RHR 141: Build Trust with Tech with Aaron Painter

Aaron Painter: 0:00

So starting off equal footing of, hey, I know you actually work for the company, or hey, I know that you actually are the candidate you claim to be is a fundamental way to build trust. It's foundational. In fact, I started at Microsoft 20 years ago, now, I went to the security office and I had to show them my ID and the security person looked at it, and they gave me a temporary password in a key card to access the buildings. And if I got locked out, had to go back to the security office, somebody was doing that physically. And that's just not a skill process. It's certainly not realistic in today's world of talent coming from all over the world, in many cases, maybe not even showing up. And so I feel like this question of identity and bringing transparency there is critical and building trust with colleagues and remote workers.

Kyle Roed: 0:41

This is the rebel HR Podcast, the podcast where we talk to HR innovators about all things people leadership. If you're looking for places to find about new ways to think about the world of work, this is the podcast for you. Please subscribe from your favorite podcast listening platform today. And leave us a review revelon HR rebels Welcome back, rebel HR listeners very excited for the conversation. Today we're going to be talking about something a little bit different. We're going to be talking all about remote work with remote remote work on the rise. The trend of fully remote interview processes are also becoming the norm as well as building trust. remotely, Aaron Painter is at the forefront of addressing this very issue. Having seen employee fraud cases firsthand, a former VP and general manager at Microsoft, Aaron is now CEO of nametag a leader in digital ID verification. There is a lot on the horizon with this issue. And I'm really excited to start to dig into this with you, Erin, thank you for joining us today.

Aaron Painter: 1:42

Thanks. I'm a regular listener and super excited to be on the conversation with you today.

Kyle Roed: 1:47

Thank you and with us. We also have Molly Bradesco. Molly, welcome back. All right, Erin. So Molly and I were chatting before we hit record, this is going to be I think, one of one of the new topics that we've talked about. And I'm really excited to to really kind of dig into this issue. Before we go there, though, I'd like to understand a little bit about your background and what got you into kind of the digital world of work with nametag.

Aaron Painter: 2:13

Yeah, it's a great question. And like many of us, I think, in so many of our professions, we have different backgrounds that come to bring us to where we are today. And so much of mine was shaped working around the world. I was at Microsoft for about 14 years. And most of those 14 years were outside the US, I had the pleasure to lead international expansion for Microsoft. So when we opened up an office in a new country, where all around the world, and then I spent several years living on the ground. For years in France, two years in Brazil, I've been happier, as in China, two of those in Hong Kong, three and a half in Beijing, and then later on several years in the UK. And so, so much of my career was being someone who often didn't look or sound like others at the table, having to find a way to sit in having to find a way to build trust with my colleagues, and most importantly, my team members that I was managing. And throughout all of it, I would say one of the most fundamental relationships I had, every place I was, was with my HR business partner. And I was fortunate at Microsoft to work with a set of colleagues who truly value that profession and wanted to really kind of be the best they could be. And I saw firsthand how strong an HR partner can be as a true corporate to the business, when you have kind of that desire on both sides to make that relationship work. So much so that when I left Microsoft, after working in China, I wrote a book on it focused on customer and employee loyalty with the premise that when employees feel listened to and trusted and respected, they carry that sense of engagement or loyalty to how they interact with customers. And you get a virtuous cycle on the business side where employees feel listened to their than listening to customers for feedback. And a business can create loyalty with both and be successful overall. So I have a ton of respect for this discipline, and certainly for where many of your listeners spend review jobs.

Kyle Roed: 4:06

Appreciate that we will take that, that that undeserved credit. So you know, I think it's, it's really interesting, you know, the context of being different. And being in a place where you know, people notice, notice the difference, I think many of us don't have that experience. And so as that was shaping you and you know, you were you were kind of learning about that, what, what did that teach you about, about building trust with with people who are maybe different than you or, or people who just don't know you?

