How AI Is Reshaping Roles, Job Architecture, and Careers Heading Into 2027, With Maggie Ruvoldt

00:00 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Hello everyone. I'm excited to do another podcast session, and today it's with Maggie Ruvoldt, who's a friend and an incredible CHRO, people leader, and COO. Today we're going to talk about AI, how roles are changing, how jobs are changing, how skills are changing, and how that's impacting the workforce. Maggie has been a CHRO at many large tech companies. Now she's an advisor at a number of different organizations, including Rebalance Capital and Semper Virens. Maggie's also COO and Senior Partner at ChangeBridge People Solutions, so she's taking decades of practice and experience and applying it there. She's the perfect person to talk about what's happening in the world of HR and how the workforce is changing. So Maggie, thank you for joining us.

01:07 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
It's always exciting to spend some time with you and talk about this. The topic we're going to talk about today is one I'm incredibly obsessed with: how roles are changing. So many people are focused on what's disappearing, and I'm excited to talk about not only what's changing, but also the roles that are going to be new. Every time you have a tech revolution like this, we focus on what we're losing but not necessarily what we're gaining. So that's the conversation I'm excited to have.

01:33 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
People keep asking, “Are we going to lose our jobs?” and what's happening, so it'll be a fun topic with someone who's done this at scale in many different industries. Maggie, I introduced you and probably haven't done justice to everything, so maybe a quick introduction would be great so people know you and your background, and we can dive right in from there.

02:00 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Happy to. It's always awkward to talk about yourself, but sure. As you mentioned, I've been in and out of large HR organizations. I've been a CHRO a few times, at an education technology company and at a healthcare company, and now I'm at ChangeBridge People Solutions. We're an HR advisory, and everybody who works for us is somebody who has sat in the seat. The work we're doing now is so focused on AI, HR transformation, and the things that are happening, and I get to do what lights me up every day, having been in HR for, oh, probably more than 30 years now. I also spend a lot of time with startups and groups like that, so I'm always happy to have a conversation with somebody like you. My main focus these days is transformation work, and definitely the impact AI is having on how we work every day. I'm a big believer that technology should enable us to do our jobs well and allow us to function at the highest level we can, rather than being something that's a bit of a drag on us, which AI is in lots of different ways right now.

03:11 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Unless someone's living under a rock, everyone's talking about AI and its impact. But maybe let's set the stage. What are you seeing and hearing? What are the questions, what are the concerns? What's top of mind for companies and executive teams?

03:29 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
It's a great topic, because we spend all of our time talking to leaders about it. In the past year we've talked to something like 150 CEOs and CHROs about what's happening in the workforce. I keep saying this is the most collective case of imposter syndrome I've ever seen. Everyone thinks they're behind. And if everybody's behind, then nobody's ahead. So there's a good amount of performative work going on, where people are saying, “We're going to make somebody the head of AI enablement.” What does that mean? Or they're layering tools on because they have to show they're moving forward, but they're not actually redesigning the work. So what I'm hearing from a lot of people is a bit of tool fatigue. “I don't want to just show that I'm doing something. Can we actually get into the work and think about where in the process this should fit?” Let's talk about what we're trying to accomplish, the outcomes first, and then choose the right tool for that process, rather than picking the next shiny object, layering it onto what people are doing today, and not actually doing the hard work. The other thing I've heard in the past couple of months, which is a little surprising, is this. For months and months it was, “Use AI, use AI. It's going to help us reduce the labor force, and we'll be able to do more with fewer people.” And then all of a sudden the bills started rolling in. What did it cost to do something? There are some tools that really are creating those efficiencies, and other places where people are realizing, wow, we're spending all of this money. People are token maxing. That became the whole thing, show what you're doing by token maxing, and the bills are outweighing any savings they might have gotten around labor. Those are the big themes, I think.

05:31 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
That's good. There's a lot to unpack there too, like measuring the ROI of agents and token spend, and humans working with agents, and whether it's really working out the way you expected. Maybe to backtrack: do you see roles changing, jobs changing? In tech I see that a lot, but outside of tech as well, in other industries, how is the workforce evolving?

