Why Varex Imaging stopped treating HR as separate silos

Summary Jay Hart, Global Head of Talent Management at Varex Imaging, joins host Kelsey Willock Jones on Beyond the Paycheck to make a case most HR leaders feel but rarely name: employees never experience HR the way HR is organized. Talent acquisition owns one piece, learning and development another, HR business partners a third, total rewards a fourth, and the employee only ever experiences one employment deal. He walks through a call center where turnover was high and the obvious answer was to pay more aggressively. The more his team listened, the clearer it became that people were not leaving for money, they were leaving because they could not see their careers moving. The fix pulled mentorship, formal education, spot bonuses and relocation into a single nine month cohort program: nobody enrolled left, and employees started asking how to get into the next one. He also tells the one that did not work, an expensive retention package for a team of data scientists who took the money and left anyway, because what they actually wanted was development, flexibility and air cover from leadership. Built for CHROs, total rewards teams and HR leaders who suspect their best programs are reaching employees in pieces.Chapters 00:00 Intro 00:42 Meet Jay Hart and Varex Imaging 01:53 A 2,500 person global workforce 02:31 Why HR should be industry agnostic 03:49 The cost of fragmented HR programs 06:08 Listening, trust and the steward of culture 08:12 The call center problem pay could not fix 11:04 Making the case without a clear ROI 13:37 The retention package that failed 15:53 Staying current as an HR leader 17:53 What most HR leaders are not ready for 19:39 Where to connect with JayTakeaways - Employees experience one employment deal, not four HR functions, so judge every program by what it adds up to rather than by which team owns it. - Test the pay hypothesis before funding it. Listening turned a call center turnover problem into a career visibility problem that no market adjustment would have solved. - Pull the levers together. A nine month cohort that combined mentorship, education, spot bonuses and relocation retained everyone enrolled and created a waiting list for the next one. - Retention money does not hold people who are leaving for development, flexibility or air cover, because the companies recruiting them will simply pay out whatever you tie them with. - The manager is the longest lever in the HR toolbox, because employees rarely walk into HR with a problem early enough for HR to fix it.Connect with the Guest Jay Hart LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaydhart Company Website: https://www.vareximaging.comSponsor Aura Finance helps you simplify compensation and benefits planning by bringing everything into one streamlined platform. No more juggling spreadsheets, disconnected tools, or manual calculations. Aura gives you a single place to design, compare, and communicate total rewards packages with confidence.With AI-powered insights, it takes the guesswork and busywork out of comp decisions, helps you spot pay equity gaps early, and makes it easy to model scenarios that keep your teams engaged and your budgets on track.See a demo at https://www.aurafinance.com/ (00:00) - Intro (00:42) - Meet Jay Hart and Varex Imaging (01:53) - A 2,500 person global workforce (02:31) - Why HR should be industry agnostic (03:49) - The cost of fragmented HR programs (06:08) - Listening, trust and the steward of culture (08:12) - The call center problem pay could not fix (11:03) - Making the case without a clear ROI (13:37) - The retention package that failed (15:53) - Staying current as an HR leader (17:53) - What most HR leaders are not ready for (19:38) - Where to connect with Jay