Aaron Painter: 4:42

Yeah, a lot of it started to me with this concept of listening. And we talk a lot more about this now. So that become a more trendy topic since my book in 2017. But I think of this fundamental principle of when you're listening with curiosity to understand people feel respected by that and And I ended up doing even a kind of a TED talk about this. But I think it's probably most relevant. When I think of some of the Asian cultures where I worked. Hong Kong I went in, it was sort of a business trigger, and for us wasn't a performing business. And yet, we had a lot of really strong, incredibly intelligent employees who sort of knew what things could be, or that they could be a little bit different, or how to respond differently in the market. But their voices weren't being heard. And so by breaking a little bit of cultural norms, and saying, Hey, I'm gonna sit down one on one, and hear from you and not tell you how things are going to be and what my mandate or doctrine is gonna be from some headquarters, but to try and listen with this curiosity of what what's in your mind, what can we do differently? What can we do that would make things perform better locally, not only did I get great ideas that helped shape the basis of a plan, but I was able to create a relationship with those colleagues where they felt like, their voices matter, and your opinions mattered. And that, to me, that sense of mutual respect was the foundation of being able to build trust, and then ultimately, to build a really successful business. That worked, I would say, it worked in many phases in my career, and in many places. And then even as I went outside direct management of my, my team members inside to how I carried engagements with customers, but it almost always was in person. In fact, most of the cultures where I lived in France, Brazil, certainly across China, there were so much in person focus, it was long lunches, with colleagues and with customers and dinners, and everyone was in the office all the time. And they were in person relationships. And so I knew how to do that. And fortunately, it was a skill. I often think management is an art, you know, there are tools that we bring to it, it's not a science. And so your nevers are perfect, you're always striving to get better and better. But I couldn't do it in person, I knew how to connect with people physically, even if I didn't necessarily have native language skills, but they didn't either. But it was I lead to learn quite different in strength. Think about doing that in a virtual context, particularly when maybe you didn't have that basis of trust that you earned in person.

Kyle Roed: 7:02

Absolutely, what you're speaking to the heart of me, and I'm, you know, I'm an individual that I have three people on my team that I've never actually met in person. And I've you know, mostly because of COVID. But we've stumbled through it, some of those individuals are in China, and you can't even get in, right. So like in person is completely impossible right now. And it's been, it's been a challenge, it probably took significantly longer to build a trusting relationship with those individuals, then than it would have if I was actually in person, and we could see each other's nonverbals. And kind of listen to understand and you know, do some of those, those best practices you mentioned? So. So as you as you think about that, and you think about, you know, some of the work that you've done with with name tag and with your experience prior? What are some of the tactics or things that you have found work, when you're in this, this new kind of territory that we're marching through?

Aaron Painter: 8:01

Yeah, there's a lot that we experiment with a name tag, we were founded as a virtual company at the start of the pandemic, and we had to build our own sense of culture. And I was nervous at first, because I had office space, we're all set in Seattle, and it was gonna be great. And we're going to build a team in person. And quickly COVID made that not possible. All right, let's try and find just different ways to do this. And I realized quickly that a lot of the talent that was going to be in our space, we're going to be in a lot of different places. It was a competitive talent environment. And I said, I'd rather find people who are amazing at what they do, and can come add to our culture and build this company that we we have such great aspirations for, they weren't going to be in Seattle, they were going to be somewhere in the US, let's at least limit it to that. And so we had a lot of experimentation on how we communicate how we come together, the rhythms, the practices, the team, you know, how we use virtual tools that I'd say, have really helped us and some fun things we could talk about, and we're getting better at every day. But to me, it really goes back to the problems in way we were trying to solve. And I realized at the start of the pandemic, very personally, that it was simply too hard to trust the identity of someone online or on the phone. Man, it's too simple. It gives you today want to know who someone is, you you have you come into the bank branch, and they show you an ID, or you're walking into a bar, you're going to buy an age restricted product, or you're hiring someone in the US and you go through a nine nine verification process, the standard and all of those is actually the same. Show me this physical document type that someone of the government has given you. Let me match says your face match this document by trusted document and I trust you match that face, then your identity is confirmed. But during COVID realized very quickly, hey, if you call and you say, Hey, I'm locked out of my bank account, I lost my phone. My authenticator app didn't work, what a million things in my life change. they default to these silly knowledge based questions that are either really easy, right? What's your favorite color or really hard? What street did you live in and whatever year and it creates frustration on behalf of those poor customer service reps? In the millions of people who work in that profession, it creates frustration on behalf of users who can answer it, or at the very least walk away saying, Gosh, that's how my account is protected. Like, that's the level of security we're relying on. And so I realized there was this just this challenge in how companies and particularly identify their customers. But I very quickly learned as we started engaging with companies that they had a concern there. But they also had a huge concern about how to extend that to employees, and how to verify who employees are, particularly in a remote world of work.

