Tom Kenaley
By Tom Kenaley, President & Senior Partner, KORE1 CIO interview questions in 2026 should test budget defense, AI value realization, board communication, and one real incident the candidate owned. Vision questions are theater. Every serious finalist has rehearsed that answer twice this month. The published lists all ask some version of the same five things. … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 Hiring an automation engineer starts with deciding who the seat reports to, because that one choice sets the platform experience, the pay band, and which candidates ever apply. Plant floor, engineering group, or IT. Three genuinely different jobs wear the title, and every published salary figure blends … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President and Senior Partner, KORE1 An engineering org chart runs on six staffing ratios, and only one of them has real research behind it. That one is span of control, and it lands near six engineers per manager. Everything else on the chart is convention borrowed from a company that looked nothing … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President & Senior Partner, KORE1 Agile coaches in the United States earn $96,500 to $198,500 in 2026, and scope sets the band far more than years of experience do. Team-level coaches cluster near $110,000. Enterprise transformation coaches clear $200,000. The title by itself tells you almost nothing about the number you should … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Co-Founder and President, KORE1 A contractor onboarding checklist works backward from the start date: access requested at T-10, equipment decided at T-7, scope document signed at T-3, and a named internal owner assigned before anyone says day one. Run it in that order and the first week produces work instead of tickets. … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President & Senior Partner, KORE1 Integration engineer interview questions in 2026 should test contract reading, duplicate delivery, schema drift, credential expiry, and partial batch recovery, not definitions of REST, SOAP, or middleware that any candidate can recite. The published question lists are written for the person being interviewed. Not your job. Yours … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 DevOps and SRE differ less in skills than in authority, because a DevOps engineer is measured on how fast code ships while a site reliability engineer is measured on whether it stays up and can stop releases. Same skills, mostly. Different mandate entirely. The two toolchains overlap … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 An EDI analyst job description should name your ERP, your translator platform, the X12 or EDIFACT version your partners require, and the trading partners the hire inherits. Base bands run $60,000 to $175,000 in 2026, and where you land in that spread is decided by scope, not … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 Vetting a staffing agency comes down to four things a firm either can or cannot produce on request, a named recruiter, a 12-month retention rate, worker classification paperwork, and a written conversion fee schedule. Everything a sales team brings to the first meeting is optional. Those four … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, President & Senior Partner, KORE1 Workday HCM consultant interview questions in 2026 should test staffing-model judgment, effective-dated data corrections, security-group reasoning, and one real open-enrollment or payroll failure, not module definitions any candidate can recite. The training-site question banks all test recall. Recall is the cheapest part of this hire. What you … Read more
