Carolyn
Case

HR runs on borrowed science, and a surprising amount of it did not survive contact with better research. Annual performance reviews still anchor pay and promotion decisions despite decades of evidence they do not predict who actually improves. Learning styles still shape onboarding decks long after cognitive psychology quietly retired the idea. Maslow's hierarchy still gets drawn as a rigid pyramid in motivation training, a shape Maslow never drew and a strict sequence he never claimed.

This session names the specific practices, traces where the research actually stands today, and shows how a function trained to defer to best practice ends up defending policies with nothing behind them. It is a working method for testing any practice, vendor claim, or workshop before it goes in the handbook.

What attendees take away

1. 1.Which staple HR practices have already failed replication, and what holds up in their place
2. 2.Why "best practice" language lets outdated science survive inside HR long after it is retired everywhere else
3. 3.The difference between a theory that is simply outdated and one that was never well-supported at all
4. 4.A short evidence check to run on any practice, vendor, or workshop before it reaches the handbook
5. 5.How to raise this when the practice in question is one leadership personally loves

Available as a 60- or 45-minute keynote, a 75-minute breakout, or a half- or full-day workshop. Custom lengths on request.

SHRM recertification credit available in all formats. Credit is awarded at 1.0 PDC per contact hour, issued directly rather than self-reported, with the Activity ID provided to the host in advance.

Every screening call is an interview about somebody else's workplace. Recruiters hear why people are actually leaving, what a competitor's culture is really like from the inside, and what an entire market has quietly stopped tolerating, long before any of it shows up in a survey or a headline. A sudden cluster of applicants from one company is a signal. A pattern of declined offers is a signal. None of it gets captured anywhere but a recruiter's memory, because recruiting is measured on time-to-fill, not on what it noticed along the way.

This session treats that pattern-recognition as a real, trainable skill rather than an accident of the job, and covers the practice intelligence professionals use to turn a raw conversation into a usable signal: HUMINT, human intelligence gathered through direct contact rather than dashboards or surveys. It also draws the line the discipline depends on, between reading a market and pumping a candidate for what their employer would not want shared.

What attendees take away

1. 1.Why a recruiter's screening call is functionally an exit interview for a company that is not yours
2. 2.What a sudden spike in applicants from one competitor is actually telling you, and how to read it
3. 3.Why decline reasons are competitive intelligence about your own employer brand, not just a dropdown field
4. 4.How to turn a single conversation into a usable, reportable signal using the HUMINT method
5. 5.How to build a capture process so this insight reaches leadership instead of leaving with the recruiter who heard it

Available as a 60- or 45-minute keynote, a 75-minute breakout, or a half- or full-day workshop. Custom lengths on request.

SHRM recertification credit available in all formats. Credit is awarded at 1.0 PDC per contact hour, issued directly rather than self-reported, with the Activity ID provided to the host in advance.