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The decisions that go wrong are the ones nobody documented.
A termination, a reduction, an executive exit. By the time it reaches a lawyer, the expensive part already happened months earlier, in a system nobody was keeping.
By Kristyn Castello · 4 min read
PARTNER
THE MARKET
THE RESEARCH
FOUNDER BYLINE
PARTNER
The decisions that go wrong are the ones nobody documented.
A termination, a reduction, an executive exit. By the time it reaches a lawyer, the expensive part already happened months earlier, in a system nobody was keeping.
By Kristyn Castello, Founder and Principal, KHR Executive Advisory · 4 min read
I am an employment attorney and I have built people functions three times from zero. Those two facts sit closer together than most people expect, because the calls that end up on a lawyer’s desk almost never start as legal problems. They start as people decisions that were made without a record.
Take the ones my firm exists for. A termination. A reduction in force. An executive exit. In every one, the first question is the same: what was this person hired to do, what were they told, and what did we write down. And in most companies the honest answer is that the job description was written to attract someone, the interview notes are in an applicant tracking system nobody has logged into since, the onboarding plan was a spreadsheet, and the performance conversation happened over lunch.
Four systems, none of which talk to each other, and a decision that has to be defensible years later. That is not a compliance failure. It is an architecture failure, and the compliance failure is downstream of it.
The most recent function I built was at a high-growth health tech company, from fifty people to more than a hundred and fifty, through an IPO. Nothing sharpens your view of documentation like taking a company public. What you learn is that the good outcome and the defensible outcome are the same outcome. If you can say what the role was for, what you asked of the person, and what happened, you usually also made a better decision. When you cannot say it, the decision was probably worse too, and now you also cannot prove otherwise.
This is part of why I work with Nu | Erraa. It keeps one definition of the role from the business need through the first ninety days, and it comes back at the end of that window to check the hire against what was actually asked for. That check is a management tool first. It happens to also be the record you will want if the relationship ends badly.
I would rather build the structures that prevent the hard call than be the person handling it at eleven at night. Most of the time, the structure is just this: decide what the role is for, write it down once, and keep it attached to the person doing it.
None of this is legal advice, and every situation turns on its own facts and its own jurisdiction. But if you are about to make a people decision you would struggle to explain in writing, that discomfort is information. Listen to it.
Kristyn Castello is Founder and Principal of KHR Executive Advisory and a Nu | Erraa Certified Fractional Partner. A Louisiana-licensed employment attorney and SHRM-certified executive, she works with companies nationally from Baton Rouge. Reach her at kristyn@khrexecutive.com or khrexecutive.com. This article is general commentary and is not legal advice.
PARTNER
You cannot hire your way to a People function.
Two decades of building these from the ground up, and the pattern is always the same: the company outgrows the way it hires long before anyone notices.
By Sholeh Esmaili-Montoya, Fractional People Executive & Operator | Founder, Startup Talent HR - 4 min read
I have built People and Talent functions from the ground up for two decades. Different industries, different stages, companies of 30 people all the way up to 600+, pre-seed through Series C and past it, across the globe.
Here is the pattern. A company hires well at twenty people because the founder knows every candidate personally and the bar lives in their head. At forty, it still works, barely, because the first People hire is carrying it. At eighty, it stops working, and nobody can point to the day it stopped.
What actually happened is that the reason each role existed stopped traveling beyond the interview stage. At the time, the founder knew it. The recruiter knew it. The hiring manager knew it — they helped write it. Past that point, it went nowhere.
Most companies respond by buying something. An applicant tracking system, because the pipeline is a mess. Then a human resources information system, because records are a mess. Then a performance tool, because nobody wrote down what success looked like.
That is the part I have spent twenty years working around by hand. Manually carrying the reason a role was created, and the scorecard behind who got hired, into an onboarding plan built to set them up to succeed. Then carrying it again into the check-ins, so the manager and the employee had something real to talk about. Even then, a manager in month three who does not know the full range of what this person was hired to be capable of, and me going back through Slack to dig up the notes that spelled it out.
I do not think the answer is more systems. I think the answer is one definition of the role that survives the multiple handoffs, and something that comes back at ninety days to check the hire against it.
That is what caught my attention with Nu | Erraa. It is built to capture the why behind a role before you ever open the req — the success criteria, the reason the role exists — and carry that definition forward into the onboarding plan and then into the performance check-ins themselves. It is clear it is designed by someone who has lived this problem too. It is built around the whole role, not a stage of it.
The other reason it caught my attention is simpler. I do not advise. I am a fractional executive and an operator, and I get into the work, which means I need tools that hold up when someone is actually using them at speed. Most others do not survive that test.
