Meet the Contributors (and join the cohort!)
Drew Soule, MHRIR
Founder/Contributor
With 15 years spent getting into rooms most HR people don't see, I enjoy doing the work that's hardest to hand off. Labor relations across unionized manufacturing floors. Performance management and org design at scale in hypergrowth tech. People Programs built from scratch in healthcare. IPO readiness in fintech.My through-line isn't the industry. It's a belief that HR is most valuable when it's closest to the hardest problems. Relationships built intentionally. A human-first approach to navigating change.I believe that belief shapes how AI fits into the work too. Custom workflow automations built on the Claude API. AI used daily to accelerate research, documentation, and synthesis. Real time spent thinking about where emerging tools belong in People work to solve realproblems and where they don't and add unnecessary noise.My goal isn't efficiency for its own sake. It's getting the hours back that belong in a conversation with a leader who needs a real thought partner, not a process owner.
Find me at linkedin.com/in/drew-soule
Donovan Parish, MSHRM, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, GPHR, PHRca
Contributor
I have spent more than a decade in HR, most of it inside the parts of the job that decide whether a company can actually execute: employee relations, organizational design, leadership development, and the workforce data most teams collect and never use. I have done that work across gaming, biotechnology, education, and financial and legal services, which means the same operating logic has been pressure-tested against workforces that have almost nothing in common.
I am less interested in HR theory than in what holds up when a real decision is on the table and someone has to defend it on the merits. My throughline is simple: people strategy is a business discipline, and HR earns its standing by building organizations that can execute, not by running programs.
Find me at linkedin.com/in/donovanparish
A Busy Employee Relations Team Is a Symptom
Most organizations read a productive employee relations function as a sign of health. It is the opposite.
A high volume of cleanly resolved ER cases is not evidence that HR is working. It is evidence that something upstream is broken, and that the organization has gotten efficient at paying for it.
The case is not the product. The pattern is.