06:00 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
When it's going right, it's not necessarily that roles are changing quite yet. It's more how people are doing the work. The process itself is changing, which enables the role to change. The lowest hanging fruit in HR is talent acquisition, and places where you can use AI in responsible ways. I was surprised to find out how many job applicants, when they're given the choice of doing a first interview with an AI agent or with a person, choose the AI agent. High percentages of people. That helps the recruiter be a bit more efficient than they were before.

06:51 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Oh, interesting, so candidates are picking the agents too?

06:54 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Candidates are picking the agents. So surprising.

06:57 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Is it like you don't want to talk to your Uber driver anymore? Is that the same analogy?

07:01 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
That could be. Maybe it's Gen Z and they just don't want to talk to anybody. Or maybe there's a sense that it's a little less biased, or the stakes feel a little lower. It's only really working in that early stage. The other place is anywhere you're doing analytics. Again, the work itself isn't changing, because where people add the most value is in judgment, in insights and inferences: what does this mean, and how does it connect to the larger pieces of the business? The way people are functioning is changing, in that they can have a system, a product, or an agent do the lowest-level tasks, and then spend more of their time on the higher-value pieces. That's what I think is happening.

07:50 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
To poke at that, do you think it impacts some roles by level of seniority more than others? If you take analytics as an example, does it affect the analyst who's doing the data gathering, cleaning, and structuring more than the senior data analyst or data scientist who's doing the analysis, insights, and recommendations?

08:15 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
That's the boogeyman right now, right? The entry-level job. People are talking about entry-level jobs going away. Well, they're not going away, but they're changing. I do think there's a high impact. There is an impact on the percentage of entry-level jobs in the market right now, and I think it's going to impact them first, because more senior people can now rely on a tool for a task they might have given to somebody at the analyst or coordinator level. But what that group of people still has to do is be critical of the data cleanup. I was working with a client literally yesterday, and we were talking about automating a process, and the first question I asked was, “How clean is the data?”

09:10 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Garbage in, garbage out, right?

09:11 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Exactly. It's the same old story. So I do think there are tasks the analyst level used to do that they're not going to have to do anymore, but that means they can start doing higher-level work faster, and asking those critical questions.

09:30 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
I think that leads into how roles are evolving. If you had a magic eight ball, do you think some jobs will completely disappear? Do you think lots of new jobs will be created? What does this look like in three years or five years? And the LLMs have progressed a lot too. There was a version of Claude last November or December that was a step function improvement, at least from my vantage point, in coding and B2B applications. What's your thinking there?

10:07 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
I think roles are definitely going to have to change, in the same way as anything that came before this. Think about how social media changed marketing. There were roles that went away in marketing, but new ones evolved. When I graduated in the 1900s, there was no social media marketing. Nobody was running your social media campaigns and the analytics behind them, because it didn't exist. But other jobs became less important or went away as a result. I think we're seeing the same thing, and it's really hard to predict what that's going to look like. Data entry kinds of things have, I think, largely already gone away, and more and more of the initial analysis that can be done will leave. Oddly, I think something that's going to boomerang back is writing, jobs that require writing. Everybody's getting really sick of the AI slop, and you can tell when a company or an organization is using too much AI. We sort of moved away from certain graphic design jobs, certain communications jobs, and certain marketing jobs that required you to actually do creative writing. I think that's going to come back around, because people don't like what they're seeing. What these models are really good at is the analysis piece, and I think those are the jobs that will be impacted the most and probably go away. The jobs that will evolve in the short term are governance-related jobs. What are the ways we're making sure data is protected? Everybody's afraid of agents getting out of their little containment areas and doing things they're not supposed to be doing. So I think roles around security and governance are going to become more important. Companies will be, and should be, asking themselves where they're using AI, but most importantly, where they're not going to use it, even if it's capable of something, and making a conscious decision about that. Roles around that are going to come into fruition, and eventually that's going to become everybody's job. Everybody needs to be thinking that way. But I think we'll see more of that in the next couple of years.