Kyle Roed: 10:32

Is this where you asked for my mother's maiden name?

Aaron Painter: 10:37

We didn't know it's you win enough. I mean, one of the odd things is it sort of starts at the hiring process, right? Where recruiters or HR professionals are contacting candidates through social networks or job platforms. And those candidates increasingly don't know if the person contacting them is who they claim to be. And then the same challenge extends sort of the other way, you don't necessarily know if the candidate or you're reaching out to is a verified person, so to speak. You know, we rely all of us enormous ly on things like LinkedIn, I don't know about you, but the number of inbound things I get from people on LinkedIn, I don't even know if they're a real person. I don't know if somebody's pretending to be I was at an event last week, and that event organizers kindly grabbed everyone's LinkedIn bios and your links and put the next of the person's name, they took someone who was actually pretending to be me, they linked to have someone a fake Aaron painter out there. Same job, they use my photo, at first, sadly, that person had no friends or no connections. But that was the link because someone assumed that was me. They search my name on LinkedIn, and they came back with a fraudulent profile. And so we're seeing this enormous sense of challenge in these platforms that we come to rely on and respect whether it's LinkedIn, or indeed, or one of the many, many job platforms out there, where you don't actually know if the profile whether the recruiter or the candidate is actually a verified person. And impersonation happens, fraud happens. And realizing this matters at the interview stage, it especially matters at the offer stage. And then there's this whole other strange chapter that we started to encounter, we learned firsthand from companies we're working with, where actually the employee maybe is validated, you figure it out, and you hire them, you've got three to five days you go to the i nine verification process. We've heard stories that doesn't even work before stories that people that are higher on their first day, they actually go and steal a bunch of it from the company and disappear before they even completed their eyeline process. But then, in the best case, maybe they hire and everything's good, and that well intentioned employee is working away. But then someone calls the IT Helpdesk, and set whether it's actually your employee or not, you don't know that IT Helpdesk is stuck being the identity detective. And the person on the other end of the phone says, Well, I'm locked out of my account, and you reset my login credentials. And now suddenly, it's an IT problem, and it is trying to verify is this person actually our employee, before we reset their credentials and let them back in? It's all the same problem, it's just simply too hard to trust the identity of someone that you meet only over the phone or online or through those channels.

Kyle Roed: 13:03

You know, I think this is a really powerful topic, because it's one of those things that I think it's it's a, it's a logical consequence of what we just went through, which is trying to trying to figure out remote work in like, a crisis environment without necessarily having the infrastructure and tools to make sure that you've got, you know, the security protocols you need. And, you know, I can think, you know, I won't go into extreme details, but I can think about, even when we had those tools in place, and we were doing in personal work, fraudulent activity, when we were hiring people that said they were different than who they were, and we'd catch it on a, you know, when we were onboarding them, and have to, you know, adjust their or take appropriate, or you you figure it out, when you google somebody's name that they're not, you know, there's more to the story, things like that. So, So walk me through the tool a little bit more. It, how do you how do you do this? When you when, you know, it's, it's not easy, even when you're in person? How do you how do you validate some of this out virtually?

Aaron Painter: 14:15

Yeah, we build something that is incredibly modern and slick to use. And it sort of as two functional areas where it works, and they feel different, but they're actually remarkably related. If you think about when you log into a website, let's pretend even at the moment, given the what's in the news, let's pretend it's Twitter, right? And you have all your communications and you're chatting away and you're saying whatever you want, and then you want to be someone else. Well, you just create a new email address on Gmail and suddenly got Gmail addresses linked to whatever twitter handle you are and that's, that's sort of your new persona profile. Even Twitter and Ilan first few days has realized that doesn't work that you need sort of verified profiles. You need to know actually, who is the owner behind an account, still operate with a pseudonym and maybe still be anonymous, let the platform decide. But the platform, I would argue has a responsibility to know who its users are. And so we build something that's a really slick way to essentially go through what you might think of like a KYC process, if you're opening a bank account of checking someone's identity remotely when they open the account. And then we've created a really slick way for someone to essentially log in again, only using their face instead of a password, but that we can then reconfirm it back to the government ID of a share, to make sure that they are the same person accessing a profile. So this allows things like verified profiles to happen on job search platforms on social media platforms, and takes away this sense of anonymity. So that we can all operate with a bit more confidence and trust in who we're interacting with, on these platforms.

