Happy Saturday! Welcome to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story. Get a group of founders together and sooner or later, they start talking about the joys and hassles of managing people. Everyone, it seems, has a truly wild story to tell about an employee. This helps to explain the rise of HR Besties, the widely popular podcast hosted by HR professionals Jaime Jackson, Ashley Herd, and Leigh Henderson. What started as memes, TikToks, and candid workplace commentary has evolved into one of the biggest HR podcasts. 

As Inc.’s Kayla Webster reports, the trio built their audience by openly discussing the realities of toxic leadership, workplace dysfunction, discrimination cases, and the contradictions inside corporate culture. What makes it so compelling isn't just the controversy; it's the business model behind it. Rather than relying solely on podcast advertising revenue, the hosts used content as a trust-building engine, expanding into training, consulting, social media influence, books, and more. 

In this piece, you’ll see:

How the hosts of the hit podcast ‘HR Besties’ make fun of bad leadership, win devoted fans, and drive revenue for their individual companies.

BY KAYLA WEBSTER, STAFF EDITOR

The most powerful trade group in human resources tried to silence a podcast. It didn’t work. HR Besties—Spotify’s top-ranked HR show—built its audience by telling the truth about what actually happens inside corporate America when employees complain, discrimination cases go to court, and “best practices” meet ugly reality. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the century-old institution for HR professionals, asked the court for a gag order to stop it. It lost—and the Besties kept talking.

A willingness to be honest, no matter the professional cost, is ultimately what HR Besties is selling. It’s also a lesson for anyone who wants to follow a similar path. Start creating where the stakes are low: on social media, in newsletters, in small experiments. Test the material before you build the business around it. Don’t quit your day job because an idea feels exciting; quit it when the idea pays more than your job. Treat the podcast not as the revenue model, but as the engine that powers everything else: the books, the training platforms, the speaking gigs, the brand deals that actually move the needle.

That the show has attracted this kind of institutional attention speaks to how seriously it’s been taken and how much ground it has covered in the short time it’s been on air. Co-hosts Jamie Jackson, Ashley Herd, and Leigh Henderson have worked inside the very systems they now critique: corporate HR, employment law, and executive leadership. Together, they’ve turned their professional war stories into a fast-growing social media business and one of the most-listened-to HR podcasts in the country. Individually, each of them runs a separate company that predates HR Besties and, in most cases, generates more revenue.

For entrepreneurs and aspiring podcasters, their story reads like a playbook for building a brand by telling the truth about a broken system—and monetizing the fallout. But it’s also a story about what that kind of honesty costs, professionally and personally, in an industry that has long preferred to keep its contradictions quiet.

“We really wanted to create a space where we could have authentic, real, genuine conversation,” Henderson says. “People think of HR as stiff, sterile, the enemy. We wanted real talk about work.”

Herd spent years as an employment lawyer, winning cases that didn’t feel like wins. She’d argue well, prevail, and drive home with the uncomfortable sense that nothing had actually been fixed—the manager involved would never understand what they’d done wrong, the lesson available in the situation would go unlearned, and sooner or later another lawsuit would follow.

“I’d win cases, and it didn’t feel good,” she says. “It might not have been illegal, but it wasn’t right. There were lessons nobody was learning.”

That gap between what employment law punishes after the fact and what it fails to prevent became the foundation for Manager Method, the leadership training business she built while still working corporate roles, including running HR for McKinsey’s North American operations. The company now offers scalable training, an AI-powered coaching tool, and an eponymous book. She’s currently at work on a second book about “career quilts.”

Henderson didn’t choose her departure from corporate. In June 2021, she received a phone call informing her she was being let go. The call lasted fewer than five minutes. The shock of it sat with her in the days that followed, and she decided to do something with the feeling before it dissipated. She launched an account called HR Manifesto on TikTok, treating it as a place, she says, to test the book every HR person says they’re going to write.

A few posts in—humorous takes on HR exit interviews—she had 10,000 followers. On day two, a stranger sent her a direct message: “this really helped me.” That, she says, was all she needed. She now has just under two million followers across platforms, holds brand-partnership roles with companies including Workday and UKG, and has a book forthcoming from HarperCollins in January 2027. The business is on track for a seven-figure year.

Jackson built her following at night, in the margins of a job that was consuming her. It was the height of Covid-19, and she was running HR at a nonprofit clinic, responsible for keeping people safe when nobody was sure what safe required. To decompress, she made memes—dry, deadpan jokes that only land if you’ve ever sat through a mandatory training or processed a termination in a beige conference room. Two friends told her to post them. “Who the fuck would laugh at my shit?” she asked. As it turns out, quite a lot of people.

Humorous Resources grew into a following in the millions. Drew Barrymore shared her posts. Kathy Hilton shared her posts. What Do You Meme?, Red Robin, Dunkin’, DoorDash, and Clarins all signed on as brand partners. A single meme for a campaign can fetch around $500; retainer contracts with HR technology companies have run as high as $25,000. She’s now a full-time content creator.

