Ex-Workday CTO Joe Korngiebel takes the reins as Eightfold CEO – what his mandate to scale means for HR buyers.

After a decade of building talent intelligence platform Eightfold, Co-Founder Ashutosh Garg is stepping down as CEO.

He’s handing over to Joe Korngiebel, an HR technology veteran with almost 30 years of experience building enterprise HR software at PeopleSoft, Workday and, most recently, Dayforce.

Korngiebel was CTO at Workday between 2017 and 2020, and Chief Strategy, Product & Technology Officer at Dayforce for the past six years.

Garg will continue to serve on Eightfold’s board, transitioning into the role of chairman.

Speaking to UNLEASH about his appointment, Korngiebel is clear about the opportunity: “I’ve been involved in the cloud transformation. I’ve been involved in the mobile transformation. This transformation is bigger than those combined.”

Eightfold and its “unique position in the market” are built for this moment, in Korngiebel’s view.

The company has become a “standard intelligence layer” on top of platforms like Workday and Dayforce – the systems of record where Korngiebel spent his career.

“It is now less about the systems of record and more about the system of intelligence,” he says.

However, that work “doesn’t matter if you don’t have customers getting value out of it.”

What drew Korngiebel to Eightfold is that the talent intelligence company has “large enterprise customers that are happy and are driving value through AI.”

In the CEO seat, Korngiebel’s top priority is to lead the next chapter of growth and innovation for Eightfold; the plan is to do that not just for, but with, customers.

Korngiebel sees his job as complementing the “singular vision and voice” Garg has brought to Eightfold with his own track record of scaling companies.

He joined Workday as an early employee in 2006 and watched it grow into a publicly traded industry leader, then helped turn Dayforce from a payroll and workforce management provider into a global HCM player.

From CTO to CEO: Why focus equals success

Eightfold is Korngiebel’s first CEO role – he tells UNLEASH the biggest challenge in front of him is the pace of the market: “The speed at which everything needs to happen today,” from sales to implementation to how product gets built.

Many buyers will be tempted to wait, so Eightfold has to show customers “why now”. That means getting “the whole company to really row together” at speed.

Before making big calls, though, Korngiebel plans to listen. “You should listen twice as much as you talk,” he says.

That means hearing from Eightfold employees, customers and partners – Korngiebel wants to figure out how Eightfold can make “one plus one be much more than two” for its customers.

“I believe in customer-driven innovation,” he adds. The aim of listening is not to boil the ocean, but to figure out where to focus Eightfold’s investment as it scales: “Focus equals success right now.”

For Korngiebel, that focus lands on the people side of the equation. With agents being thrown at HR leaders from every direction, the question is who will drive them.

“AI doesn’t work without great people,” he says – the priority is “how we can help customers in this time of so much change.”“AI doesn’t work without great people,” he says – the priority is “how we can help customers in this time of so much change.”

Speed you can trust: Korngiebel’s promise to buyers

Korngiebel has spent his career partnering with large enterprises, and he says what HR buyers trust comes down to three things: fairness, security and transparency.

On fairness, that means “making sure we look at bias before we even start” and not building AI as a bolt on.

“You’re seeing a lot of acquisitions happen in this space;” stitching acquired tools together, he argues, makes it hard to offer buyers one central platform they can trust.

On transparency, Eightfold has “humans on the loop, not just in the loop” – something he says he did “a lot of due diligence on” before taking the CEO role.

What can buyers expect from Eightfold under Korngiebel over the next six months? Korngiebel tells UNLEASH that customers can continue to trust Eightfold to “keep up with the pace at which things are moving,” while doing it in a “fair, secure and transparent” way.

“That’s what this brand has been [built on] before I ever sat [in this] chair, and that’s what I’ll continue to move forward,” concludes Korngiebel.