Kyle Roed: 15:48

I'm chuckling, I'm chuckling, because so this is what the dating apps do. They, they just to make sure you're not you know, full of it, they match, they make you take a picture to match the picture that you're saying you are to make sure that they that you know that you're legit.

Aaron Painter: 16:07

It's funny. It's funny, you mentioned eating, because we talked about that one a lot. They're starting. And the really, that's another example where knowing who the person is really matters, right? You're trying to build trust with someone you're trying to build a relationship, you're probably going to meet up in person. And yet, they don't actually still know they might match that your photo matches the profile photo that's there. And by the way, you still don't really know who you are as a person. And I would argue that those platforms have the same responsibility to actually check your ID and know who you are to say, alright, that face also matches to this legal name that someone in the government attested to. And then by the way, yes, let's make sure your profile photos match. I think there's a step change coming in the internet, where we need authenticity in many of these transactions that we've come to rely on. There's a room for anonymity, there's room for pseudonyms. But there's also a ton of inappropriate things that happen because we can't validate who the user is beyond today, mostly their device, we think of a user as an email address, or a phone number, or linking it to a device for like an authenticator app or sending them an SMS verification, we don't actually have a way to verify the person instead of the device. So we built one. The other neat thing, the other flavor of it is sort of in the support scenarios, or in one time scenarios, we've created this really easy, like no implementation required, a, you know, sort of a web page that someone in HR, or someone in the IT department, or someone in customer support, can go to, to type in a phone number, and send you as a person or request and ask you to validate verify your government issued ID and that your photo matches that that you are that person. And then it gives you an instant sense of confirmation and trust that you know who you're speaking to, kind of a one time flavor of what we can also enable every time someone kind of logs in or signs into something. So those use cases up, hey, on the employee use locked out, can you reset my credentials, instead of a guessing game or feeling social pressure on the phone to just do it as the IT person, that IT person could then have a tool to say, Hey, I just need to make sure it's actually you. And that you your ID has been checked and that your name matches our employee on file? Let's say before we reset that password, or maybe before we issue an offer letter?

Kyle Roed: 18:19

That's really interesting. Is it limited to the US? Or is it can it just be any government issued ID

Aaron Painter: 18:25

almost 10,000, document types. It was interesting, I thought we'd focus on the US first. But then we had a bunch of companies that said, hey, globally, I have employees all around the world, or I have customers that call and get locked out from all over the world. And so we really doubled down in about a year ago to build international functionality. So it works wherever the person might happen to be located works on Android and iOS. And we've done it with some really slick technology that doesn't require the the sort of candidate or the employee or the customer in that case, to have to download a separate application, something just pops up on their phone. This is really neat new technology from Apple and Android, it's called an app clip. It's like a mini app that's just feels like it appears on your phone without you having to go to the App Store. So we get all these rich security functions of like an application native on the phone, and we can take advantage of all the advanced security things on the phone. But with the user experience, that's easy. It turns out this is just absolutely breakthrough. No, no provider on the market is doing anything like this today.

Kyle Roed: 19:26

Yeah, very, very cool. And, you know, it's interesting, because one of the things that popped into my head when you were describing this is, you know, you are creating a little bit of friction in the, you know, in the candidate experience, for instance, right. So anything you can do to kind of reduce that, you know, and make that user experience really, really positive is important. But I think you know, the International question for me. I mean, I've just, you know, the bigger issue that we run into, at least in my organization is the fact that we hire internationally and a lot of times we're hiring people in an area where we don't even have an office. You know, we're hiring Have through a, you know, a, you know, a third party organization or something like that. And yeah, there is a lot of risk when you're doing things like that. But there's also a lot of, you know, competitive advantage if you can hire people anywhere in the world, just because because they have the right skill set. Right. So that could be a really powerful enabler for certain organizations to.

