Name: The Automation Advantage Talent Show 🪄
Uploaded: 2026-02-17T20:43:06.168Z
Duration: 1 h 3 min 54 s
Description: The Automation Advantage Talent Show 🪄

Transcript for "The Automation Advantage Talent Show 🪄": Join first. But I'm hi, everyone. Hello? Oh. Hello. Hi. Welcome. Hello? Hello? Welcome. We see people coming in already. Happy Tuesday. Happy Tuesday. I was just talking with. Tuesday. the judges behind behind the scenes. It's actually Chinese New Year today. So if anyone celebrates, happy Chinese New Year. Love. I went to California Adventure, Disneyland California Adventure on Saturday for a friend's fortieth birthday without their kids, and it was, like, a Lunar New Year celebration. Like, was all these specialty foods and drinks. It was, like, super, super fun. So we. definitely got our our celebratory time on. Yeah. I usually when I'm back with my family, we would always make dumplings from scratch. That's like a core memory, so I gotta have some dumplings this week. Love. Every oh, I see people are really going off in the chat and sharing where they're calling from. We got people all over. Judges, where are you calling from? Washington am from? Oh, go. ahead. Go ahead, Brendan. I'm calling BC, Canada, so I'm just outside of Vancouver myself. What about you, Lance? Yeah. I'm over in LA. Nice. So we got some West Coast. here. We got some East Coast. Yeah. You got everybody. Yeah. We've got people from Orlando, the Bay Area, New York. I'm calling from New York as well. Thank you all so much for coming here today. This I'm super excited for this unique event that we're bringing together, the HR automation talent show. And thank you again to our amazing judges for joining us. So I'm gonna give, like, one more minute for people to to log on, and then we're gonna just get started. So. who's excited about the Olympics? the chat. Oh, yes. A a question for the chat is if you've built a workflow. And if you have, whether it was on Rippling or not on Rippling, just curious what it was. Or also feel free to share what brought you here to this event today. Personally, this is the first time I've ever attended a talent show. Definitely an HR automation talent show, so curious what brought people to this event as well. Oh, disciplinary. action workflow. That sounds interesting. That. sounds interesting. Okay. So it's 02/2003. I think let's just dive in here and get started. So, again, welcome to the HR automation talent show by Rippling. I'm your host, Vanessa Kahkesh, and I just wanna do some quick housekeeping before we dive in. So feel free as many people already are to use the chat function to connect with other attendees. We have hundreds of HR professionals from all over the country live right now at this event. So please use this time to introduce yourself, discuss and stay engaged. And if you do have a question for the judges, feel free to put that in the Q and A box. And this webinar will also be recorded, so you will receive that afterwards. And just a quick recap of the agenda. We're gonna kick things off with an automation mastermind roundtable with the incredible judges we have here today. We'll then dive into live voting with our finalist nominees. And so we have three categories, and we'll also be doing live voting. So everyone here who's live, get ready to vote for your winner, and we'll end things off with a q and a. And we have some resources so that you can kick start your automation journey too. And with that being said, I would love to dive into some judge introductions so you can meet everyone here. So I'm gonna kick it off with I'm gonna ask you, Lance. I'm looking you're right next to you on the screen. Could you start things off and then popcorn? And feel free to introduce your your name, your company, what you do, and the question of the day is what's your favorite automation that you've built? Love. Well, thank you so much for having me. My name is Lance Blair. I work at Liquid Death. I've been here for four years. It's crazy. My title is senior global benefits and employee engagement manager. So it's a really long title, which really encompasses all things benefits, all things employee engagement, and then I also do some, nonprofit partnerships in philanthropy management as well. My favorite workflow is definitely our PTO reminder. You know, I I set up something where, basically, if you haven't taken time off in, you know, thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, or three, six, nine months even, then you will get a Slack message or an email. Your your manager will also get notified after about the six month mark, just because we're trying to prevent burnout as much as possible. So I'm all about being an employee advocate and caring about people. I my slogan is, like, I put the human in human resources. So that's definitely a big reminder for for me, and it's my favorite one. I'll pass it over to Karin. Thanks, Lance. So I'm Karin Wilkins. I'm the head of people at TheGuarantors based in New York. I oversee everything under the HR and recruiting umbrella here. I actually just celebrated my four year anniversary. Time flies. And I think my favorite automation that I built is in for for onboarding. Once somebody signs their offer letter, depending upon their employment type, their location, it triggers all the notifications for everyone that needs to know their manager, the employee themselves, IT, and everything is just kind of done and hands off, which is really great when you have a cohort of 40 plus people at a time. I'm gonna kick it over to Brendan. Thanks, Karin. I'm Brendan. I'm fortunate to lead and support the people function at Chess.com. If you've seen the green pawn, if you play chess, no chess. Have you ever heard of chess, you could play. I'm super excited to be here. My favorite automation is whatever the most recent one we're working on. So we about the whole team has really bought in on automation, which is really exciting. And I think I saw one this morning that was focused on when someone becomes a people leader or a people manager, triggering a number of automations, notifications to certain people, kicking off learning paths or or knowledge sharing. So I'm really excited to see, where that one goes. And, Kimberly, I'll pass it to you. Hi. Super glad to be here. I'm Kim Williams, founder and principal with the FairPath project. So we work on cleaning up toxic workplaces. And so with that, my favorite automation is coming up with the exact cost of a brilliant jerk, which helps people very quickly identify people who may not be awesome to work around and how much that actually hits your bottom line. Wow. Amazing. So we got I love how we have such a diverse set of