How HR Can Earn a Seat at the Executive Table
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we speak with Jelena Djordjevic, Chief People Officer at Thumbtack, about building true business partnerships as a People leader in today’s unpredictable world.
Jelena shares how HR leaders can balance empathy with business rigor, navigate rapid change, and create real accountability at the leadership table. She also reveals how Thumbtack is approaching AI adoption with both excitement and caution, building a culture that’s ready for the future.
🎓 In this episode, Jelena discusses:
Why hard conversations are the true job of HR leaders
How HR can build deep trust with CEOs and executives
Balancing empathy and business rigor in people strategy
How Thumbtack is approaching AI experimentation and adoption
The importance of growth mindset and humility in adapting to rapid change
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Jelena Djordjevic 0:00
You can't really build the depth of relationship, and especially in the head of people role, you can't be effective if you don't have that strong relationship, whether it's with the CEO or with other your other peers, people on my leadership team expect me to call them out to name dysfunction. And so if it's not being said, you just aren't doing your job. We're kind of the ultimate HR bps, holding people our leadership coaches, holding people accountable as leaders, and so we have to be willing to do that. One tactic that actually is really helpful that we've used has been finding a leadership assessment tool or personality test just to give language and vocabulary to different dynamics and different personality preferences. So we've gone through Strengths Finder and disc and Enneagram, Marco and I just independently have both really like as humans, have gravitated towards Enneagram through our different journeys, and so we brought that into the leadership team, and both of us know it very deeply. And so it gives us a language to use and just poke fun. You just bring some levity to it, like, Oh, don't be such a, you know, whatever. It's a way to bring a little levity and just like a construct and vocabulary that you can use, as well as what I really love about Enneagram, specifically in relationships, is their framing of healthy and unhealthy states. And so if somebody is really acting out, it might be a cue of like, wow, they're really in an unhealthy state. Something must really be triggering them. And instead of getting pissed, I can get curious and empathetic. I still might have the right to be pissed and like to feel the impact of their behaviors, but first I can be like, Oh, wow. They must really be triggered by something, and I just don't know what's getting triggered. So let me, like, learn before I and then I still will share my feedback. I
Chris Rainey 1:54
you. Welcome to the show. How are you? Thank you so much. I'm doing well. How are you? I'm good. I love the fact that, like we had, we were at two opposite ends of the day today, like we were saying that, like, as my wife just walked in the studio, of my daughter, your kids just left.
Jelena Djordjevic 2:08
I just got my kids out the door. I had to tell them, like, they know what YouTube is. So they got I was like, I'm doing a podcast. It's kind of like YouTube
Chris Rainey 2:16
that's the best way to it's interesting now that the new generation of kids. It's YouTube podcasts. And now YouTube is the big YouTube is the biggest podcast platform in the world, which is kind of like, if you try to explain to our kids what podcasts used to be, they're probably like, what you that what you're talking about? Like, obviously it's YouTube, right? No. So how old your little ones? They're eight and five. Ah, nice. Robin six. So you have to teach me how to juggle too. Maybe we'll just change the whole entire episode to talk about
Jelena Djordjevic 2:48
better once they once they become, well, I was gonna say once they become friends, but it's really once, once they become frenemies. You have to do less, because they can play together, but you then have to, like, you know, rip them apart
Chris Rainey 3:00
Yeah? So, so, as much as Robin's begging me for a brother and sister right now, she doesn't realize she's gonna have a friend of me. Is that what you Yeah, she really doesn't know that right now. She's like, Oh, it's cool. Like, it's gonna be really okay. I've got that all to come then. So that's gonna be interesting before we jump in, tell everyone a little bit more about you personally and sort of your background and journey to where we are now.