Aaron Painter: 20:24

Yeah, I also feel really passionate about our core topic, which is how do you build trust with people, and in this case, employees, and that trust goes two ways, just like respect has to go two ways if you're going to build a trusting relationship. And so starting off on equal footing of, hey, I know you actually work for the company, or hey, I know that you actually are the candidate you claim to be, is a fundamental way to build trust. It's foundational. In fact, if you don't know who someone is, again, in person, you recognize their face, I started Microsoft 20 years ago, now, I went to the security office, and I had to show them my ID and the security person looked at it, and they gave me a temporary password and, you know, key card to access the buildings. And if I got locked out, had to go back to the security office, somebody was doing that look physically. And that's just not a skill process. It's certainly not realistic in today's world of talent coming from all over the world, in many cases, maybe not even showing up. And so I feel like this this question of identity and bringing transparency there is critical in building trust with with colleagues and remote workers.

Kyle Roed: 21:27

Yeah, it's really interesting, you know, it kind of communicates that you're legit, right? Like, this is a real company. And they take these things seriously, including things like employee privacy, right? Which is obviously an extremely hot topic, have you run into any issues with the kind of the, you know, the whole concern around biometrics and like storing, you know, storing that type of information as you're validating potential employee or Customer Identification?

Aaron Painter: 21:59

Yeah, we've we've been very progressive in our approach to privacy. In fact, in some ways, I would argue we are role models and things like GDPR, and CCPA. And even the, you know, the Illinois biometrics area and other states that are following suit. Partly, it's because we are heavily consent based. And so through each step of the process, a user has clear consent and what they're doing. They have the ability to revoke what they've share. And we do things in a future we call privacy masking today, where my classic example of this is when you go to a bar, you know, gosh, that bartender or the person with the door, the bouncer is saying, show me your ID. And in the US, they're only trying to solve the question of where you're over 21. And you're able to enter this bar, does the person really need to know your home address? No, it's a little bit creepy. Like it's sort of oversharing, right and modern language. And so we've created a way where it let's say in that scenario, they can just say, we're looking to know that you're over 21, you might scan your ID, but you're only going to authorize sharing of the principle of not even your birthdate, but simply that you have over 18, or over 21, whatever the scope, as we call it is, and so we've put users directly in control, their controllers have their own data. And it's a truly opt in the user has to specifically opt in to share with a company with an employer with anyone they're engaging with. And then we've been really thoughtful about how the data is stored and where it's used and scenarios around that. So we're really proud of our approach around privacy in many ways we have we built a privacy platform, or is it an identity platform? Or is it a security platform? I don't know all of those words apply. But part of it's because we've been so thoughtful in how we architected things, including, by the way, limiting what a company needs to store. And so a company has the option of not even needing to store the information they capture simply knowing that it's been validated.

Kyle Roed: 23:42

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the guy just to mention to the word that GDPR is just sends shivers down my spine. Is anybody that's operating in the EU knows? Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's fun. And then the all the other ones that have kind of followed suit. So So I want to circle back to kind of the the, the initial premise that we're talking about, which is, which is trust it? Has there? Have you had any of the reactions where people feel like, Oh, you're asking me to do this? Because you don't trust me? And that, you know, like, does that point of conflict happen? Or is that the exception

Aaron Painter: 24:23

that stay, there's not an option. And so what are reflective is, is high value scenarios. Trust matters. And in a way, it's also access to your own things. So let's say you're on a job platform today, or you're seeing an HR platform, and you know, where you're logging in for your payroll and access to other things. You might put in your work email, and then maybe your employer changes and you need to go back and access your payroll data. We don't want just anyone accessing all the information that maybe was on that platform, maybe it had performance reviews or other things. And so actually knowing who the person is that's accessing something can be a way to all offer sort of a VIP level of support or a more secure way to access your own data. And so a lot of the companies, we work with roll things out like this in the spirit of, hey, we are increasing security. And we're doing this to protect you, as opposed to, we're trying to be invasive or, or put in friction for you. Were doing this as an enhanced level of security. Today, the best level of enhanced security, align the sort of things like multi factor authentication, or MFA or you know, to have a send you a text message set up an authenticator app. Again, though, that only works until someone gets locked out, which happens a lot. And so companies are slowing down and more resistant to rollout things like MFA on the technology side, because they have a huge surge and customer support tickets. And that's been another sort of workforce that I've had a lot exposure to, and you're coming earlier, I'm shocked that we really aren't providing those professionals with the right tools. Right? These are people that go to work every day, in theory, because they liked helping others. And instead of being able to say how can I help you the sword, every coal, essentially, with an interrogation of proof to me, you're the person I'm speaking with. So anything we can do from a tooling perspective, to make that a better experience, Natalie's better for the person who's calling, or chatting along whatever the channel is, but it's also better for the millions of people who work in customer support every day, be able to get back to their core function of actually let me help and try and calm you or, or relieve some barrier that led to the frustration of you calling in the first place. So that's really where we focus on this. How can we bring greater security and greater convenience without really having to sacrifice either?

