Welcome to People Nerd —a newsletter about building smarter, saner people systems without resorting to corporate nonsense, vibes-based decision-making, or reinventing onboarding for the 47th time.

I’m Raluca Ghete. I’ve spent 15+ years designing HR strategy, compensation frameworks, and culture systems for startups, scale-ups, and global teams across SaaS, fintech, and tech-enabled businesses.

This space is for:

• Founders who are scaling fast and wondering why people stuff suddenly feels… fragile

• People/HR/Talent pros trying to quietly (or loudly) upgrade how their org works

• ICs turned unofficial culture carriers

• Anyone who’s ever whispered “there has to be a better way to do this”

Here, I write about:

• What systems thinking looks like inside a growing org

• Why your compensation model might be slowly eroding trust

• How to actually get people to use your performance process

• When to automate, when to standardize, and when to leave it weird (on purpose)

• How AI can support HR—without turning it into HRGPT™

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