Jelena Djordjevic 3:22
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So I now lead the people team at Thumbtack. I'm the Chief People Officer here. I've been in this role for four and a half years, but before that, actually had a pretty a traditional career for an HR leader. I grew up in kind of core business roles. So I started my job. So I started my career at Bain and Company, the management consulting firm, and spent, five or six years there just doing very traditional strategy consulting, but really loved cases where I could get my hands dirty and do implementations really dig in with clients. So I knew I was not a lifelong consultant, and valued the learnings I got there, but wasn't going to do that for life, and so I switched over from Bain to thumbtack seven years ago as Chief of Staff, and I was for running a lot of the corporate processes and standing up a lot of the kind of GNA functions, like before we had an internal comms team, I ran that. I used to run our planning rhythms for the company, our business performance management, so a lot of core business functions. But I always had kind of my a toe in the water with all things people, org culture, and it just became an increasingly big part of my job, in addition to sort of my passion projects at work. And so the opportunity came up to lead the people team four and a half years ago, and I haven't looked back since amazing
Chris Rainey 4:32
before we dive into all of that, because there's a lot to take in there. Tell everyone a bit about the organization who may not be aware of the business.
Jelena Djordjevic 4:39
Yeah, so Thumbtack is a marketplace to hire local professionals. We're the best place to take care of your home, and we really serve our homeowners and Home Pros in the US. We're all over the US, and as an organization, we have about 1200 employees, remote, all virtual employees across the US, Canada and the Philippines as well.
Chris Rainey 4:59
Wow. Do you mean by taking care of your
Jelena Djordjevic 5:02
home? So say, if something breaks down, for example, our fire alarm system is not working right now. So you could call a handyman through thumbtack, find and hire a handyman through thumbtack and fix your in the last month or two, we've used it to kind of install a lighting system fix our fire alarm. I think we have to do a little bit of a hot water pump in the basement as well. So all that kind of work that you gotta, you've got to put into your home to make sure it's in good
Chris Rainey 5:28
condition. Are you in the UK? I feel like I need to you. Are you are in the UK?
Jelena Djordjevic 5:34
No, no, we're not. Oh, as
Chris Rainey 5:35
I say, I was like, I sounds like my wife finds that, finds out about this, all the things that she's been asking me to do. She's gonna she turns
Jelena Djordjevic 5:41
out there's a big use case for this. When you I sometimes am like, why don't we rent this feels hard, and that's exactly the service that thumbtack provides to people I love to make easier.
Chris Rainey 5:53
No, I would definitely, mean, if you're in the UK, I definitely would be using the platform as well. So what's I suppose, uh, lots of unravel in in that journey. So what would you say first and foremost was, was some of the lessons that you learned in previously in your career that helped you as you moved into Chief of Staff, and then, HR, yeah,
Jelena Djordjevic 6:12
yeah, I think um, or in consulting, a lot of what you're really learning is how to tackle, how to learn quickly and tackle a problem to get to a recommendation. Um, it does often, sometimes, but not always. Like stops that recommendation, which is why I wanted to transition out. But you really learn how to get up the learning curve very quickly. You might be on a 234, month case, it might be longer, it might be shorter, and so within a week or two, you have to learn everything you can about an industry, about the client, about the data set that you just inherited, whatever it may be. And so I think that getting up the learning curve curve quickly has been something that's really served me well, whether it's like it was onboarding into this role, or just as there's a new problem at hand, like if I had to really learn compensation. Or right now, the whole world is learning about AI. So just figuring out how to like be a quick study, and then figuring out how to wrap your hands around a disparate set of inputs and problem statements and stakeholders, to kind of put a little structure around the problem, to figure out great, what are the what are the five pain points? How do we prioritize them? How do we go tackle them? How do we analyze them, and kind of having that methodology to work towards recommendation solutions and ultimately impact. So it really is that like that problem solving skillset and that ability to get up the learning curve on not not all things, some things are just very technical, and you really need a PhD for them, but on a lot of core business
Chris Rainey 7:39
topics. Yeah, I love that. So you have that sort of framework and methodology, and regardless of like, the challenge is kind of, you can apply that, right? And that's, that's huge, right? Because most people, they don't have any framework or methodology, and it comes down to, just like, you're under fire, and you don't really have a way of working through that as well. So I can see that, how that will be transferable, especially given all the change and transformation that work is going through right now with HR, with all of the external forces that we're facing, you name it, pandemics, politics, exactly, social justice, this, we can just keep going on at this point,
Jelena Djordjevic 8:14
like, given all those kind of external forces of uncertainty, I think there's So much. There's always like a latent or kind of an undercurrent of anxiety, of overwhelm, whether it's like, from an individual perspective or the whole organization, like, how do we face COVID and remote work? How do we, you know when the hiring, like, when you know we were in the great resignation and no company could keep up with all the hiring, or now with AI, like, a lot of these kind of, almost like societal or like business currents are so overwhelming, and so being able to put, kind of put your hands around them as a business is so important, to be able to say, Okay, I think it just calm. It like brings calm and order to what is a lot of uncertainty. And I think I thought COVID was crazy. The pace of change three, four years ago was overwhelming, but I just feel like it's only gotten faster and crazier. And so being able to bring a little order to chaos, so that kind of the temperature can come down, so the organization can then approach those problems from a place of steadiness and intentionality is really important. And so that's where that kind of structured thinking and framing really comes in.