people here, and, I had the honor of also being able to learn each of your journeys in HR. And so thank you again for taking the time to join this town show and also judge our finalists today. Before we get into the categories, I I wanna kick things off with a question for you all. I think that we're just in a very interesting state of the world and the industry of HR too with the rise in AI, automation, technologies, and it's kind of all around us. And, obviously, this event today is sharing some of those workflows. But I'm curious for all of you today, what was the breaking point where you knew things had to change in the way you operated your HR functions? Like, what was that breaking point where you wanted to kill the manual work and really allow yourself to become and step into a more strategic role? I'm gonna ask Karin to kick things up. I think your answer is as soon as I entered the profession, was like, this manual work is gonna crush my soul. But really, I was really building the function here at TheGuarantors, and it just was not scalable or sustainable. So that was a huge focus on automating it as much as possible and just happened to be at the time that I also was introduced to Rippling. So it was serendipitous. But, definitely, over the last few years, it was was my my breaking point. Should I kick it off to somebody else? Sure. If anyone wants to jump. in. I'm happy to jump in. I think for me, it was a different a little bit of a different approach. When I joined Chess.com, I was the the first one into the function, and we were just over a 100 headcount at the time. And so standing up the function, putting all the processes in place, building out the tooling that we were going to have, at no point did I think, wow. I want to to build a team around administration and administrative work. I I want to build for the future and build in a way that allows us to support the culture and support the team, in the way that they need to be supported. We're, you know, 100% remote and async, and so there's a lot of things that we were doing. I don't wanna say it for the first time anywhere, but certainly in the early adopters of remote work, And so we wanted to build something that that matched that. Yeah. I don't mind adding too because I kinda came into a small organization where I inherited an HR team that was very, very admin heavy. And not only did I, like, just like you guys say, like, oh, well, this is not my favorite part of the job, but it they weren't respected. And I think, you know, for HR professionals, if you really wanna grow in a career, you can't lead with how much paperwork you push. You need to be able to free that time to deal with real problems and to sit down and talk about strategy and to get into deeper work. I see really profound ties with someone's status in an organization, you know, what their title will end up being, how their team is treated, what they are paid. All of that I see is deeply tied to how much you're able to automate. Oh, wait, Lance. I can't hear you. Is the. audio working? We lost him. Oh, no. Don't worry. Can you hear me now? something with your me? now? Testing. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I. can hear you now. cool. Cool. Cool. But, yeah, I was always something. I was gonna say, when you're a small but mighty team, which I believe many of us start out that way, similar to Brendan, you know, I joined just after we crossed over the 100 person threshold. I was employee number three in our people and culture HR team. So there was. just a lot of building that we had to do, and executing at the same time. You know? Our slogan is kinda building the plane as we're flying it just like every other start up is the same thing. You know? And so when you do that, you kinda have to automate as much as possible because you're kind of a team of five in one person. Right? And now we we've we've grown. We were we're we started off as just, you know, two or three people, and now we're up to six employees in our HR team with HR business partners, which is awesome. But we all kind of do our own vertical. Like, we're responsible for a lot in our own lanes, and that just requires automation across the board. And notifications and communications ideally is what we use a lot of our automations for so that you don't have to manually tell people like, hey. I did this thing with COBRA, or, hey. We did this thing with leave of absence. It's like, it's just built in. You get a email or a Slack message. So, a lot of it in a super remote work environment where you can't just tap somebody in the same room or turn around in in an office, you kinda need that as well. Yeah. No. All of that makes sense. And I think it's it's also just very inspiring to see the impact that you've been able to make each one of you in your organizations. And now, Kimberly, being able to start your own company Mhmm. from, like, building an automation or some like, a workflow that genuinely, you know, quantifies the impact of culture. And so I think it's it's really interesting to see everyone's unique paths. And also, Kimberly, I really like what you one thing that I think could, you know, continue this conversation is you said that it it was hard for the company to see the value. if you're complaining or talking about the paperwork you have to do. You need to create that time to be strategic. And so my question for you all is, how have you been able to almost rebrand the way your company sees your role and function in HR? And, like, where do you ultimately hope to step into at the 2026? Like, how do you wanna continue evolving into that more ideal version of yourselves? Anyone can feel free to jump in here. I think for us, it's been freeing up that mental load, not only just time, but we're thinking about all of the other things that we have to do that now we can actually spend time understanding where the pain points are in the business, being tapped into what, you know, best strategy works for specific teams, getting to know our managers. So it's just that more time of understanding so then we can spot what the the issues are and be able to more proactively help. Yeah. I think we're we're currently trying to build out a a bot, to be able to answer things like, where do I get my or where's the holiday calendar? Like, do we have this day off? Right? Like, very simple questions that a. lot of times, HR teams get tasked with. Right? So, and we love answering those questions. It's just like it's like almost like water cooler talk in a in a remote work environment. And so it's like, okay. Cool. It's an opportunity to engage with employees. However, there is a certain point where you you're, like, over 200 people, 