Over the last 8 years, I've really enjoyed partnering with UX, Security, Internal IT, Product, Engineering & Data teams as a Talent professional. By sharing these resources with the world, I hope to empower other folks in HR to be true talent partners to the R&D groups they support and ultimately help build life changing products. If you're looking to stay connected, feel free to reach out to me. This Github repo will continue to evolve as my own professional interests evolve.

A curated collection of resources on Leadership, Org Design & Talent Management:

• Netflix Culture: Very interesting perspectives from Patty McCord on what it took to build Netflix's unique culture (sports team, talent density, no performance bonuses, top of market pay, etc). She was the CHRO of Netflix. Netflix produced the Netflix culture deck that has circulated the tech space for a number of years.
• Drive by Daniel Pink: Daniel Pink shares a 10 minute video on what factors lead to high performance for creative work. Spoiler alert: it's not pay. It's Mastery, Autonomy & Purpose.
• The Culture Map: If you work in any global team with different cultures or ways of life, this is a MUST read. It dives deeper into the differences between cultures on a number of different dimensions with great examples of no-nos when interacting with multicultural teams.
• Managers of One: prior to reading this article, I've never heard of the concept of "Manager of One". I really love how Gitlab highlights the 20 things you need to see a Manager of One. As a Talent Professional, those 20 things really summarize the types of behaviour I would expect from a high performing individual contributor role.
• How I talk to Leaders About Firing People: Really honest article about PIPs, what needs to be done to be fair to the employee and also acknowledges the importance of the manager in owning responsibility for this failed relationship.
• 12 Quotes from High Output Management by Andy Grove: For people managers that haven't had a chance to read his book, this article summarizes 12 practices that managers need to execute on to build a high-performing organization. Must read.
• a16z's blog archives: really interesting points about "summertime soldiers", "vesting in peace" and "mediocre performers". He provides advice on turning around a company through really strategic HR choices.
• The Fullstack HR professional: As a follow-up to the above resource, Josh Bersin has written a wonderful thoughtpiece on what it takes to be a Full-Stack HR professional.
• Hyper Island Toolbox: Fantastic hub of different faciliation techniques and team buildings.
• Open Policy Index: The team at Open Index created this airtable of 300+ HR policies. This is a resource that HR professionals can use to research what's available in the market, but remember: the best policies are custom fit to your organization's reality. As always, give kudos and appropriate credit to the individuals and organizations where you drew inspiration from! :)
• Workplace Investigations for the Human Resources Professional: Great primer on what the investigation process looks like. As someone not involved with these activities in my organization, the information was digestible and useful. Resource is free which is helpful for self-taught HR professionls lacking the HR academic background.
• Pyn: Employee Experience Process Mapping: great, FREE tool to process map talent processes, you're able to collaborate with peers and expert visuals. It's like Figma for HR.
• Talent Density - Coinbase We're moving to a corporate world where growth =/= headcount increases. It's important to build lean and highly skilled organizations. I know the topic of "talent density" is a bit controversial, but as someone that subscribes to the Netflix approach to talent, I really enjoyed this blog post.
• How to Build High-Performing Teams: Olympic Lessons from Team Canada: a fireside chat with several Olympic Athletes on diversity in coaches, psychological safety, feedback culture, and more. Very interesting!
• Hiring Super ICs at Ramp: Eric speaks to the craft of recruiting and his thoughts on hiring exceptional individual contributors at Ramp.
• The Rands Test: "The Rands Test," a management and team health assessment inspired by "The Joel Test" for software quality. This test comprises twelve points, designed to evaluate various aspects of an engineering team, particularly focusing on communication effectiveness and strategic understanding within a company.
• Employee Lifetime Value: article introduces Employee Lifetime Value (ELTV), a metric that quantifies an employee's total expected future contributions to an organization over the entire duration of their employment, similar to how customer lifetime value assesses a customer's long-term worth. ELTV as a crucial HR metric for understanding human capital ROI, justifying investment in people, and optimizing the employee lifecycle.
• Zapier's AI x HR use cases Playbook on the different AI x HR use cases.