Chris Rainey 9:21
How have you obviously started as Chief of Staff? So you really, you know, you lived and breathed the business, right and in every element. How has that helped shape the way you evolve your HR strategy and align that with the business?
Jelena Djordjevic 9:37
Yeah, yeah. I think there was kind of two I so I owned many different like functions, I guess you call them our responsibilities, whether it was like annual planning, the board process, all the leadership forums, like internal comms. There's a lot of different things that I owned, but in the end, they all came down to two things, one of two things, it was either establishing a rhythm that the business could operate against. Um. And just making that predictable, fine tuned, streamlined, or building bridges across the business, like connecting our Product team to our go to market team, or whatever it may be. And so those two things have been, I mean, they're very kind of part of who I am as a professional, and things I enjoy doing, I think that's that was always true, but it's really helped me approach my work, whether it's thinking through our goal setting and performance process or our compensation process, or whatever it may be. How do we build a business that the rhythm? Build a rhythm that the business can get into and make sure actually kind of borrow this from our chief product officer. What's the minimal viable process like? How do you strip it down to its bones, to the most important elements, so that it provides the it serves its purpose, but doesn't add burden to the organization? And then on building bridges too that like, you're constantly trying to figure out where there's disconnection, misalignment across the business, and that's really core, both in terms of how we think about designing our operating model. So my team works with the CEO to design the company's operating model. Kind of, how do we our matrix organization? So, like, how do we make sure we're connecting the dots where we need to, but also creating autonomy where we can because running, you know, having a lane to run independently and is, like, is always more efficient and easier. So where there is opportunity for autonomy, go for it. But where you need connection, it's really important to bring those people together. So, like, I kind of as Chief of Staff, I did that a lot through the processes I own. Now it's more through the lens of the operating model, as well as relationally, like, which leaders need to be talking more this more. I was commenting on a document this morning that, like, one function was advocating for something that really is the decision of another function. I'm like, let me build, bring these people
Chris Rainey 11:43
together before there's an issue. Yeah, yeah. No, I love that. Well, if I understand you've worked with your CEO for like, seven years now, is that right? Yeah. How has that partnership evolved and influenced your approach to your strategy? Yeah.
Jelena Djordjevic 11:57
I mean, in some many things are very much the same, and then both many things are different, just because both of us have grown so much in those seven plus years. We are pretty different personalities and have very different strengths. Marco is very much like the kind of founder, CEO who will have a bold vision, who is willing to sort of turn, take a hard right turn to, you know, burn the bridges. And I am very much able to, like, take a crazy idea and figure out how to make it reality. And and there's many other areas where we're sort of, like, I'd say we're compliments. I off. I will sometimes joke like, hey, let's not be opposites. Let's be compliments. So I think we have always complemented each other in terms of our skill set and and just kind of personalities. And so that's been fun to have, like a real sense of partnership, like a yin and yang in that regard. And then I think just naturally, over the last seven years, each of us has really grown in our in our respective ways as leaders. And so while it used to the relationship as chief of staff was very much okay. What's the CEO's vision for the company? How do I go make that happen? And how do I act as his proxy? Kind of be an extension so that he can go focus on the key things he needs to go focus on, but I can still drive the company's agenda, whereas now it's much more of, yeah, a similar relationship that you'd have with any other executive, where I've got my, you know, I represent both the employee base and represent the management teams kind of interest in the direction that the organization needs to head. And so he, in some ways, actually feel like he's empowering me and enabling me more, like we obviously share a joint vision and have shared priorities and work together to figure out what direction the organization needs to head. But in some ways, yeah, I feel like it's almost more of like he's enabling me to help, to set me and the organization up for success, to achieve whatever our kind of people and organization goals are, which has been a really fun partnership. Yeah, it's been a great evolution, and fun seeing it evolve over the years.