All three say they started creating content in the first place because HR can be a profoundly lonely job. These professionals are squeezed from two directions at once—the C-suite above them and the workers below—and rarely seen clearly by either. “HR is a very thankless job,” Jackson says. “People don’t know that you’ve been fighting for everyone to have a raise, or told the CEO a five-dollar Walmart gift card for Christmas is not good. They don’t see the background work we’re trying to do.” Henderson, who spent years coaching executives and supporting CEOs before leaving corporate, puts it more pointedly: “I was doing all the right things and still watching toxic behavior get rewarded. I call myself a toxic workplace survivor for a reason.”

To cope, each of them started making things: Memes, TikToks, legal breakdowns. They found one another through social media; Henderson launched her TikTok account after being fired, and that’s where Herd found her. Jackson’s meme page started boosting Henderson’s Instagram posts, sending followers her way. Listeners to the podcast would probably assume they’ve been friends for years. In fact, they only met in person for the first time over Memorial Day weekend in 2023, recording eight episodes in Atlanta—including one in a strip-mall pop-up church—and HR Besties was born.

The show drives six‑figure revenue, split three ways, through sponsored conference sessions and select brand partnerships. It’s not, like many other competitors, primarily an ad-supported podcast in the traditional sense. “Podcast ad revenue on its own is an expensive hobby,” Jackson says. “It’s like pennies on the dollar. Sometimes you’d have 10 ads to do, and it just wasn’t worth the time or the disruption for listeners.”

The hosts are also surprisingly candid about another issue that keeps them from lucrative partnerships: They say brands routinely discriminate against female creators, and their agents confirm that some clients specifically request male podcasters because they assume men are the decision-makers in organizations.

It was in that spirit—saying out loud what the industry prefers not to say—that the show became a target. When SHRM became the subject of a major discrimination case in Colorado, it piqued Herd’s interest, especially given the organization’s power to keep many in the industry silent. So she put on her employment lawyer hat, ordered the trial transcripts, thousands of pages at 10 cents apiece, and read through them line by line, spending thousands of dollars of her own money to access public records she believed contained lessons HR leaders needed to hear. 

“What happens at SHRM is what happens in workplaces across America,” she says. “You have an organization charging a lot of money to tell people what to do—and then not doing it themselves. When a jury sees that, in a case about discrimination, it’s lightning in a bottle for the plaintiff.”

In the case in question, SHRM v. Mohamed, a Colorado jury awarded former instructional designer Rehab Mohamed $11.5 million—including $10 million in punitive damages—after finding she was terminated in retaliation for reporting discrimination by her White supervisor. The 2025 verdict exposed significant failures in SHRM’s internal investigation, which was conducted by an inexperienced employee who was simultaneously involved in the termination. 

On the podcast, the three hosts walked listeners through what the filings and verdict meant for HR professionals and everyday employees. They didn’t soften their conclusions. One moment from the case that the Besties found particularly egregious: A White female colleague testified that she had witnessed the manager discriminate against Mohamed, who is Black. SHRM’s legal counsel reportedly responded that the testifying co-worker simply “wanted to be a White savior.”

“I think SHRM is a wonderful case study on the impact and importance of leadership,” Herd says. “It makes it difficult being in this field when the leading HR association voice perhaps doesn’t align with your own values.” 

Henderson frames the episode as a textbook example of how not to handle criticism. “It’s like at work when people can’t take feedback or admit they’ve done wrong,” she says. “The world needs a lot more people saying, I did wrong, and this is what we learned.”

SHRM’s legal team responded by asking a judge for a gag order against what their filing described as a “troubling HR podcast” commenting on the case—a clear reference to HR Besties, though the show was not named. The judge denied the request. 

“Honestly, I loved it,” Jackson says. “We must be doing something right if they’re listening and they’re scared.” The hosts reclaimed the label within days. “Troubling” went on T-shirts. It became a catchphrase at conference sessions and podcast tapings. (SHRM declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing legal proceedings.)

Kristen Wann, an HR business partner at Monarch Investment and Management Group in St. Louis and a regular listener, says the coverage resonated precisely because the hosts didn’t hedge their remarks. “A lot of HR professionals are struggling with SHRM’s national attention and the information that has come out,” she says. “They could have glossed over the topic to stay neutral and on SHRM’s good side, especially for business opportunities. But they’re honest and discuss the facts, and I truly appreciate that.”

For now, the Besties are doing what they’ve always done: making things, telling the truth, and seeing what follows. Henderson’s book comes out in January. Herd is deep in her second. Jackson’s videos are landing her on the feeds of celebrities and the desks of brand managers. And together, the three of them are still recording—still saying out loud what the industry prefers to keep quiet, still landing in inboxes, and DMs, and maybe even beige conference rooms where someone, somewhere, needed to hear it. SHRM has a century-long head start. The Besties are just getting started. And no gag order is going to slow them down.

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