Jake Vassello

Why this site exists

There is a real gap between what IO psychology has figured out about how people work and what most managers and HR professionals actually know about it. The research is often locked behind academic paywalls, written in language that does not translate easily into Monday morning decisions, or summarized so loosely that the practical implications get lost.

This site is an attempt to close that gap. The pieces here are written for practitioners — people responsible for hiring, developing, managing, and retaining other people — who want to do that work with more rigor and less guesswork.

Background

I have spent the last decade working in talent, learning, and organizational development across industries. Most recently, I have been leading talent, training, and engagement at Refuel Operating Company, where I built the 2025 People & Talent Roadmap across 260+ locations — covering performance management, onboarding, succession planning, and engagement.

Before that, I spent nearly three years at Microsoft (Activision Publishing) as a Talent Operations Lead, building recruiting infrastructure for a 150+ person team and developing interview and onboarding programs that reached thousands of employees. Earlier in my career, I worked as an Organizational Development consultant and, before that, as a Training Manager at Sherwin-Williams.

My graduate work at CUNY focused on the relationship between job satisfaction and employee performance — and the gap between what the data actually showed and what conventional wisdom assumed is part of what made me want to keep writing about this stuff.

What I write about

The topics on this site map to the areas I find most useful and most underserved: organizational commitment and retention, goal-setting that actually reflects how people develop, performance management, recruiting and selection, group dynamics, leadership, and culture. The thread connecting all of it is IO psychology — the science of how people behave at work — applied to decisions that real managers and HR professionals have to make.

Everything is written to be usable. If you finish something here and do not have a clearer sense of what to do differently, I have not done my job.