500 people, where that becomes almost like, okay. I have 16 messages to answer in the morning. And if we can cut that in half by adding in the spot, then that is most ideal. So I think, to Karin's point, really engaging with the executive team, middle management, all the way down to frontline employees, I think, you know, trying to engage with them and understand what their needs are, in a more, realistic and and grounded way, allows us to better serve them in a lot of different ways too other than being held up by, you know, pounds of paperwork, right, administrative tasks. Yeah. I agree with all of that too. I I don't know how much we wanna deep dive on this, but I think that, you know, our focus with all of this is how do we make the manager and the team member experience first class, instead. of it being the recipient of of policy or HR process of of their past experiences. What can we do to reinvent, their interactions with the team, with us, all of that? So Oh, don't know what that was. That was interesting. that was. yeah. I love that. I think that's a great point. And and, you know, we we talked about that too. I mean, one of the great things we were able to do is to kind of tabulate how much time we saved. And so when you can go to a board at the end of the year and your accomplishments and say, you know, we saved 3,000, that we were able to, like, solve x, y, and z problems because we did this. We shrunk our footprint while supporting more people, which is our way of, you know, contributing to the bottom line. Or we even had somebody who became so good at automation and AI that they got picked up as a a data analyst and was promoted up within the company, which is another beautiful story that we love to tell. So I think that storytelling angle can also be really powerful for connecting with folks too. Definitely. Last question before we dive into our finalists. Okay. So we all know HR is human resources, and I think even though automation is so important and technology is definitely essential to running a company, there are things we can never automate. And so I wanna ask you all, When with the free time and energy that you will and the mental load, Karin, like you mentioned, that you get with automation, where do you want to double down on? Like, what are the human things that you really think that AI can never really replace that you wanna strengthen for yourself as a leader and just also your teams? I'm happy to speak to that. I love what Brendan said in the chat. You can't automate empathy and presence. And so if I think about, oh, Mhmm. I get five minutes back here, ten minutes back here, twenty minutes back here, where does that go? Our mission is you know, part of our mission is being the best possible place to work, and I wanna put my time into that. For some people, it might be presence. For some people, it might be empathy. It might be listening. It might be helping unblock something, speeding up processes, velocity, you name it. Right? We support in so many different ways in the HR or people function. And the reality is the less time we spend, whether it's generating a document, you know, writing a verification letter of some kind, the more time we can spend showing up for people. So that's, you know, that's what I wanna do. And to piggyback off of that, I think I like to joke when people ask me what I do. I say I'm a corporate therapist. And I think. a lot of talk can relate to that. And honestly, more of that. Right? I think it goes back to the comment of empathy and presence. And that's what I try to instill in my team as well, of just making time for people now that we have more time and building those relationships. And. I also think oh, go ahead, Lance. I was just gonna say, like, breaking down silos is is where I I wanna invest a lot more of my time. I think in a remote work environment, it's challenging. You. know? I think it's it's a lot easier to have silos of information. And so, you know, working closely with our HR business partners and their various teams and departments in order to, you know, communicate just share information more across the board and be like, okay. This is a pain point for you, and it may be coming from this department. What are we doing to resolve that? And not just, like, putting a pin in it, but actually working on that over the next thirty, sixty, ninety days, right, and finding a solution fairly quickly. And I think freeing up our time allows us to to do a lot more of that work, in order to help, you know, not only help the company, but ensure that we continue to make Liquid Death or our current employers, like, the best places to work as possible. Right? That's that's ultimately why we're here. That's beautiful. Yeah. One of the things I liked is is not just being there for people, but being able to customize so you're not doing, like, a one size fits all. Like, we found for, you know, just even looking at performance management that there were very different needs from sales and marketing and these other folks. And so by freeing up that time, you're able to hear them, you know, learn from them, you know, know what they really need and build for that too. And it's yeah. Wow. Like, both all everyone's answer is very heartfelt too. Feel like it reminds me of, like, the reason that we're all, like, you know, doing things too. It's, like, for the people. It's with the people that you you get to work with. Ultimately, businesses are just a group of people working on things that they're passionate about. And so I think the fact that we get to spend more time on that, and when we free up companies to be able to invest more in their people, that's what really matters. And I think that's also what makes HR so special is that I think that's the the the purpose of the function. Again, it's human resources. So wow. Thank you all so much for your insights, and I think this is an incredible discussion that I would love to continue. But I do think we should dive into sharing our nominations. And and so for everyone here too live, just for some context, what we've done for this HR automation talent show is we went out and tried to find some of the best workflows from HR leaders all across the country, and we have three categories for winners or for finalists. So we have creative architects, compliance champions, and efficiency engineers. And so I'm gonna share my screen. The first category we have is the creative architects. And I'm gonna put these three questions here in the chat for people to think about when getting ready to see these workflows that are amazing nominees submitted. And judges, feel free to use them as well. And so what we're going to do is we're going to share