12:42 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Those are very astute observations. I also think we can't predict how some markets and use cases will change. What comes to mind is radiology. People said radiologists and image scanning would go away because AI can automate that so well. But what's actually happening now, and maybe it's my age, is I get so many ads for $200 monthly or quarterly body scans and health scans. Instead of a very expensive X-ray or MRI that you only got when it was absolutely necessary, healthcare can be more proactive and continuous, and people go in twice a year or more. So if you look at the data, demand for those jobs has actually increased rather than shrinking. No one could have predicted that two years ago. People thought it was for sure gone, and the absolute opposite has happened.

13:42 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
That's a really good example. People want to get their healthcare information from a person. Even though maybe they want to do the AI interview, nobody wants to get results that they don't think a person has applied some reason to, from someone who can have a conversation with them in an empathetic way.

14:02 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
That's a good point too. I want my medical care provider to tell me, “You're okay,” or “You're not okay, and this is why.” You want that human judgment and calibration, because the AI report will say, “Haris, since becoming a founder you've lost so much hair and put on seven pounds.” So you want to have that conversation. Something you also hinted at is that people want a lot more personalization, not just with healthcare but with compensation, total rewards, and employee programs. Gen Z doesn't want a cookie-cutter career ladder and benefits. That's not what they're looking for from a corporate role anymore.

14:52 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
No, not at all. They want to understand. They're more curious, and they want more transparency. We have the ability to give them all of that, along with personalization. I've often said compensation and benefits is such a fascinating area, because we think about currency as money, only money. What's interesting about the generations behind me, and particularly Gen Z, is that lots of different things are currency for them. Money's definitely currency, but so are different benefits, and so is time off, and so is the ability to personalize all of that. What they would love us to do is say, “Here's the total investment we want to make in you as an employee. You can pull different levers on how much of it comes to you in money, how much in flexibility,” or maybe you need medical benefits a certain way, or you want more going into mental health benefits. Seeing that big picture. Of course, that's hard to do at scale, because there's also pay transparency and fairness, what a job is worth, those kinds of things. But these technologies give us the ability to be much more transparent and much more clever, and not clever in a snarky way, than we've ever had the opportunity to be before. It also requires people in the kind of seat I've always sat in to be much more tech-focused, tech-enabled, and tech-forward than we've ever had to be. The CHRO seat has often been occupied by somebody who came up through the HR business partner or generalist path. We sat in every seat, and you could get away with not having spent a lot of time in HR technology. But now I think it's going to be increasingly important to truly understand how all the technology connects, not just in your own department but in every other department, and how it's impacting job design. It's a very different role for HR leaders over the next few years.

17:03 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
That's interesting. Let's dive into that next. How is the CHRO role changing? What are the changing expectations? I want to get into how the HR team in general is changing as well, but let's start at the top.

17:18 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Starting at the top is always interesting. Like I said, you have to be better at truly understanding the impact of these technologies: what they're capable of, what they could do to your business, and what the risks are across your entire business. There's so much opportunity with new technologies to automate work we do within our own department, and I always believe that if we're going to do work redesign, let's start with us. But you have to embrace this with intellectual curiosity rather than fear. So I think the role is changing in that way. More and more, other teams and other leaders are looking to us, and they should be, for how to even begin to approach this. Org redesign used to be, and we didn't say it this way, but honestly it was, how are we moving the boxes around on the org chart? We're going to shift this function over here, and it's going to be under this leader. Now the CHRO needs to say, “Wait, how is the workflow happening?” Very few workflows stay within a single department. So we have to be able to see across the organization where the opportunities and risks are for us to be more efficient using these technologies, and to level up what all those jobs look like. And then that filters down through the rest of the HR function.

18:42 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Maggie, earlier you were talking about whether AI agents are actually working and driving value, and token maxing. Ultimately, who's responsible for measuring and driving organizational productivity in the world of AI? I imagine it largely falls on the HR team.

19:03 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
It does.

19:03 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
So now you also have to measure whether employees are more effective and whether the agent is doing the job. How do you think about that? What kinds of questions are coming your way?

