About The Skeptical Guy

JOHN HOLLON (aka The Skeptical Guy) is an award-winning journalist and a nationally recognized expert on leadership, talent management, human resources, and smart workforce practices.

For 6 years he served as Vice President for Editorial at ERE Media, where he founded the popular HR and talent management website TLNT. Before that, John was Editor-in-Chief of Workforce Management magazine, the nation’s oldest HR and talent management publication, and he has also worked as Editor at RecruitingDaily.com as well (and you can read about that here).

During his 30-year career, he also held editing positions at the late, great Los Angeles Herald Examiner and California’s Orange County Register. John was also the top editor for Gannett at 2 statewide newspapers — the Great Falls Tribune in Montana and The Honolulu Advertiser in Hawaii.

The Skeptical Guy with grandkids Hazel and Teddy Hollon

During his time at the Orange County Register, John served as the News Editor on the team that won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for photographic coverage of the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. During his time in Montana, he was honored by the Gannett as one of the company’s Top 10 editors when the Great Falls Tribune was recognized as the company’s Most Improved Newspaper.

John has deep experience in magazine and online publishing, having been a Group Editor and Editorial Director at Fancy Publications in Irvine, California, Vice President for Editorial (and employee No. 7) at Pets.com in San Francisco during the dotcom boom, and Editor of the San Diego Business Journal. At Fancy Publications he also served for a year as Managing Director/Publisher of the Thoroughbred Times, a thoroughbred horse racing weekly based in Lexington, Kentucky.

In addition to his work as an editor and media executive, John has also worked for 13 years as an adjunct professor in the College of Communications at California State University, Fullerton where he taught opinion writing, magazine management, and media ethics through the Fall of 2019.

Recently, John worked as managing editor for New Zealand-based Fuel50, an HR technology company built on thought-leading research, departing in June 2023. He’s also back as a contributing editor at ERE Media and TLNT.com.

On top of that, he served for 10 years on the advisory board of the Workforce Institute at Kronos.

A California native born in Newport Beach, John has an MBA from Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, and a Bachelors in Journalism from California State University, Long Beach, where he was Editor of the campus newspaper, The Daily 49er.

You can also find out more about John by checking out his profile on LinkedIn, or following him on Twitter, or sending him an email at johnhollon@yahoo.com.