Kyle Roed: 26:35

Yeah, and just don't ask me, you know, to click the squares with the with the cars or the motorcycles and have like bit like barely one tire and one of those tiles. It's so stressful.

Aaron Painter: 26:47

Great technology 20 years ago when it came out, and but isn't that old? Is it been 20 years? It's actually a really great how I built this with Guy Roz podcast, with the recap. reCAPTCHA founder kind of on this, he went on to build Duolingo and how they were drove what they set out to do and why. super interesting. Listen, I when someone exhausts all the rebel HR podcasts, that's when I would recommend great kind of founding story and also an example of kind of how it's outlived its usefulness. Because knowing is someone who bought, by the way, turns out is still difficult. And most platforms, but matters more now of who are you not just Are you a person above which person are you. And particularly, we're thinking about hiring and the people that are part of our companies. What matters is who they are. We've had this interesting thing with some one company we're working with actually shared a story where they hired someone, they thought that person went along it kind of outsource their work to another colleague, obviously, the one they thought they hired was getting the payroll and registered in the system. And the person they outsource to was doing better work than they thought the person they hired. And so the company is like, we're really torn. We realized this was incorrect. But the person was better than the person we hired. However, the outdoors person didn't have the certifications that we were promising our customers that our employee had. So we were being dishonest to our customers. Of course, we had to end it. But this is sort of this conundrum with a lot of reasons why you really need to know not only who did you hire, but our data person accessing your network and purporting to be your employee. And companies, especially with high turnover in today's digital world of Gotcha. There's a lot of change going on in the current economic environment, everyone's out looking for jobs, and vice versa. Hiring continues at different paces. And there's even growing amount of fraud isn't even growing amount of how can I kind of game the system? And I think that's sort of the spirit of this of this podcast. And the conversations you have is we need kind of a rebellious approach. I think we need something that's a little bit disruptive. And I think the industry today is missing this concept of authenticity, and being able to know who you're engaging with, as a critical step and building any kind of employee employer relationship.

Kyle Roed: 28:56

Absolutely, yeah, I think we've all heard that story of the person that like gets the job and then hires a contractor on, you know, Upwork or Fiverr, or something like that. And then they're just like, and the contractor is better. That's, that's funny. It is, it is interesting, though, to think that, you know, there's just so much more of an opportunity for this to happen than there was, you know, a few years back. And, you know, and I think it's one of those challenges where, you know, we don't want to be intrusive, you know, the employee privacy matters. And, you know, and trusting employees, you know, matters but, but trusting employees blindly, or not having some sort of a check and balance in place is also extremely risky. And so, you know, what I'm hearing is, this is maybe a way to thread the needle a little bit, and try to find the right balance there.

Aaron Painter: 29:48

Yeah, I think there's this opportunity in particular, when you're starting a relationship, you know, at that moment of recruiting at that moment of offer, you know, shoot an offer letter at early in the relationship and that's, hey, let's get to know each other just like interview questions. Are background checks or other things that are standard that are sort of just trust checkmarks that make you feel good about the college you're working with knowing they went through a similar process. And then it's the same thing, I think when there's just this high risk moment of, hey, you're a Virtual Employee, we're trying to protect your account, your reputation, your credentials, if some random person calls the help desk and pretends to be you, we don't want to let them in and jeopardize your relationship and reset your email password and let them pretend to be you and email the whole company. Like, that's not protecting that and giving sort of the respect to the employees that you have. And so it's at the right moments, I feel enormously that employees need to feel empowered, and that trust is so critical on that. But I think I guess, connecting or building trust early in those relationships, especially when employees are remote. It's difficult. And I think we just need better tools to be able to offer that checkmark and sense of verified competence.