19:12 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
I had an example of this maybe 18 months ago, where we were looking at putting in a certain technology, and there's the front-end cost of that. We recognized that to justify the ROI, it had to replace a minimum of two people. Fortunately it was an organization that was growing and could grow into those roles. But at the time we weren't 100% sold that it could fully take on the job of two people. We had these discrete tasks. That's why we've got to get into this. I don't think job descriptions are changing. They should be. You really need to get into the actual work people are doing and the work they're going to be doing, assuming you're not eliminating jobs, although some people are. It's our responsibility to understand the real investment in the technology, and whether it's a knowable investment. There was a Wall Street Journal article a day or two ago about how, when you give people LLM access, it's hard for the company to predict what the bill is going to look like. People aren't good at even understanding which model is right for the task. Pick Claude as an example, and I'm a huge Claude fan. I may pick the least complex model because I think it's the cheapest. But if it takes three times as many tokens to do the work as a more complex model, it may end up costing me more. HR needs to train people to think about their jobs with that level of sophistication for us to really see a return on these kinds of investments.

21:02 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
That makes my brain go in so many directions around training and skill development as well. We'll get into it. But on the changing HR team: beyond the CHRO, how are HR organizations changing? Are there roles whose scope is changing more than others?

21:28 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
I think the total rewards team, which is often a team we don't talk about a lot, is changing dramatically, because of the level of analysis we can now do and the flexibility around what the different options are. If I've got a tool that helps me do really good analysis, and particularly a tool that brings me closer to the business leader and the finance department, that matters. I always say the most important relationship for a CHRO in any business is, yes, the CEO. The second most important relationship is with the CFO, because there's so much of what we do, particularly in total rewards, where those two people are walking in lockstep. So the total rewards team is changing because they now have tools that let them do a higher level of analysis, which opens up the opportunity to think more strategically and more about employee experience than they've ever been able to before. That's a team that's getting really exciting. That's one example. I think the HR tech team is another one, but I could go down the whole gamut.

22:46 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
On total rewards, do you see any change in job architecture design, like the ladder design, the leveling structure, ranges first, and then the skills and competencies?

23:04 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
This is the one so far I'm a little disappointed in, because I don't think job architecture is keeping up with what's really happening in the workplace the way it could be. I suspect that's because we all base our job architecture and compensation analysis on historical data, years and years of “this is how best practice is done.” This is all changing so rapidly that I don't know the research is old enough, or that people are thinking about it in a forward-thinking way. Job architecture always feels to me like lagging research, and we're always just tweaking, and tweaking, and tweaking. Right now there's an opportunity for a real revolution in compensation and job architecture. But we need the data to do that, and I don't know that people are doing all the work around that yet.

24:18 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
And if you're a legacy job architecture consulting firm, do you have the incentive to change what you've built over decades? That's the other thing I think about. I see roles changing quite a bit, but people are maybe hacking this by creating new roles. Forward deployed engineer was, in some ways, a solutions consultant. In the SaaS world it was frowned upon to have a large professional services arm, and now it's a favorite topic and suddenly the cool thing to do, and people are seeking those skills and that kind of talent. So it's interesting to see what's becoming in vogue.

25:08 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
It is, and the benchmark data isn't keeping up with it, because it's changing so fast. I'd hate to see us lose out on opportunities around how work should be done and how organizations should be structured because it's happening too quickly. I think over the next couple of years there will be enough brave people on the forefront that the benchmarking numbers from consulting firms with decades of data will begin to move. I'm finding in my conversations that people are asking less about benchmark data and more about what forward-thinking organizations are doing. They're willing to let go a little of the safety of “here are the 10 reports I based this on,” and ask instead, “Here are the companies that are really making use of this moment. What are they doing, and how can I apply that?”

26:08 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
If I play that back, instead of “Here's our eight-level structure” and exactly the 50th or 75th percentile, organizations are also asking, “We want to emulate this business or that business. What are these companies doing, and can we push our structure and pay ranges?” And I imagine skills and pay strategy are a bit more like that too.