the pitch that they made, where they're going to walk through what they've built. And we're gonna do some live voting after. So judges, how does it sound to you guys? Awesome. Love it. Okay. So let's let's meet our creative architects. We did have an LMS in place previously, but it was very limited. We could only upload content, and but we couldn't automate it. A lot of the rollouts still had to be done manually and, follow-up lived really in spreadsheets or emails. And that made it really challenging across multiple states with different compliance requirements. The LMS through Rippling is really intuitive. Building courses is really straightforward. So we just make that Loom video and then we upload that content. I can organize it in like a module setting. The one course that I am super happy we built is the core values and culture course. This is assigned during onboarding, and it walks employees through our core values, what they look like in action, and real hospitality based scenarios. And it's a recorded message directly from our CEO. Once the course is built, you just automate it when it's assigned, whether it's during onboarding, you can tie it to a role or employment status too. So it can be triggered by a change with like a promotion, for instance. And then after that, it just it truly runs in the background. So I don't have to manually assign trainings or chase down completions, like I mentioned. So it makes it really efficient, especially as we continue to scale and grow. The LMS has saved me at least 20%. We've cut out the need for, you know, the manual follow ups. We've eliminated spreadsheet tracking, which is huge. And just from an HR perspective, it saved, like I said, several hours each month, that used to go towards assigning courses, tracking the completions, and reminding managers as well, especially since we're spread out across all different states. We have 28 employees in The US, and then the rest of our workforce is in Canada, UK, and then Netherlands. So we have different holidays in different countries. So our HR lead was manually inputting every holiday into one Google Calendar. So she had to track, like, every single country and enter them into a calendar for the entire year, a lot of manual work, a lot of time doing data entry. I used Make and Google Calendar. The output of the automation is one team calendar that shows all holidays across different countries as well as any time off that specific countries have. So first, The US. Pull all The US events. And then Canada, Quebec, Canada, Ontario, UK, Netherlands. And you can see every time it ends in two branches, it's like, does the holiday already exist? Does it not? And so it will either create a new event or update one that is already on the calendar. And it keeps doing that on a schedule. So as Rippling updates the calendars or all their calendars, for that matter, the automation will also update our team calendar. Our HR does not need to do all this manual work. So she saves we estimate about a week of time saved, but also it increased clarity across teams. So when we want to schedule meetings and projects, it's very easy to go to that one calendar and then see, you know, everybody's availability across different countries. Whoopsies. Okay. Those are cool. Those are really good. Very cool. Yeah. Wait. I would love let's talk about it quickly, and then we'll launch the polls. But what are your thoughts for finalists? I love it. I I thought those were were incredible. I was watching the first one. I was like, wow. That's brilliant. We we just kinda refreshed our values and talked through all of that. And even with all the automation we do, it hadn't occurred to me to build that into into that type of course and to really make sure it gets delivered. So I thought that was great. But then I saw the calendar, all of the stacked calendar and event automations, and I just that was. that was so cool. I was also thinking about with the stat calendar. Like, it seems like there's so many other things that could apply to, you know, like, changes in laws. I mean, you you know, for different states and, you know, for a remote country, you know, whether you're international or even local, can see a lot of other things that could be applied with that. They're both really good. I don't know who's gonna be the tiebreaker on this one. That's gonna be hard. Karin, Lance, what are your thoughts? Any comments? What stood out? Yeah. The first one, I've automated so much for onboarding, and it didn't occur to me for, you know, the LMS. And we have the LMS, but I I thought that was such a creative idea. And, yeah, the the multi countries and and calendars, we we only have a handful. Definitely not as robust as as this example, but, yeah, I thought both of them were very were brilliant and things that I hadn't thought of yet. I agree. We just got the LMS, so I'm, like, taking notes diligently because I was like, that's awesome. You know? Especially being able to assign different trainings for different people, like, automatically just based on their title or their level, I think, is is super huge. Because right now, that is quite a manual kinda function if they're we have it state by state. You know? But, Mhmm. Mhmm. to have the granny like, granularity of it all is, like, really, really dope. Mhmm. And then, yeah, for the I mean, anytime you can make calendars more efficient, I'm so here for you know, particularly when you're an an international company, that's, like, a game changer across the board, and I think so many people can just utilize that. You know? Yeah. So, yeah, that's a that's a tough one. I'm excited to see where. people land. Yeah. That's so true. too. Think they're both and also I love how, like, each of these automations, like, they also just spark ideas for different similar automations. Like you're saying, Kim, you could do this for laws. You can do this for other things that vary across states. And so that's why I love how we're sharing and exchanging these ideas here so people can take this and start building their own workflows as well. But okay. I think it's it's it's time to vote. We gotta we gotta put in an answer, and so we're gonna launch the poll. It's gonna close in sixty seconds. So select and vote your creative architect winner, Alicia from the Weekender Hotels who build the LMS automation or Chris from partnerships on AI. And, also, I think everyone's a winner here, but but, yeah, you gotta choose one. You gotta choose one for this, and the poll is gonna close in thirty seconds. So hurry up and enter in. I'm gonna say this three times today, but I'm so glad it's not up to me. Okay, everyone. I see people putting their answer in the chat, but can we please put that in the poll? Let's keep it in the poll, but we'll but I appreciate the poll. Do you see it? It's on the it should be released on the left the second tab. From chat. You don't see it? one over is poll. Yeah. Yeah. The next one over. Do you got did everyone see it? Second tab at the top. Yes. Got it. Okay. We have almost oh my gosh. This is crazy. It is a close tie. There's over 400 people almost putting in their their number or their their winner. So hurry up. Ten more seconds. 