Kyle Roed: 30:51

Absolutely. Absolutely. This has just been a fascinating conversation. And and, you know, it's something that I think everybody in HR has probably felt this if they've had any sort of remote employees or, or even are going through, you know, in person, fraud situation. That being said, We're gonna shift gears, we're gonna go into the rebel HR flash round. So are you ready? I'm ready. Okay, question number one, where does HR need to rebel?

Aaron Painter: 31:19

Think HR needs to know its candidates. I think we trust platforms. And I think we got a whole bunch of creative ways to source new candidates. And I think there's a greater need to know truly who you are sourcing new the candidates that you're interviewing with, virtually or in person?

Kyle Roed: 31:33

Absolutely. Yeah. And it's easier said than done. Even when we're not talking about just pure identity, you know, who a person is, is hard to know, sometimes.

Aaron Painter: 31:44

That's right. It's for interview processes, I would argue are hard enough. And if the person isn't being honest, on who they are, let alone their background. Gosh, that's not a very solid place to start building a relationship.

Kyle Roed: 31:56

Absolutely. All right. Question number two, who should we be listening to?

Aaron Painter: 32:01

It, I think there is a stronger relationship that's necessary between IT and HR, then some people might assume, I mean, so much, obviously, the HR profession even is increasingly as HR ops, right, and how much we rely on tools for candidate management and HR platforms and so many other important things. But at the same time, I think that it often absorbs challenges, particularly around IT Helpdesk, it supports, and they can be a great partner. Sometimes that's also the security organization, but I think it is should be a partner from early on. The experience many candidates or employees have with the company is often a digital one. And so using smart digital tools, I think can make that HR employee experience and even better.

Kyle Roed: 32:44

Absolutely. I'm a huge advocate for that actually started my career in it. But first of all, it can just help you because there's a lot of things that you can digitize and systemize and automate with it. But they're, they're also you know, what I call like, brothers in arms, you know, we're, we're always the ones that get called when things go wrong. So you know, band together, find your find your tribe, it is good people.

Aaron Painter: 33:12

I love it. I love it. We got started early on, actually, we had a bunch of HR professionals contact us and say, Hey, I've got to deal with this COVID stuff. I need to know who's vaccinated, etc. And they had HR teams that have spent gone full time validating people's COVID cards. And this is hey, can you just that actually there when someone did it? And someone it came to us and said, can you make this from HRT, and it turned out to be just kind of an early way we could help during the pandemic of checking someone's ID and COVID card and giving the charges to report. But just automating an HR process that was becoming time consuming. Right. And it's when that relationship is strong. I think there's so much help that can go both ways.

Kyle Roed: 33:46

Absolutely. One of my favorite people is the person that does on my workflows. And they usually make it better than what I even had anyway. So yeah, I'm with you on that one. All right. Final question here. How can our listeners connect with you and learn more about nametag?

Aaron Painter: 34:02

Well, I wouldn't be a fan of the church discipline if I wasn't active on LinkedIn. And I think it's really the best platform. We try and think a lot about this space and produce content that might be interesting to folks. So we'd love your feedback, feel free to connect with me directly. I've got a really cool website and kidney tech.com. But LinkedIn is kind of my primary platform and I think the same for a company.

Kyle Roed: 34:22

Absolutely. We'll have that information in the show notes. So open up your podcast player, check it out. We'll also have a link to nametag if you want to check out the system. And if it's interesting to you. Check it out. Aaron, really appreciate the time here. I know you're super busy and really value. You spending some time with us today. So thank you

Aaron Painter: 34:40

was super fun, Kyle. Thanks for having me.

Kyle Roed: 34:42

Thanks. Take care. All right. That does it for the rebel HR podcast. Big thank you to our guests. Follow us on Facebook at rebel HR podcast, Twitter, at rebel HR guy, or see our website at rebel human resources.com You opinions expressed by rebel HR podcast are those the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any of the organizations that we represent No animals were harmed during the filming of this podcast maybe