Chris Rainey 14:01
Yeah, you're kind of like describing myself and Shane's my co founder's relationship where, like, I'm the crazy visionary, and unfortunately, he has to bring my crazy ideas to life as well. But in order to get to that point, though, it's not easy. You have to have some hard conversations, right? So what's like some of the biggest challenges you've had to overcome together.
Jelena Djordjevic 14:23
That is so true. It's funny. I think really it's just being able and willing to have the hard conversation. I think oftentimes it's not even you kind of work once we get going, as long as there's deep trust and a willingness to own it, like to take responsibility for your actions, and a willingness to be totally open. I feel like you can actually work through any issue, but it's like being a kind of mustering up the courage and the and the like, the commitment to the relationship to like, kind of get at it again, to have whatever the relevant hard conversation is in a given moment, I actually one of my I think. Have been my first performance review for Marco. In my feedback, he he referenced, like, my willingness to to give hard feedback as like, you know, like he was like my written feedback of things that were going well. And I don't know how deliberate it was on his part, but I still remember it seven years later as like an incur, a sign of encouragement to lean in the hard conversation and to say what's not being said. And so sometimes I have to, sort of, like, really, if it's a really hard thing to broach, I might have to, like, really muster up the courage and I'll own it in terms of, like, my nerves and discomfort with it. But, yeah, you just, you just have to have the conversation, but you have to have that real trust in each other and commitment to making the relationship better, which isn't always there necessarily. So I feel like we've always been able to kind of pick up the phone and talk through things, but it's after. It's a lot of kind of positive reinforcement cycles of having had so much practice at it. So we definitely still, like a month ago, we had we got at it at a meeting, and happened to have a one on one later that day, and both of us were like, so I have something to say. No.
Chris Rainey 16:05
Thank you for sharing that, because I think it's just important, right? Like this is, this is a topic that many don't talk about, and many actually CPOs I speak to do struggle to have that, that level of psychological safety to have that conversation. Yeah. What advice would you give to those leaders?
Jelena Djordjevic 16:23
I mean, I think you just you can't really build the depth of relationship, and especially in the head of people role, you can't be effective if you don't have that strong relationship, whether it's with the CEO or with other your other peers, because you're the one, like people on my team expect on my leadership team, expect me to call out what's not being said, like to call to call them out, to name dysfunction. And so if it's not being said, you just aren't doing your job. Because we're like ultimate, we're kind of the ultimate HR bps, holding people or leadership coaches, holding people accountable as leaders. And so we have to be willing to do that. But I do think one, one tactic that actually is really helpful that we've used has been finding a kind of like a leadership assessment tool or personality test, just to give language and vocabulary to different dynamics and different personality preferences. So we've gone through we've done Strengths Finder and disc and Enneagram. Marco and I just independently have both really like as humans, have gravitated towards Enneagram through our different kind of journeys, and so we brought that into the leadership team. And both of us know it very deeply. And so it gives us a language to use and just poke fun, like, to you just bring some levity to it, like, Oh, don't be such a, you know, whatever like, but it's, it's a way to bring a little levity, and just like a construct and vocabulary that you can use, as well as what I really love about Enneagram, specifically in relationships, is their framing of healthy and unhealthy states. And so if somebody is really almost like acting out, it might be a cue of like, wow, they're really in an unhealthy state, something must really be triggering them. And instead of getting pissed, I can get curious and empathetic. I still might have the right to be pissed and like to feel set of like the impact of their behaviors. But first I can be like, Oh, wow, they must really be triggered by something, and I just don't know what's getting triggered. So let me, like, learn a little bit more before I and then I still will share my feedback.
