Podcast: A Guide Through HR Compliance with Jocelyn King of VirgilHR

In Season 2, Episode 1 of Testing, Testing 1-2-3 by TestGenius, hosts Jenny Arnez and Mike Callen talk with Jocelyn King, CEO and founder of VirgilHR, about how growing companies can stay compliant across thousands of overlapping state and local employment laws. King explains why she named her company after Dante's guide Virgil, the compliance mistakes she sees most often, and how VirgilHR's attorney-built chatbot helps HR teams make confident, defensible decisions — including a look at where the platform is headed next with agentic AI.

Why is it called VirgilHR?

King, a former philosophy major who wrote her college thesis on Dante's Divine Comedy, named the company after Virgil — the poet who guides Dante through Hell, Purgatory, and toward Heaven in the poem. She saw a parallel: employment and labor law compliance can feel "hellacious" for HR professionals, so VirgilHR set out to be that same kind of guide. Asked which circle of that compliance "hell" was toughest in her own career, King pointed to employee relations investigations — work she called emotionally draining enough to push her toward starting her own business.

How did VirgilHR get started?

King spent her career in HR at high-growth tech companies. About 10–12 years before founding VirgilHR, she took on her first multi-state workforce and found it nearly impossible to track every applicable federal, state, county, and city law — at one point maintaining a manual spreadsheet updated from SHRM legal-alert emails. Years later, while scaling a company's North American team from a single hire to roughly 1,000 employees across the U.S. and Canada in under a year, the same problem resurfaced at a much larger scale.  That experience led her to start VirgilHR nearly five years ago, building the first chatbot prototype with an offshore engineering team around an early vision for generative AI — before "gen AI" was a mainstream term.

What are the most common HR compliance mistakes?

According to King, HR teams most often run into trouble by:

• Assuming federal law is the whole picture — many employers build policies around federal minimums without realizing a state or city may impose stricter rules on leave, pay, or scheduling
• Relying on outdated job descriptions that no longer reflect actual essential functions, creating downstream issues with hiring, accommodations, and classification
• Misclassifying workers — a growing risk as companies lean on freelancers, consultants, gig workers, and remote employees across multiple states
• Applying policies inconsistently rather than acting with bad intent — King notes that most companies that get sued didn't set out to break the law; a manager granting one exception, a recruiter using different hiring criteria, or a policy applied differently across locations is often the real root cause

How does VirgilHR track changing employment laws?

VirgilHR monitors legal changes through large legal databases and direct outreach —  the team often calls state offices to request clarification when a new law is released. King says it's a burdensome process, but VirgilHR has built a scalable way of doing it, tracking employment law down to the city level across roughly 8,000 localities in the U.S.

Who is VirgilHR built for?

King says the company's industry focus is emerging organically over time, and today includes:

• Healthcare
• Construction
• Manufacturing
• Staffing
• Professional services

Some of these (healthcare, construction, manufacturing) sit in higher-risk categories; others, like professional services, may carry less inherent risk but often have large remote workforces spread across many states, creating their own multi-state complexity.

What does the VirgilHR platform actually do?

The conversation covered several features in depth:

• A compliance chatbot with employee-specific workflows. Rather than giving a generic answer the way a general AI tool might, VirgilHR's bot asks follow-up questions tied to the specific employee and jurisdiction. For example, on a California termination question, it walks the user through the exact steps and forms required for that employee's county. For an FMLA question, it asks about company size, number of employees within a 75-mile radius, and hours worked — the actual eligibility factors — rather than assuming FMLA applies.
• HRIS integration. VirgilHR already has the technical capability to pull details directly from a company's HR information system — King described a proof-of-concept built about four years ago that could identify what a user was looking at (like a specific leave request) and automatically surface an employee's start date, tenure, and location without the HR user having to enter that information manually.
• Attorney-built content with live citations. All guidance is developed and maintained by VirgilHR's in-house employment and labor attorneys, and answers link directly back to the source legislation. The team also monitors those links on the back end and fixes any that break or expire.
• AI job description builder, plus guidance on ADA accommodations — including walking users through the interactive process, relevant forms, and any additional state or local accommodation requirements.
• Legal team access. Beyond the chatbot, customers can talk to a VirgilHR attorney directly — something King says has been especially valuable as companies navigate reduced federal EEO enforcement, since state and local anti-discrimination laws, and Title VII, still apply regardless.
• Employee handbook builder and multistate comparison tool, supporting what King calls the platform's focus on standardization and simplification: turning dense legislation into plain-language guidance, while helping HR teams apply policies consistently across locations — something that matters directly in litigation, since documented, consistent practices are a company's best defense.

King is clear that VirgilHR stays in an advisory lane: the platform offers general, neutral guidance rather than legal advice, and doesn't tell customers what their risk tolerance should be — only what the options and trade-offs are.

What's next for VirgilHR?

King says the near-term strategic focus is making the platform more agentic — moving compliance from reactive to proactive, so the system can flag a relevant law or required action before the user even knows to ask about it, rather than waiting for someone to pose the right question.

AI as an assistant, not a replacement

King frames VirgilHR's approach to AI as augmenting HR professionals, not replacing them. The goal, she says, is to give HR practitioners confidence and speed — pulling accurate, attorney-vetted information to the surface quickly — without eliminating the need for compliance specialists or human judgment.

Advice for people entering HR

Asked what she'd tell someone starting an HR career, King said: don't just learn how to administer HR — learn the "why" behind the rules and the business itself. The best HR professionals, she said, understand both the law and the technology, and can translate that into practical decisions that protect the business and its people. She also cautioned against the "we've always done it this way" mindset.

Watch, read, or listen to the full episode

• Watch: Episode video on YouTube
• Read: Full transcript
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Learn more: VirgilHR | TestGenius

Notice: This podcast is a presentation of Biddle Consulting Group, Inc., the publishers of TestGenius. The topics covered in this podcast are sometimes controversial and pertain to an often-changing landscape. The opinions expressed of the hosts and guests are their own and may not align with those of the organization for which they work. None of the conversation or resources shared on this podcast should be construed to be legal advice. As a best practice, if you have concerns over these issues or opinions expressed, you should explore them with an attorney or other expert.