26:33 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Exactly. And so much more around skills. Think about how job descriptions and job architecture are all based on tasks rather than skill sets. When we start to think about skills, first of all, you can move people around in lots of different ways. Put skills and outcomes together, and you're thinking about how work is structured and how the organization is structured in different dimensions. I think that's where the appetite is coming from.

27:04 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
That's an astute point too. Skills was maybe a hack to help frame what was needed, but now that jobs are changing so quickly, and agents are potentially doing some of this work too, what you're saying is it's really about outcomes, and working backwards from that. What's the outcome, what are the jobs needed, and what are the tasks that make up each job? It's the economic definition of a job that people are thinking about more.

27:38 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
I think that's what's changing. And think about job satisfaction, by the way. Are you satisfied because you did a bunch of tasks today, or because you had impact and feel like you got a great outcome? What's exciting about shifting to skills and outcomes is that skills get me focused on the things I do best, and outcomes are the impact I'm having. We talked earlier about currency. Feeling like I'm having an impact is a form of currency. I keep thinking about this. I never really watched the show Suits, but I saw a clip where a legal secretary is getting interviewed, and the lawyer asks her, “Are you good at what you do?” She doesn't miss a beat: “I'm great at what I do.” Doesn't everybody want to feel like that at work? “I'm great at what I do. I get to show up every day and be awesome.” When you focus on skills and outcomes, that's that feeling. And then being properly rewarded for that outcome as well. Put that together and you get a level of discretionary effort from people that so outpaces anything else you could possibly get.

28:55 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
That's something I think about a lot as a startup, because we don't have a ton of structure. We need people to be ownership-minded, hungry, and driven, but we also need the organization to feed the positive feedback loop you're describing and have that mindset. I don't think I've cracked the code on it yet, but it's definitely something we think about a lot.

29:22 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
It's hard.

29:24 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
So what do you think happens to performance management and performance evaluation in this world?

29:33 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
We've tried every version of this, right? We've tried the annual review, quarterly reviews, small check-ins. It feels like we've done every flavor, but we were focusing on the mechanism. Some of the interesting things I'm seeing today are people focusing more on the outcome, and on the behaviors. Not only recognizing, “You had this great outcome here,” but “Here's how I saw you show up in that meeting,” and capturing that in real time.

30:17 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
So, continuous.

30:17 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Exactly, making sure it's continuous. I've always said that if you show up to your annual or quarterly review and get surprised by a piece of information, the manager has done something wrong. If there's a disconnect between how an employee perceives their performance and how the manager perceives it, that's almost always on the manager, for lack of communication. There should always have been a continuous set of feedback. And when we think about jobs in terms of outcomes, it's much easier to have those conversations, because that's what you should be giving feedback on: outcomes and behaviors, and how they show up every day.

30:58 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
That's a really good point, the continuous feedback loop, anchored on outcomes and behaviors. Outside of the HR team, and maybe the answer's the same, how should individuals think about being productive in this world? How should people think about their own roles, jobs, and career development as things change?

31:29 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
That's a good question, and it has so many layers. What's not new, but what I think we haven't necessarily done a great job at, is this: you talked about owners before. That's true in startups more than in other places, but I think it's true in large organizations too. Everybody's job has some level of impact on what the company is trying to accomplish. I have an enormous amount of respect for firefighters, healthcare workers, police officers, the people we traditionally call essential workers. So don't take what I'm about to say as anything negative about that term. But I believe every worker is essential to the business, and has to be, if you can draw the line from what you do every day to what the business is trying to accomplish, the customer impact, or the impact on other employees, if that's what your role is. I had a conversation with a facilities team a couple of years ago, and I said, “What you do every day is valuable to what we're trying to accomplish as a business.” They said, “We don't see the direct correlation.” And I said, “Our employees show up every single day, as often as they come into the office, into a building and a space you're responsible for. If the office is falling apart, if the taps in the bathroom don't work, their focus is taken away from what we want them to do. You're creating the environment in which the work happens and in which our customers interact with us.” Thinking about your job that way shifts the business impact. It certainly shifts your job satisfaction, but it also gets you thinking proactively about what you could be doing next. When it comes to how people should think about their careers, I think traditional ladders are out the window. I don't think you should think about your career as a traditional ladder. Think about the skills you're accumulating over time and how you can apply them in lots of different ways. And when you're thinking about your next career opportunity, ask yourself, “Does this scare me a little bit?” Because if it doesn't scare you, there's no opportunity for you to grow. If you feel like you could go in and slam dunk it tomorrow, where's the new opportunity in that? It should scare you a little bit. And it should have plenty of elements that let you show up every day and work at your highest level. Think about your career that way. What are the opportunities out there that scare me a little, but also let me work at my highest function?