A curated collection of resources on Diversity, Inclusion & Equity:

• Tips for job seekers, recruiters and leaders on building a diverse & inclusive workforce (Ceridian): shameless plug, I wrote the article when I was a Pride ERG Co-Chair at my last company
• Diversity Terminology: On D,E,I terminology.
• What does privilege look like?: On what privilege can look like in day-to-day actions.
• On Equality vs. Equity: On the differences between equality and equity.
• On Intersectionality: On what intersectionality is in the lens of identity
• How to talk about pronouns at work: On respecting and acknowledging pronouns in the workplace
• Designing for Ramadan 2023: Really great read on Ramadan, the pre and post activities and how organizations can build services & products that are inclusive to this community.
• Rivers to Success: Great 30 minute course for non-indigenous employees to better understand history around our indigenous communities. I find that our media fails to really provide adequate coverage of Indigenous history so I strongly recommend for individuals to be proactive with their own education.
• Google: Inclusive event design: An incredible open-source doc from Google outlining best practices on inclusive in-person or virtual events, it covers the gamut from participant registration, speaker representation, logistics and more.

A curated collection of resources to better understand Total Rewards/Compensation:

• What is Equity by Carta: great resource on understanding equity, cap tables, vesting and more.
• The Holloway Guide to Equity Compensation -> Equity is a huge consideration when joining a company, but equity is a black box for most individuals. Check out this thorough guide on how equity works. I learned lots about concepts like 409A valuations, taxation, public vs. private equity, vesting schedules, stock options vs. RSUs, and much more.
• Opening Up About Comp Isn’t Easy — Here’s How to Get More Transparent: the world is moving to more transparency around salaries, but the reality is that many organizations may not be ready for this change. HOWEVER, this doesn't mean you can't work towards transparency internally and externally. Check out this article for insights on how an organization can shift into transparency.
• TheWorldatWork: Handbook of Total Rewards: picked up this textbook recently and found it was a fantastic resource for a Talent professional to learn more about compensation surveys, job analysis, merit cycles & budgeting, sales & executive comp, labor laws and more. Still part-way through the book! TheWorldAtWork is an organization that focuses on the practice of Total Rewards, definitely recommend taking a look at their site for other resources!
• Immigration 101: Immigration/Mobility programs are sometimes offered as a condition of employment. This document from Homebrew gives some context for HR professionals on the process of sponsorship in the United States and an overview of the various types of VISAs (H1B, O-1, F1, TN, etc).
• Department of Labor - US - Minimum Wage Laws by State: This federal website breaks down the minimum wage laws across every US state. Can serve as a source of truth.
• Economic Research Institute: ERIERI provides many free compensation courses for US Talent practioniners. Sharing this course as it covers the major federal legislation related to Total Rewards in the United States: Fair Labor Standards Act, Equal Pay Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Civil Rights Act, National Labor Relations Act, and more.
• Sales Commission Glossary: The world of Sales Compensation is more nuanced than comp for non-incentived corporate roles. I thought this glossary was a good explanation of common terms found in the space of incentivized compensation programs.
• The Differences Between Median vs. Mean: very clear explanation of the implications of using "mean" vs. "median" in HR data analysis.
• Paychex - basic benefits a Company must provide (US): great summary of mandatary US benefits for FTE based employees: Workers Comp, Unemployment Insurance, Social Security, Medicare, FLMA, etc. Note: companies can choose to go above and beyond to attract talent - 401k + PTO programs are prime examples of benefits that are "standard" to remain competitive.
• Business Benefits Finder: if you're a small business or start-up looking to research grants in regards to hiring in Canada, this is a great directory!
• #ShowUsYourLeave: crowdsourced list of 60 different companies parental leave programs, highly recommend taking a look if you're doing market analysis on your company's leave benefits.
• Carta - 2023 Equity Report: fantastic insights on the current state of hiring/comp including topics like the size of equity grants, hiring appetitite across functions and an interesting discussion on IC vs. Manager appetite.