Chris Rainey 18:22
Yeah, no, I love that, because I've always You're so easy to jump the gun and assume something, but a lot of time, there's some there's something an undercurrent that you perhaps aren't aware of. The amount of times I've done that and then actually ask questions and led with empathy and realized, oh, wow, actually, this person has something going on outside. There's something that I didn't know about, and that's actually the reason for this behavior, or the way that they're showing up, right as well. It's very quick for us to judge. So you're right. You do need to give the language to be able to have those conversations as well. How do you balance the dynamics of of making sure that you're focused on, we just mentioned the word empathy, legal empathy, but also your focus on outcomes based on data, because it's like you hear a lot of people talking about AI. I got into HR because I love people. Well, it might be surprised that it probably not. It might not work out so well in this profession. I mean, that's important, of course, you know, we'd expect that, but that's not really what's gonna make you successful as a HR executive.
Jelena Djordjevic 19:24
Totally. Yeah. I mean, you really have to balance both. And I think that's been our kind of the business orientation and the humanity, and that's been our team's kind of Mo like we did a kind of a legacy exercise as a leadership team, like, what legacy as a people leadership team. What legacy do you want the people team to leave on Thumbtack? And what legacy Do you want to leave in your career? And it was amazing, the similarities in the themes, and it all bubbled down to like, we want to be like, you know, a hugely impactful team drive the business forward and bring the heart and humanity to the work. And so it was really. Recognizing that duality and the fact that you really it's not even about like, balancing them, which almost like, I think there's an implication of you have to choose, yeah, yeah. It's like, it's yeah, it's like the they're intertwined, and yes, naturally, there are times where you kind of have to prioritize the business, kind of in a traditional sense. But how do you bring humanity to those moments? Or how do you find the win, wins for employees and for the business, which I think is often, especially if you're really transparent, and you lead with why, and you explain, like saying some kind of budgeting, like a situation like say something, budget has to get taken away from something. If you lead with why and explain the why. Um, employees can often understand, Oh, I got it. That was the like, we had to make that decision. But if you don't, then they might just think, like, Oh, this is just like, you know, cold capitalism. So I think to me, that's just that's very core to who I am, this sort of, like, impact GSD orientation, but also a lot of Ori, like, leaning into vulnerability, into the humanity of people, I really lead into my Gemini roots the duality of it all, and I think that's what we try to do as a people team. And I that was very I made that very clear and known to the team early on, which was a big adjustment to be under, like, to work in such a business oriented, analytical, financially oriented environment. But I think I've really tried to couple that with, like, really leaning into our humanity, our vulnerability ourselves, bringing our full selves to work, and kind of making sure that work is working for us as humans as well,
Chris Rainey 21:30
yeah. And a part of that, I'm sure, is then working very closely your team, on your communication strategy, yeah,
Jelena Djordjevic 21:37
yeah. We work very closely, yeah. I mean, I, like me, the head of HR business partners, the head of internal comms, work very closely. We meet on it. We have a set meeting to think about, like, what's the what's the pulse of the org? What are what's the confusion, what's the chatter about, what do we need to be getting ahead of? How do we need to be communicating that? How do we need to be bringing the leaders to the employees to make sure that everybody's understanding what's going on in the business. And it's not just the what, it's also the how, like, how do we engage and how do we, yeah, bring that human lens to some of the key decisions or the key messages that we've got to get out to employees.
Chris Rainey 22:12
Yeah, what's really the priority for you right now? What's top of most top of mind for you right now? What you most excited
Jelena Djordjevic 22:20
about? I mean, right now, I'm sure many people would say this right now is AI, is just really understand, is thinking through, how do we usher the organization through this moment of a lot of innovation, transformation, uncertainty, hype, like there's, I think where the road is headed is not clear to anybody, but there certainly will be a road headed somewhere with AI and all the possibility. And so we're thinking about it a lot from how do we, how do we set the tone for the organization of the moment we're in? How do we define our core principles and beliefs about how we engage with AI and technology? What kind of culture do we want to kind of build around it, and how do we support and enable employees so that they're like, willing and excited to go experiment with a new set of tools with a different way of doing their work? So it's this is it feels very much like a change management exercise, but it's very different than, say, when we rolled out future of work in our virtual working model, there was such a binary decision. It was just like, virtual yes or no, you know? It's like, do hybrid virtual, you know? And it was a, it was almost like a switch was flipped on from a decision perspective. Whereas here there's a lot more uncertainty.