109876543. Derek, we can't do both here. We gotta choose one. One. Okay. We're closing the poll. That's enough. And so let's see. Whoops. Okay. So from the polls, drum roll, please. Okay. So we got 220 votes for Alicia at Weekender Hotels, and she is the winner of the creative, architect award. category. Congrats, Yeah. Rats. Lisa. Congratulations. With a very close tie of almost 170 votes, so it's a very close tie. So thank you both for submitting your automation, and congratulations, Alicia. Nice. And I hope that. inspires people to start building their own LMS automation. Okay. Next up is the compliance champion category. So this automation and category, we actually had Chris. She was just on a roll and submitted twice, and we selected her for two categories. So she's also gonna be presenting again. But this this one is all about automating risk before it becomes a fire drill drill and enabling scale without sacrificing accuracy or trust. So some questions to consider are, does this automation prevent risk? And does compliance happen without slowing down the business? And, Lance, I know you were nominated as the compliance champion award by Rippling last year, so I'm excited to hear what you think about these. But let's without further ado, let's meet the compliance champion winners or finalists. Before Rippling, we were tracking our disciplinary actions in a separate system that really was the only part of the HR lifecycle of an employee that wasn't living in Rippling. It was in our other system and so that is why we decided to move that process over to Rippling. Our custom map enables our managers and supervisors to submit disciplinary actions for employees or on employees in order to track their overall job performance and to create ability to track improvement as well through the system and also it protects our company if we do have to terminate someone for cause. We have that documentation all in one place. And then we also have a series of follow-up notifications sent to the manager and HR on the date that the follow-up to the employee is required to take place. So the custom app is really easily integrated into workflows and all of those fields are able to be pulled in and used as triggers. The ability to have all this data in one system has been really helpful. It has saved us a little bit of time, and so it's just less confusing for the employees because everything else HR related is already in Rippling. What's helpful for me is if a manager comes to me and says, Hey, I think we need to let this so and so employee go, I can very quickly now go to their Rippling profile and see, oh, well, you don't have any write ups, so we're gonna need to document some of this before we can proceed with the termination. We need to track every engagement with government officials at every level. And before, it was done in a spreadsheet. Very manual. And so a lot of things fell through the cracks with that. The solution was to build a custom app through Rippling and to track all of that data around government engagement. I created a three part system. One is training in the LMS that will, go to every new employee and will be assigned yearly after that. Two is a pre engagement form that people need to fill out when they're gonna meet, with a government official, and then a post engagement form that is filled out after that meeting has passed. We went from a spreadsheet to, like, a reliable, accurate tracking system that is completely automated with all reminders, everything done by rippling. So it's been huge. We can send that to our auditors when they can see our process. They can see that it's accurate, it's reliable, and, you know, we keep our nonprofit status. I think it's probably saved depending a couple of days to a week of work. We even got the eye of the tiger playing. Yeah. Okay. So you just met our compliance champion finalists. And, I actually wanna ask Lance and Brendan to kick things off because, both of you have scaled fast in pretty different environments and from Liquid Death to Chess.com. So, I mean, feel free to comment on these finalists and their workflows, but also what role do you think automation really has when it comes to staying compliant without slowing down the business? Yeah. I can jump in first. This is I love this. This is amazing. Like, definitely speaking speaking my language here. So I think with, Shannon, I disciplinary actions, it's always a little, like, wary and, you know, like, you have to be checking information. You're relying on your managers to do their one on ones, which, you know, may or may not be happening, and, like, that can just be a lot. So having the visibility in one place is really, really cool for, you know, the the people or the HR team to be able to have that visibility kind of as time is going and not, like, all when a problem occurs. Right? And then there needs to be an investigation or there's a lot of back checking that may happen, which is just not great and not exactly compliant in the best way. You know? And so I think that's super cool. I love the follow-up workflows. Really, really interesting as well. I'd say, like, you still have to rely on those managers or people in order to, like, do the task in Rippling. And so I think that would be kind of the harder part is still, like, you know, if they miss something, then what exactly happens? Or, like, you know, we're all people, and everybody's documentation is a little bit different. So that can be a bit of a challenge. With Chris, incredible. You know, like, they're speaking my language, reliable, accurate, tracking systems. Like, you know, that's something that they were already doing. It's a task they have to do. But especially when it comes to government officials, that's, like, just really important stuff. So, the fact that they save days to weeks of work, really, really dope as well. But, overall, I just think if you're it sounds like they built something that from the front all the way to the back was, like, really well constructed and well done, and they were crossing their t's and dotting their i's in that system. So, yeah, that's, like, my take. But I think, when it comes to compliance and making