Does Revenue-Per-Employee Matter? & Random Stuff - William Tincup - #185

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Check out this episode of the #1 people analytics podcast with special guest, William Tincup, Editor, Analyst, Advisor, Host at Wrkdefined!

In this wide-ranging, unfiltered, and often provocative conversation, host Cole Napper sits down with one of the most recognizable and influential voices in the HR technology community for a discussion that refuses to stay inside the usual polite boundaries. William lays out why he believes a genuine car crash is approaching as Silicon Valley and Wall Street fall deeply in love with the revenue-per-employee ratio, celebrating companies that deliver growth with dramatically fewer human heads even while the true cost of the AI tools powering that efficiency remains largely invisible on the balance sheet. They examine how the actual work being performed, the humans performing it, and the rapidly emerging class of AI agents and agentic systems all reshape that metric and force a fundamental reset in people analytics, workforce planning, talent intelligence, and behavioral science. The pair dig into the practical consequences: who gets promoted and paid more when one analyst finishes the same deliverable in five hours with Claude and ChatGPT while another still needs the full forty, how pay equity conversations must evolve, and why location-based compensation is inherently biased. Recruiters come under sharp scrutiny next. William is characteristically blunt that most still do not trust their own data or analytics because, at core, they are salespeople who would rather post a new requisition on LinkedIn or Indeed than mine the three million candidates already living inside the ATS. He explains why generative AI has not magically repaired that distrust and what real incentive redesign would look like if organizations actually wanted recruiters living inside the systems they already own rather than treating the ATS as pure compliance theater. Vendors receive equally direct counsel: stop selling AI into HR by endlessly explaining the how, the tokens, and the architecture; start selling clear outcomes to IT and the buyers who care about results rather than propeller-hat technical details. The conversation ranges further into the leadership void created by vanishing entry-level jobs, the competitive advantage that silent high-per