34:23 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Especially in the world of AI, if AI can do a lot of the spreadsheet work and the data work, what people value most is your ability to think, to problem solve, and to manage human relationships. So pushing yourself to learn and grow continuously is much more important now than it ever was.

34:46 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Absolutely. And that judgment you mentioned. There's judgment, and then there's risk-taking. AI doesn't take risk for you. When somebody comes to me after using AI to do an analysis, what I want to hear is, “This is what I think it's telling us. Here's where the risk and reward is. Here's where I think we could take a big bet.” That's where they're adding the most value. But you need a good amount of judgment and a lot of courage to do that. That critical thinking, which is so easy to lose and surrender to AI, is going to become increasingly important.

35:30 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Do you think there will be more specialist roles or more generalist roles in the world of AI, or is it hard to predict?

35:42 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
It's hard to predict. Ooh, that's a good one. I was going to say something, and I'm going to change what I was going to say. I think there will continue to be specialist roles, but people get to dabble in other specialties with AI. I could go into AI and create a financial model. By no means would you ask me to create a financial model, right? I've got a whole list of people I go to for that. But now I can dabble in it a little, then go to that person and say, “Poke holes in this,” and have a more meaningful conversation with them than if I just asked them to produce something for me. I've jokingly said over the years that HR is the one function everybody else thinks they can do just as well as the HR department. Now everybody will be in a position to do portions of other jobs, or at least get some insight into them using AI, where they used to rely on other people in their network. So I think we'll continue to have specialists, but specialists who can dabble a little, just enough to be interesting and maybe a little dangerous.

36:54 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
So you need a surface area where you have expertise, but the general skill set is important too.

37:06 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Yes. And truly understanding the whole business. I think that's going to be more important than ever. You used to be able to get away with being a functional expert without totally getting what your company did. It's going to be more and more important to really understand what your company does and how the business functions, in a way that's invested.

37:23 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
The business KPIs, the mission, all of those things. Tying back to that is important even as a junior IC now.

37:30 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
More important than ever before.

37:33 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Let me ask you a different question. You're in the consulting and advisory business now. Sometimes organizations do want to change and evolve, but change management is a very human thing, and it's difficult. I don't think AI makes it easier. It probably makes it harder, and as you were hinting, tools don't necessarily make things easier. So how do you drive that change and the behavior you want?

38:04 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
You have to start with a level of trust, and if there's anything going on right now, it's a lack of trust at times between people and their organizations. You used to hear all the time that people don't leave companies, they leave managers, because the main trust relationship you had was with the person you reported to. I think that's actually changing. There's now a triad. There's you and your manager, but there's also the trust you have with the company, which is a little weird, like trust with a logo. A company doesn't make decisions. People make decisions. A company doesn't decide what my compensation is. People do. So that's changing the way people think, in ways I find interesting and surprising, and it's changing change management. You've got to start with that level of trust, which requires transparency, which requires better communication than ever. People have never been good at change management: what's in it for me, what's the future going to look like, how does this impact me. You still have to be able to do all of that, because without it you can't get innovation and you won't get buy-in. Companies are spending more time, but not enough yet, on that piece. They're changing expectations without going through the process of what it all means.

39:35 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
As an employer, you also need to create space for transparency, communication, and experimentation. If your job is changing, you need to be able to take risks and experiment, and not be punished for it.

