in your HR career? How have you ever overcome those challenges, and what did you learn from them?

▶9:31GuestI think what's been the most interesting for me is that I'm— I've been somewhat industry agnostic as I jumped from place to place, so that I've never really been in the same industry, like, for, like, twice. And so the biggest challenge for me is always pre-learning what that— how that business operates and what their North Star is and what they're trying to achieve, and then working backwards from there to figure out like, now what do the people need, or how do we create people programs based on like the goal of that business, right? Because even if you think about Udemy versus Chime, yes, they were both, you know, they both were and are tech darlings, but education tech, and especially education tech and online learning during COVID is going to be a booming business where your salespeople are going to be excelling and things are happening really fast versus fintech. Fintech then ramped up with how do we get, how do we get the COVID payday loans to people quicker and that sort of thing. And so there are two businesses that were very busy due to similar economic, economic things going on but needed very different things. And so it's learning the personas of the employees that you have. I started my career in the HR business partnering stuff, partnering very heavily with salespeople. And I think the reason that I was a good fit there is I'm a little bit, I would say, no nonsense. I'd use a different word, but you're recording me. I'm not afraid to say the hard thing in a meeting, and sometimes that's gotten me in trouble. I had a first job where I would just be like, just tell them to do that. And I got called abrasive, but I was just being very matter of fact, right? Like a lot of times people are scared to say a hard thing or to have a difficult conversation. And even I've even had to coach around this for myself. But once you find this, once you get over that hump and the way that you deliver things and that you talk to people and making that very respectful, I think is— it's all in the delivery. It's not coming from a place of ill will or ill intent, but hey, if we are trying to get here, you've got to have a conversation with this person about this, or that sort of thing. And for me, it's The challenges is really seeking to understand. I try to think about it whenever I'm walking into a new place is instead of walking in with all these ideas of, I've got a best practice and I'm coming from here and I'm gonna apply all the things I've learned to this exact same thing. It's gonna fail 10 times outta 10. You've gotta understand who's your crowd. You've gotta gain trust. You've gotta understand what's going on. And so I like to think about it as acting like a sponge, but then very quickly taking that sponge, being able to synthesize what's going on, synthesize what they really need and then move to action very quickly. And it's just every environment, every company is going to have its own cast of characters and its own kind of band of weirdos, for lack of a better term. But it's how do you fit into that and how do you figure out your place there and what they really need and boil it down into terms that different personalities, different cultural norms can get on board with so that you all remove that noise to move forward.

▶12:27HostAll right. What, what's something controversial but effective that you're doing as an HR leader?

▶12:33GuestI would say maybe something controversial is we've taken a big pause this year on both performance and engagement. So our employee listening, we've gone from doing it 4 times a year to scaling back to doing it once a year. And we're coming up on our employee engagement survey just now. And so while we had really great responses when we were doing it 4 times a year, we were putting the business at risk by asking people to step away to focus on some of these things. And yes, we want to know how our employees are feeling. Yes, we care about them and we want to be able to deliver on the things that they need to do their job well and to take better care of more patients. But we needed to really think about it in a thoughtful manner of what's the right time, what's the right cadence. And if we do it once a year, what's that going to feel like? And as long as we are responding to that feedback and we're still able to action plan— asking somebody to action plan 4 times a year, that's not going to be successful. You don't have enough time to put an actual action plan together. But if we do it in line with when we're setting our goals and our budgets and our OKRs for the next year, we can actually take that feedback and have it actionable at that time. So probably a little bit controversial from the standpoint of we're not, we're not listening to our employees as frequently in a formalized manner. But that doesn't mean that there's a lack of care. It's just a lack of timing. And we're in a revenue-generating business and a retail, for lack of a better term, a retail business that It just looks and feels different from some of the organizations that I'm used to. I also said performance. We were doing performance twice a year. We actually took a break this year to take a step back and say, what are we really getting out of our performance management process? Are we— what are we doing with the data? Our CEO kept asking me like, what are you doing with the data? And he's not wrong. And it was like, you know, we're kind of using it to help us guide compensation discussions. But we also thought, would it be more beneficial if we thought more about expectation setting? And then how are people doing towards their expectation setting and giving them that more frequent feedback quarter over quarter versus just checking in once a year or twice a year and being like, you're outstanding or you're exceeds. Because there's so much bias in performance management too, that like we want to get better and tighter as an organization around talent where people know where they stand at any given time. And you're not waiting for this point in time for somebody to find out that they're off track or they're not performing, but that we're managing through that on a constant basis.

▶14:52HostI love that. What question would you have me ask the next person I interview in the series? And what's your parting advice to your fellow HR executive?

▶15:04GuestAnd I would say what you should ask is, in a constrained budget environment, what is one area that you would just die on the hill of? I'm not cutting that thing. This is the one thing. If you ask me what I'm holding on to, This is the tool or the resource or the thing that I think every company absolutely needs to be able— or even our company absolutely needs to, to be successful at what we do.

▶15:31HostSo what would be your answer to that question?

▶15:36GuestUm, see, now you're turning it around on me. I would say, man, now I'm— I asked that question And now I don't know what my answer would be.

▶15:48HostIt's hard. It's a hard one.

▶15:50GuestBut because it is, it's a good question. I would actually say total rewards professionals, because I think a lot of times TR is an under-resourced team. TR is an understaffed team. They're kind of a, you know, it's, oh, you know, budgets are getting cut. Do we need a comp person? And I think in the type of environments that we exist in, the type of environments with benefits changing, cost of medical going up, different generational needs, right? Like I talked about personas, but think about different generational needs. You need somebody that can cut through all that and be able to tell you that, oh, the market has swung this way, AI, ML, we've got to get all these people. But do we really, right? You need somebody that can cut through that noise because at the end of the day, every single person has money and every single person is going to worry, probably in very general terms, about money. And you need somebody that understands the how and the why of how you pay people and how you reward people. And I would say that that's an area that you should never, that you should never under-resource or ever undercut, because if you lose track of what's actually going on in the market, you get caught up in a lot of the noise and you don't know what's fact from fiction.

▶16:58HostThat's a great answer to your own question. Thank you.

▶17:01GuestI feel like it was a two-parter. There was something else you asked me, but I didn't hear.

▶17:04HostYeah, just my, my final question is around your parting advice to your fellow HR executive? What, what would you like to leave them with?

▶17:12GuestI would say don't chase every fad, and don't feel like just because the big well-known companies are doing X, Y, and Z doesn't mean that you have to do it, right? It's okay to be great in areas that other companies aren't great at, or that other companies aren't paying attention to, because you really need to understand your people, your business to be able to build a scalable people team that's important, that can support the people that you have, right? And if that means spending less time focusing on health and being, which could be controversial, or spending less time in this area, but it's really because your team has to be great at recruiting people and TA is your thing, that's okay. It's okay to look and feel like different folks, and it's very easy to get caught up in Oh, this is the next bright, shiny thing. We have to chase it. This so-and-so talked about it on LinkedIn. It's okay to ignore it.

▶18:08HostThat's great. Cori, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I'm looking forward to getting this conversation out there on LinkedIn.

▶18:17GuestAll right.

▶18:17HostAnd I look forward to staying in touch.

▶18:20GuestMe too. Thank you so much. It was great to meet you. You too.

▶18:22HostSee ya.

▶18:23GuestBye.