A curated collection of resources to better understand the craft of Talent Acquisition:

• Canny's Tech Recruitment Roadmap.sh: A curated recruiting learning roadmap for a beginner Technical Recruiter to ramp on R&D recruitment. With my switch to the world of HRBP work, I will leave this in maintenance mode for future recruiters to use.
• Acquisitions: Useful to pulse check the market.
• trueup layoffs tracker: I much prefer the data integrity of trueup vs. layoff fyi. Trueup hyperlinks the actual articles discussing the layoff news at various companies.
• CBRE - Scoring Top Tech Markets: Great if you're thinking of trying to identify more niche talent pools outside of the big North American cities
• Indeed Hiring Lab: great for research on individual countries and getting a pulse on hiring appetite by industry & skillset
• Talent Sourcing Seniority Ladder: Denys shares an example of a career progression framework for Talent Sourcers. Wanted to capture this as a I find Sourcers don't get as much attention or love in most Talent Acquisition organizations.
• Talent Sourcing Technical Toolbox: WizardSourcer is a great place to find different tools to incorporate into your TA tech stack, from things like Boolean generators, Email finders, Github scrapers, Customized Search Engines and much more. Must read if you're constantly on the hunt to improve your TA tech stack.
• Skill Roadmaps: great tool that breaks down typical R&D crafts into a road map of related skills - worth diving into when you pivot to a more unknown R&D group.
• State of the Software Engineering Market in 2024 Gergely speaks on hiring trends in the last year, including fastest growing engineering subdisciplines.
• Recruiting Brainfood: Love Hung Lee's community, his website contains a great number of global job boards and he has a facebook community + weekly distribution list of thought-provoking talent acquisition articles. I believe he is more tapped into the European hiring markets.
• ThePeoplePeopleGroup: For my Toronto HR folks, PPG is an awesome slack community for networking and resource sharing among Toronto-based Human Resources Professionals.
• Wizard Sourcer: Fantastic website/resource for Boolean strings, recruiter templates and deep dives into different technologies used by Recruiters. I tinker around with new tools and this has been a great resource!
• SOSUV- Great community of passionate talent sourcing professionals! SOSUV runs conferences & meet-ups throughout the year, great community to be involved in. Heavy European Talent Sourcing representation.

Books:

• "Carry That Quota" - Jesse Rothstein: This really resonated, recruiting is definitely a hybrid between sales and human resources. Gives great suggestions on how a sales focused individual can manage output.
• "UltraLearning" - Scott Young: A core skill of ANY career path is the ability to learn. This is a great book for the tools needed to stay ahead of the industry and become a life-long learner.
• Never Split The Difference - Chris Voss: If you're looking to up your negotiation game, definitely recommend this one. Chris is a former hostage negotiator turned negotiation teacher.
• "Work Rules! Insights from Google" - Laszlo Bock: Super interesting if you're looking to understand some of the human resources methodologies of one of the biggest global technology companies in the world (Google)
• "Top Talent Sourcing Tools for Recruiters" - Jonathan Kidder: Takes your Recruiting/Sourcing tools knowledge to the next level, I learned all about contact finding tools, recruiting automation, boolean string builders, data scraping and more!
• "Full Stack Recruiter" - Jan Tegze : Teaches you about sourcing across various channels like Github/Facebook/Meet-up/etc.
• "How to Speak Tech" - Vinay Trivedi: Great resource for recruiters that are just starting off in technical recruiting and need to learn about how software development works. Imagine a technical terms 101 guide.
• "Stop Asking Questions" -Andrew Warner: Wonderful tips on how a recruiter can guide deeper conversations through the art of interviewing.

Blogs or news sites to follow tech news/trends:

• BetaKit
• InfoQ: Great for heavy duty deep dives into all sorts of technical topics and follow software development trends
• Pragmatic Engineer: Great for big tech intel and opinion pieces on engineering related topics.