39:50 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
And one of the things we sometimes miss in change management is celebrating failure. You don't get innovation if people are afraid to fail. You just don't. If I'm afraid I'll fail and get punished for failing, then I'm going to stay in my lane and do exactly what I know works every single time. I have a friend who was trying to implement some new marketing technology on a team, and he called me and said, “They're doing workarounds. We implemented the technology, and the team is going back to the way they used to do things, so now they're doing double work.” When he got into it, he found out they were afraid they were going to fail. They knew the old way worked, even if it was less efficient, and they were willing to accept less efficient so they didn't fail. I was part of a change management project where we implemented what we called Failure Fridays, where we celebrated stuff that went wrong. “Haris did this thing. It didn't turn out the way he thought it would, but here's what he learned. Way to go for taking that risk, because as a company we now know this set of data. Way to go, Haris, and this is what we're changing next time.” You celebrate the moment where it didn't go as expected, but we're going to keep trying, keep innovating, and get this right. That opens people up to a very different way of approaching their jobs.

41:24 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
I love that. Maybe that's a good segue to our last section for today. Let's do a rapid fire. You ready?

41:34 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
I'll try.

41:36 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Ooh, hot one. One job that you think will not exist in two years.

41:46 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
I think jobs titled AI enablement will not exist in two years. Either it's infiltrated the business and it's everybody's job, or people will decide that kind of job isn't getting them what they need.

42:00 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
And I think driving that change is everyone's role, rather than a specialist's.

42:08 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Absolutely.

42:08 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
What's one new role you think becomes prevalent or important in the next two years?

42:17 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Some form of governance or security around agents. Oversight. I hate when people think about HR as the compliance team, but there's something around whether data is secure, whether agents are doing what they're supposed to be doing, and making sure we're all held accountable. If I've got an agent working for me, what that agent does is my responsibility. So some role that helps the company think about that.

42:46 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
That makes a ton of sense. Next, on job architecture: what's a sign that your job architecture and pay strategy are already out of date?

43:01 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
If you haven't updated it in the past year, I guarantee you it's out of date. The frequency with which we do these things is going to increase.

43:12 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
That's funny. And for our CHROs out there, what's a question the CHRO or HR team should ask before approving a new job, a new job description, or a new hire?

43:26 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
They should ask, “When was the last time we actually looked at what this job is supposed to be doing?” If you're taking the job description from a year ago and reapplying it without question, you're not really thinking about how work is getting done.

43:41 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Well said. To close this off, I wrote down a lot of nuggets here, and I'm sure we'll turn them into quotes and snippets to share. One thing you talked about is that it's not about job titles, it's much more about outcomes, and the skills and work that get you there. You also talked about having a mindset of learning, evolving, and retraining yourself, which I think is a key takeaway for everyone. Another interesting point was that careers are not a ladder. People have been talking about career lattices, and that's more true now than ever. A linear career isn't how you get where you want to be, and learning different things is going to empower you to be the knowledge worker of the future. And then celebrating failure, Failure Fridays. I wrote down a lot of notes, but do you have one piece of advice or one main takeaway you want people to go home with after this conversation?

44:58 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
I do. I want people to remember that a company can't light a fire in your belly. It can stoke a fire. It can give you opportunity. But as an individual, start with what lights you up. The wonderful thing about this moment is that people have the opportunity to ask, “What is the work where I feel I'm contributing at my highest value, and how do I design my job, or look at my job, and find the opportunity to spend most of my time doing that?” And take out the things that don't. I talk about my magic wand conversation: if I could wave a magic wand and take one thing off your desk today, something that has to get done but where you don't add the highest level of value, figure out a way to use this moment to automate it or use AI to do it. That way you increase the percentage of things you do when you get up in the morning where you're that woman from Suits: “I'm great at this.”

46:00 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
There we go. I need to re-watch Suits. On that note, Maggie, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights and learnings. There's a lot for people to take away as they go into 2027 planning and think about what their organizations and workforce will look like.

46:24 Maggie Ruvoldt, ChangeBridge People Solutions
Thanks for having me. I always have a lot of fun when we get together.

46:27 Haris Ikram, CandorIQ
Absolutely. Bye, everyone.