If you are at the point where hiring has stopped feeling like it works and you cannot say why, that is usually the signal. It is rarely the recruiters. It is almost always the seams.
Sholeh Esmaili-Montoya is a Fractional People Executive & Operator | Founder at Startup Talent HR. As a fractional executive, she works with companies from 30 to 100+ people, pre-seed through Series C+, bringing experience built across organizations up to 600+. Reach her at sholeh@startuptalenthr.com or startuptalenthr.com.
THE MARKET
Every acquisition is an admission the tools were never one system.
Five deals in a year, all of them buying the thing the buyer’s own product could not do. The market is bolting point tools together and calling the seam a platform.
Nu | Erraa - 3 min read
Remote bought Atlas. Payoneer bought Boundless. Docebo took 365Talents. Phenom bought two AI companies at once. Read those as news and it is a busy year in HR tech. Read them as a pattern and they are all the same sentence: our product does one part of the job, and we have run out of ways to pretend otherwise.
That is not a criticism of any of those companies. It is what happens when a category is built stage by stage. Someone solves the pipeline and calls it an applicant tracking system. Someone solves the employee record and calls it an HRIS. Someone solves the review cycle and calls it performance. Each one is genuinely good at the slice it owns. None of them owns the thing that runs through all three, which is the role.
So the market does the only thing available to it. It buys the missing slice and stitches it on.
The trouble is what stitching leaves behind. When two products become one product on the pricing page, they are usually still two products in the data. The sourcing tool has its idea of a candidate, the onboarding tool has its idea of an employee, and somewhere between them is a handoff where the reason you opened the role in the first place quietly stops travelling. The logo is unified. The seam is not.
There is a different way to draw the line, and it starts by asking what the unit actually is. Not the candidate, not the employee record, not the review cycle. The role. What the business needed done, who is doing it, and whether it is getting done. Define the system around that and the handoffs stop existing, because there is nothing to hand off between.
Sources: UNLEASH coverage of 2026 HR technology acquisitions. This piece first appeared in an earlier form in The Loop, Issue 01.
THE RESEARCH
SHRM says it out loud. Hiring alone will not fix your talent problem.
Nearly seven in ten HR teams cannot fill the roles they have open, and the hardest thing to hire for is judgement.
Nu | Erraa - 4 min read
SHRM’s 2026 Talent Trends research put two findings next to each other, and the combination is more interesting than either one alone. Nearly 70 percent of HR professionals report they cannot fill their full-time roles. And 80 percent say the hardest quality to hire for is judgement.
Taken separately, those read as complaints about a tight market. Taken together they are a strategy problem, because they say that the thing you most need cannot reliably be bought from outside.
Most talent spending assumes the opposite. The budget goes to the top of the funnel: more sourcing, more screening, better job posts, a faster pipeline. All of that is aimed at finding the right person. None of it helps when the right person, in the sense that matters, does not exist on the open market in the numbers you need.
Judgement is the clearest example. It is not a credential, it does not show up in a keyword search, and it is very hard to assess in four interviews. It is built in context, by someone who understands the business, over a period measured in months rather than weeks. Which means it is largely produced after the hire, not selected before it.
If that is true, then the part of the process that matters most is the part almost nobody is managing. SHRM’s benchmarking work puts the share of organizations measuring quality of hire at about one in five. Four out of five companies never establish whether the person they hired did the job they were hired to do.
Close that loop and two things change at once. You find out whether a hire worked, which is worth knowing on its own. And you get the only feedback that improves the next role definition, which is what turns hiring from a series of independent bets into something that compounds.
Sources: SHRM 2026 Talent Trends Report and SHRM Recruiting Executives Benchmarking, 2025. This piece first appeared in an earlier form in The Loop, Issue 01.
FOUNDER BYLINE
Most systems collect talent data. Until now, we never connected it.
Fifteen years of watching assessments, scorecards and reviews die in disconnected systems, and what it takes to close the loop.
By Zohra Veach - 4 min read
Every hiring system collects evidence. Interview feedback, scorecards, assessment notes, offer reasons, onboarding plans, performance conversations. The problem is not that companies lack data. The problem is that the data stops traveling.
The scorecard lives in one place. The onboarding plan lives somewhere else. The performance conversation happens months later, with no clean line back to what the person was hired to do. Everyone means well, but the system forgets.
Nu | Erraa was built around the opposite idea: one definition of the role, carried from the business need through hiring, onboarding, ramp and review. The point is not to collect more talent data. It is to keep the data connected long enough to learn from it.
That is the loop. Define what the role has to deliver. Hire against it. Onboard against it. Check whether it worked. Then use that answer to make the next role sharper.
Most systems collect talent data. Until now, we never connected it.