Understanding the R&D Business Groups (Engineering, UX, Trust, Data, Product):

Campus Recruiting/Early Talent:

• Major League Hacking - great way to find out about hackathons happening across the world! Hackathons are great ways to engage in the community and pipeline Product, UX, Design and Engineering Talent. Talent can partner with their Social Impact/Corporate Social Responsbility teams on joint engagement in hackathons.
• One Req: This recruiting community focuses alot on UR (University Recruiting)- check out the wonderful templates & strategies provided by this organization: campus referral program guidelines, internship extension documents, headcount planning, and more.
• HandShake: Great job postings tool to disseminate your postings across American colleges & universities! I used this alot when I supported US campus roles across New York, Illinois, Indiana and Iowa.

Software Engineering:

• "Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations": Great resource for understanding the challenges/opportunities of building a strong engineering organization - it tells the story of a fictional company attempting to modernize the way they build applications to support business needs
• Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track by Will Larson: I just started this book, but I loved the insights of developers on the technical track. It goes through the role expectations of Staff+ Engineers at multiple companies through storytelling by multiple Staff Engineers.
• What is a Code Review?: Important context if you're unfamiliar with code reviews
• SRE vs. DevOps
• What is Software Architecture?
• The Seniority Roller Coaster - why do Developers get levelled differently across companies?
• How do you make a strong offer to a Developer?
• Birds-eye view on modern day tools/frameworks in Software Development
• What exactly is a Design System?
• Career Progression frameworks in the tech space
• The Art of Interviewing 10x Engineers
• Software Testing: Explanation of the various types of software testing that can be done by Developers or QA.
• W3C - Introduction to Web Accessibility: Brief overview on the importance of web accessibility. WCAG is a well-known compliance standard in the a11y space.
• MDN - Accessibility: Great resource to better understand how to make software more accessible - introduces topics like ARIA labels, semantic HTML, CSS considerations (color contrast, fonts, etc).
• What exactly is a product-minded engineer?: I really enjoyed this article. I think engineers get a bad rep as heads-down builders, but the true value of an engineer is solving business problems, NOT writing lines of code.
• Hiring Programs: A discussion on extra-curricular hiring programs like Bar raisers, hiring committees, and other complex ways to improve hiring quality
• Senior vs. Staff vs. Principal Engineers: A comparison about the differences between Senior, Staff and Principal Engineering roles - great read.
• DevRel Collective: A great summary of blogs, resources and communities related to Dev Rel & Dev Advocacy. Great for recruiters that work in developer facing product companies!
• Technically - What are Microservices?: great TLDR on the benefits and costs of microservices compared to the traditional monolith approach.
• Technically - What's an API (Application Programming Interface): very succint explanation on what APIs are! Highly recommend a read if you've never worked on software products before, APIs are a cornerstone of application development.
• Technically - The Beginner's Guide to Databases: I loved this article - there are so many different databases that Engineers or Data Scientists can use. The article explains the nuances between databases that can be used for production apps, analytics and infrastructure support with clear examples of each!
• What exactly is Github Copilot: great primer for a non-engineer to understand the impact on Generative AI on software development. I do believe copilot will improve the quality of life for engineers through rapid code generation, documentation support, unit testing support and more. Ultimately, the Engineer still needs to understand what is happening, adhere to their code base practices and consider security, but it is a meaningful tool.
• What happens when an app goes down? All about outages: explains the types of outages that can occur in a common SaaS product.

Data Engineering/Data Science:

• AI Fundamentals for Non-Data Scientists: 4 week program from Wharton unpacking the foundations of AI. Big data implications, tools for management and analysis of big data, explanations of the different types of machine learning, and more.
• What is data engineering? & What is data engineering? Part 2: explains the Extract, Transform, Load process, explains Batch vs Streaming, explains Warehouse vs. Lake, and concludes with examples of technologies used in Data Engineering today.
• What is Analytics Engineering? Good explanation of the differences between data engineers & Analytics Engineers.
• Kaggle - Your Machine Learning and Data Science Community: I would equate Kaggle to the Github/StackOverflow of Data Science. It's a great place to check out data sets, ask questions and network with other Data Science/Data Analytics professionals.
• Data Science - Tools & Python frameworks Primer: Great primer on the tools of a Data Scientist (Jupyter Notebook) and unpacks the various Python libraries that can be used for Data Science: Pandas, NumPy, Scikit-Learn, TensorFlow & Pytorch.
• Centralized, Decentralized & Federated Data Teams: thoughtful article on the implications of various types of Data team structures.
• Hiring Machine Learning Engineers: a primer on hiring machine learning engineers: what to look for on a resume, the overall persona, key skills.
• Data Warehousing Essentials: A Guide To Data Warehousing: great resource on the basics of Data Warehousing, the nuances between Data Warehouses and other data storage tools, schema design and considerations for the design of data warehouses.
• How top data teams are structured: Interesting breakdown of how different tech companies divide between insights, data engineering and machine learning.
• Batch vs Stream Processing: breakdown of the trade-offs between the different types of data streaming and common tools used for both.
• Full Breakdown of all of the technologies and tools used across the Data & ML ecosystem: great visual that breaks up the different tools used throughout the entire data ecosystem.
• Google's Machine Learning Crash Course: step by step walk through/under the hood walk through of 0-1 machine learning model development, training & validation, testing, deployment and productionizing a ML model.
• An explanation of how Recommendation Systems work:interesting read if you were ever curious on how products like Netflix can generate video recommendations for you.
• MLOps: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Implement It: introduction to ML Ops and common tools used
• How to Interview and Hire ML/AI Engineers
• 10 Ways to Be Data Illiterate (and How to Avoid Them)
• The Rise of the AI engineer
• Career Progression frameworks in the tech space

Product Management:

• Product Management First Principles
• What is software localization?
• What are the different personas of Product Managers?
• Cool Product Management Templates
• What is a product led company/product led growth?
• Career Progression frameworks in the tech space
• Product Management Basics: great for those that are intrigued by "Product Management" and want a 3 hour, FREE primer.
• Mind The Product - Skills Inventory for Product Managers: if you're looking to build a skills inventory or rubricfor your PM craft, this is a great resource.
• Product Analytics Certification: FREE course on Product Analytics.
• How PM specializations shape the user experience: great article that talks about how product management differs depending on the type of problem being solved.

UX/Product Design/Product Research:

• A collection of various company's design principles
• Nielsen Norman - UX Careers: Fantastic overview of UX Careers by Nielsen Norman - talks about skills common to designers, nuances between Designers vs. Researchers, and more.
• UX Design vs UI Design: Short 10 minute video on the main differences between the two fields. The reality is that most organizations combine the roles, but UX and UI are different skills technically. UI is about the visual components of an experience (typography, colors, spacing, information architecture) and UX is about the user journey (think emotions, personas).
• What is a Design Sprint: Super common term thrown around in the design world - TLDR: a design sprint is a condensed 5 day cycle where a team of designers will go from ideation to testing with users. I almost see it as a 5 day hackathon.
• What is wireframing/prototyping?
• An example of a Design System:https://polaris.shopify.com/ or https://mui.com/
• UX Research: Great resource breaking down what UX Research entails!
• Fixing product design career paths with the Mirror Model: Some thoughts on the lack of clarity for growth opportunities related to tenured, individual contributor Designers. Proposes a mirroring of the Engineering progression frameworks as a solution. Thought it makes alot of sense given the alignment that occurs between the trifecta (UX/Engineering/Product).
• UX Study Guides - Nielsen Norman: great primers on various UX topics, free resource.

Trust & Information Security:

• Common Cyberattacks
• Tools used in modern day security: goes through common tools in network security.
• Cybersecurity Role Map: Fantastic mind map that tries to differentiate the multitude of career paths in the Trust/Infosec space. Not many people know about the depth and breadth in Security: Security Engineering, Network Security Legal, Fraud Ops, Physical Security, Compliance, and much much more.
• OWASP: Industry practices on software and network security.
• What is Security Engineering and Part 2: Great piece from Pragmatic Engineer that walks through the common myths of App Sec, its evolution throughout the years and how it integrates into the software development lifecycle.