things faster, anytime you have to do manual paperwork, there's room for human error. And so that removing that from the equation altogether is always gonna be the way to go when it comes to specifically crunching numbers. As I like to say, the math always has the math. Right? Or the math is mapping or it's not mapping. And so a lot of times when humans are involved, that that those math that math is not mapping. And so we have to try to figure out a way to remove us out of the situation in some degree, to make sure those numbers stay reliable and accurate each and every time. So that's my my take. Yeah. I love that take. I think thinking broadly, compliance is often an area that's a little less glamorous. Like, I think we probably in this room right now with all everybody here have the majority of people who love it. But generally speaking, it's a little less glamorous. So any opportunity you have to really get it on wheels, on rails, running smoothly, reduce the time investment, the better. I know for myself, and I think the same for any startup minded or fast moving company, the goal is to get it out of the way, Mhmm. but get it out of the way well. Right? Get it done get it done accurately so we can continue moving at speed. We can continue driving velocity, shipping product, doing all of the exciting things we wanna do, but just not run afoul of all of the compliance stuff we have to do at the same time. So any chance we have to really speed that process up, I think is a huge win. I love both of these workflows for that. I know I'm supposed to, like, maybe pick one or suggest one, but they're they're all so good. This is genuinely hard. It's hard. Yeah. No. And and compliance can be so high stakes too. I mean, for a nonprofit that doesn't have all their stuff put together, I mean, it it can be really problematic for keeping the lights on. And and likewise, with changes in employment law and, risk that can come out from Lance, I think you said it too. Like, you know, if if they're not following up and staying on top of things or, like, she pointed out in the video. So many times in HR, we hear that. Like, oh, this person's been really bad. Terminate them, and there's no record of anything anywhere. And so I could see it being really helpful for a number of different conversations. This is another hard one. I think Karin should have to pick the winner. Was thinking. I was like, do they both I as soon the video showed off, I was like, I can't choose. But I think also, Lance, you were saying, like, you have to rely on, like, the employee or the manager to do something. But if you can make it as easy and clear as possible for them to to do it, they're more likely to, which has been one of my goals. And I think both of these solve that problem and make it as kind of foolproof as possible. So, I mean, well done to both of them. Mhmm. Absolutely. Okay. Well, thank you all for your comments, and it's time to vote. So we're gonna release the poll for one minute and enter in your compliance champion winner. I just wish I had the eye of a tiger playing right now. Next time. Yeah. Or maybe I can play it. Wait. Eye of the Tiger. Are you playing? you hear it? I, you. have to set that up ahead of time usually. Yeah. Oh, there it is. Yeah. Like, it's a whisper. Yeah. Okay. Thirty seconds. Oh my gosh. Look at that, people. It's a it's a oh my god. God. This is tight. Another tie. Chris, this is really tight. Okay. Come on. Ten more seconds. 54321. Okay. We gotta close it. Okay. So 172, it's so close. for Yeah. So. close. 61 votes for Chris. Wow. This was tight again. I feel. like Chris needs a special award, though. I mean, I didn't. come up with two great ideas. I agree. Totally. Two? silver medals. That's an that's amazing. Yeah. We're. gonna give Chris two silver medals. We will. I think just the creativity in everyone is just amazing, and so it is tough that we have to choose one. But thank you all for voting. Okay. Let's move on to our final category with time coming close. So our last category is the efficiency engineers. So this category is all about workflows that truly just cut the manual work, eliminate the time for teams to or eliminate times of teams can truly just work on higher impact strategic work. And some questions to consider. How much manual work is this removing, and does this improve my day to day operations immediately? Without further ado, let's meet our efficiency engineers. Referral tracking lived in a patchwork of spreadsheets and email threads. Each referral required hands on coordination between people operations and finance, manually tracking start dates, setting calendar reminders for payout milestones, verifying employment status, and coordinating payroll adjustments along the way. During new hire onboarding, people operations confirms whether the employee was referred through a required referral question. That single step triggers the entire workflow and establishes a clean reliable system of record from day one. The first installment will be paid at ninety days and that is the trigger event. The payout then goes over to payroll automatically and then an email is triggered which notifies the person who referred that they have an upcoming referral bonus on their paycheck. I didn't have to set up a second work flow manually. It was duplicated so that the next payout can be paid at one hundred eighty days after the start date or at that six month mark. Over the past three and a half years, we've paid just over 116,000 referral bonuses which resulted in 46 successful referred hires. Those same hires would have cost approximately $736,000 if we source them through external recruiters. We saved roughly twenty hours per year in manual work. And from an accuracy and compliance standpoint, the payouts are now fully aligned with the policy. Our previous HRIS, it was, very complicated. It felt like you needed to be a developer to be able to report certain or to pull certain data that you needed. We have certain dashboards that we need to send to leadership on a weekly cadence. We would be exporting reports and then importing that to a different reporting system to create the dashboards that we needed from scratch. My colleague previously was exporting into Google Sheets, manipulating manually, putting into the reporting system, creating the dashboard from scratch there. Instead of her having to pull that report, manipulate the data manually every single week, now we'll be able to share that with leadership. They can look at it on demand and see the exact same data, and it saves a lot of time on everybody's part. To be able to create that report and then also tie it into a dashboard where I can just log in on my home screen, see it right there, and also create different charts that I can view the data in different ways and to be able to refresh it and just look at it on demand is life changing. Being able to use formulas within the tool allows us to keep everything within Rippling. The impact of those reports is, especially with the the headcount, is just understanding where we are, how we're growing as a company, where we're growing. Okay. So our final category, judges. Chat's getting. spicy. I I use both of these these methods and and automations and can attest, like, they are fantastic. Actually got some ideas in terms of notifications for the referral bonus. But, yeah, Yes. I mean, they're they're both super useful in in very different ways. So this one's tough because it's hard to compare the two because they they both solve very, very different issues in my mind, but both incredibly helpful. I see a call for a recipe on the reports, which definitely, hopefully, that's a good take back. But I can say one thing that I really did like is not only did we see where they were pointing out the time saved, but the exact dollar. I think that's a really powerful talking point when you can say, you know, the recruitment costs went down by a significant margin. That's that's wonderful. That's gonna be money for other projects or things. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Are are sorry. Go ahead, Lance. sorry. I feel like our our senior recruiter I I I know she's in the chat. I know she's listening, and I know that she's like, oh my gosh. We need to do this immediately. So, just because there's so many touch points that that that gets to, right, from payroll to the hiring manager to the manager of the person who referred the person. You know? So, like and people we have referrals come from I mean, we get, like, 500 to a thousand applicants per job at LiquidDev. Like, it's pretty crazy, and that's something that we've been talking about a lot. It's like, how are we streamlining our referrals? Especially in this top of the year is when most referrals come in. Right? So they're just getting slammed with referrals right now. These people are looking for work, which we love, but, also, it's like trying to make that into a a normal SOP or or system is kinda the harder part. And so knowing that we can do that in Rippling regardless of the actual bonus itself, but just more so, like, hey. Who sent this person? Like, what are we doing? You know? Is is super, super huge. Yeah. I I love them both. And I think to your framework, Vanessa, that you shared earlier, we use both of those. Right? We're using, referral based workflows, and we're we're using dashboards. And I think they're both super creative. I think the debate here is in the will it save you time and money? Absolutely. In the near term, the referral based workflow will save you time and money. It's very tactical. You can see all of the steps and the the work that got saved. Interestingly about the dashboard and the distribution of data. Getting that in front of more people is gonna help them make better decisions. And in the long run, that might save you a lot of time and money. So I think that's a really interesting trade off is when do you want that time and money? Now, or later? I think that's the battle here. Yep. And now I guess the battle is who's our winner? So oh, wait. Sorry. The poll is released, and I have music. For one more minute, this is our final You're all vibes, Vanessa. We're is great. grooving. coming in. Okay. So I'm gonna give folks fifteen more minutes fifteen seconds. Imagine if I give you fifteen minutes. Fifteen. seconds. Sorry, and then put your name numb or your name. First, I'm say 541. Okay. Are you ready? Drum roll, please. It's already. Got it. Wow. Wow. How? Yes. Okay. Very cool. Congrats to Nicole. That's amazing. Yeah. Congratulations, Nicole. Yeah. Again, both Ali and Nicole, you both did such an amazing job, and I think everyone can resonate and relate to the impact that you've built with your automations. But, Nicole, you are the winner for the efficiency engineer category, and that is our category or or a final category. So thank you all so much. This is not the end of the event, though. Don't leave yet. Let me just close the poll. Stop sharing. And the slide. Okay. So wow. Judges, we did throw you a bunch of automations. And thank you all for giving your comments. I hope that you learned from everyone who shared. And again, thank you to all the nominees who submitted a workflow. And so I guess this kind of brings in a really big question, which is to everyone here live, you might be wondering where and how can I get started, or where do I even start automating? And so one thing we designed was an HR automation starter worksheet, which we wanted to just share as a quick way for you all to kind of get started with thinking about your own workflows and how you can you can automate. So just put it in the chat, and it's also in the doc tab on the on the left. And, of course, I just wanna highlight that I think it wouldn't make sense if I didn't highlight the fact that a lot of most all these automations were built on rippling. And so the real the real key here is just the fact that our platform is employee centric. It all revolves around the employee graph, and that kind of gives us a single source of truth where you can build and create systems for your company and for your organization from real from real data points for real people. And you you saw it here today, Real employees and HR leaders working to serve their organization. So if you're interested in learning about how to get started with your workflows and automations, and if you're just curious about rippling, please book a walkthrough if you'd like. There's the chat over there. And in return, we do offer a $50 gift card. But, again, it should really be about building these cool workflows. So that's all from my end. And I does that apply if you work here? I don't know, Michael. Really sorry. I was just saying, we're already rippling users. Not to shield too hard, but, like, I'll sign up for another demo. It's it's been impactful for us. So Yeah. And I also okay. Wait. Before I also wanna release another poll, which is I noticed, like, a lot of people were wondering, whether like, how can I learn from other people too who are existing Rippling users? And so in a second, I think we'll we'll give a chance for people to join our community, our HR community. If you're interested in, you know, having these smaller discussions where we can bring folks together and talk about these systems and what you're building. And also feel free to connect with us on on LinkedIn. And and, yeah, before we wrap things up too, I wanna I wanna pass it back to the judges. If you have any final comments or or things you wanted to to say as we wrap up this this event and this talent show. This was fun. When are you hosting the next one? When are you inviting us back? You're. welcome anytime. Okay. So I guess we just gotta set a date, Okay. and it's off. It'd. be like American. Idol. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wait. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I just gotta do season two. one where no judges make any decisions because we like everyone. But yeah. There's no Simon Cowles on our panel. You. know? Hey. I'll I'll add, you know, you shared that worksheet earlier, and I was I was looking at the slide, and I thought it was interesting. It's what's your your biggest, what did it say, what was your biggest time waster? And I think that's a great way to look at it. But I also wanna say sometimes people can get stuck when you think about your biggest. What is my most impactful thing? What is my number one thing I wish I could do? And sometimes you get paralyzed thinking about, oh, I don't know what the number one is. Just pick any. What is anything. that would make my life better? What is the simplest. thing that would make my life better? And sometimes that can help you get into the habit of building automations. I agree. love that. I. think starting very small because then you're like, oh, that was easy to build, and then you can add on to it. And think, Brendan, you were saying that you already refined, like, three or four workflows today. I feel like every week, I'm refining things that I built, you know, years ago. So you just keep adding to it. Agree. Yeah. And, like, what would make our employees' lives easier or better? Right? What are some things that, like, they are constantly coming to us asking about? Right? For us, it's like we have a PTO reminder one. And I know I mentioned the the time off reminder, but the PTO one is like, hey. You have a scheduled PTO on this day, and it gets to them about two days before they're scheduled to take it. Because life happens. They forget to go into Rippling and cancel their time off request, and then it messes with, like, everything else, you know, and all of my analytics. So it's like, okay. That's beneficial to me, but it's also a reminder for them and to get in touch with their manager, have a conversation, remind their team, like, hey. I am gonna be out on Thursday. I have a doctor's appointment, or I'm gonna be gone taking my kid to, their player, like, whatever the situation is. Right? So it's it's those little things. To Brendan's point, it's not just about these big, like, what can I do for the executive team and these, like, major reports all the time? Those are great and amazing too, but, it really is about, the little things along the way. So yeah. Thank you so much for having us. This is a blast. Yeah. Thank you all so much. And I guess maybe one last final question is, what is one thing you're looking forward to? Doesn't have to be about automation, just in general. Since we have so many HR folks here today at incredible companies, and I think it's rare to have a room full of HR leaders from such diverse orgs in the live audience and in the judges here. So what is one thing you are looking forward to in 2026? It's. '10 things one. on a positive note. tough tough question. I I think we're gonna go through a really interesting change in the workforce, and there's a lot of opportunity for us to provide some incredible support and provide empathy and strategy and planning, to our leaders and to our team members as automation and AI changes the way that people go to work. Like, how are we enabling people to do great work? So I think that the more we can automate, the more time we have to participate and and be present in those conversations and situations. And I think that will, I'm looking forward to that. Hi. I think also leveling up what we've we've done. You know, I think we've made a lot of impact already, at least for for within my company, and I see, like, where we're going with the space and additional tools available to us in creative ways that HR folks are are looking at solving problems and really just continuing to build on that. Every time that we see major upheaval, HR grows in status and stature. I'm looking forward to seeing how people perceive HR by the 2026. Yeah. In a very specific way on the benefits front, I'm very looking for I'm I'm very much looking forward to seeing how s b seven twenty nine impacts California, but not only, the world and The United States. That's basically a law that mandates IVF benefits that are gonna be covered for all fully insured plans. We're a California based employer. We have employees in 29 plus states around the country, but this benefit will be, you know, related to all of our employees because we're a California based employer. So, Nice. I'm very excited about that, just because it's something that we've been talking about. And as you guys know, the IVF benefits are or benefits, but also the actual procedures are incredibly expensive. And so I'm always looking to, you know, make our benefits richer and everything, but it's nice when the government does step in or a state does step in in order to help make that a bit easier and setting that change and make an impact. So I'm very excited to see what that looks like, for the rest remainder of the year. Wow. Well, I mean, with all the uncertainty in this world, there's still a lot of good things to look forward to. And so, yeah, I'm also looking forward to seeing how I guess I'm I'm just excited to be able to be a part of an incredible team here at Rippling and also just to to continue growing and hopefully to build more of these experiences for everyone in HR and also just beyond. So I think we're also hitting our one hour mark, and so I wanna be mindful of everyone's time. And I think this is a great way to wrap things up. So thank you again, everyone. Thank you, Karin, Lance, Kim, Brendan, and to all of our finalists and to everyone who attended here live to enter your voting. We really appreciate it taking the time out of your busy week and Tuesday. I did also release a poll on the second tab if you're interested in potential community events. So feel free to to see if you'd like to join that. We have our HR community linked below as well. We'll share the recording of this event post live. I know I've gotten a lot of requests for that. And and, yeah, that's that's all. So thank you again. Thank you, Vanessa. Thanks, Thank you. Vanessa. Thanks, Vanessa. Thanks, Saul. Okay. Bye. Gonna end it off on What? Oh, how's the wrong song? Sorry?