Chris Rainey 23:32
You have no idea where we go in, right? It's like, yeah.
Jelena Djordjevic 23:35
And there's so much hype and so much, you know, mayhem in the in the headlines about it. But as a result, like setting the tone and setting our principles and supporting and that
Chris Rainey 23:44
won't change, though, right? Like you can set the principles, the tone of foundation, and you know your AI, ethics, etc, so so that when those shifts happen, you still have that solid foundation to operate and make decisions from most people don't even have that part, so they're just kind of lost in the storm off of everything that's happening, right as well. So the fact that you're even that far in the journey is great. What's the overall like view from the business in terms of AI? Because I'm sure there's also going to be applied within your solution itself, right? Like in terms of your own tool, in terms of the app and the web,
Jelena Djordjevic 24:23
yeah. So we're actually, we're, yeah, there's, how do we think about it from the business and the product perspective, kind of the customer facing, and then how do we think about it internally for employees, there's so much exciting potential in the product for how we use AI, if you think about it, you know, one of the hardest things about a marketplace is figuring out what you need exactly and then matching to the right person. And so and with, say, with an Airbnb, you know what you want, you want like a three bedroom with a view of the ocean, and you need enough. You know, living space. When it comes to your home, there's a lot of context and expertise that people don't I do not know the first thing about most parts of my home. And so you. Need that kind of aid and coach to help you make get to the right, get your job done. And so how can we use multimedia like, how can we use video, recordings and pictures and scraping information like digesting conversations to make to help customers really understand what they need and help match them as best as possible? So given the AI ability to digest and analyze multimedia, I think is so exciting, given that you're dealing with physical good so there's so much exciting stuff that's happening from a product perspective. And in some ways, we actually kind of our product AI vision has been more advanced than like internally we're reckoning with what does it mean for employees, and how do we engage them? But a lot of the product use cases were, like, actively experimenting with and thinking through, how do we start shipping them? So, yeah, there's a lot of exciting stuff that's in the works, yeah, but,
Chris Rainey 25:49
but in order to achieve that, you have to have that internally, right? And have that AI, you know, AI culture, AI culture, but you have to have that level of efficiency, right, internally, in order to then best serve your customers externally and through the product as well. But it's difficult, right? Because it's just ever changing. But I think it's really exciting, you know, like sometimes people in your product side don't know what question to ask, you know, and having an AI assistant, they can have a conversation with that, ask them questions that helps them lead them to what they actually need. Is a game changer, and the more it learns, the better, the smarter it's going to get. So that's exciting, and I think that the same way I look at it also internally. So in terms of, like, how do you build customized learning pathways right internally, to meet people where they're at in that moment, but also understand the context of your organization and bring that context into the AI learning pathways as well. That's going to be super exciting to do that, because we're already doing it for our customers. It's just like we're not really now. We're bringing it internally, but imagine if we did it internally and then brought it to our customers, the impact that that would have, right, that ripple effect, because those are the people that are serving your customers, yeah,
Jelena Djordjevic 27:05
and it's interesting, because there's so many, it's one of the things that we believe, is like, well, there are generalizable use cases, and, you know, productivity gains and hacks that everybody can benefit from. There are very like, each function really has to understand the applications of AI within their functional needs or within the business needs. But it is interesting how there are these things that you can borrow like this kind of the conversation diagnosis, like a lot of the tools that you know, you can imagine a customer engaging with the thumbtack platform, like that type of technology be equally applicable in an employee trying to understand, how the heck do I onboard? How do I navigate this? And so right now, it's really, we're in the phase of, like, really just trying to understand and diagnose and figure out what's the like, the low hanging fruit that we can use to to learn even faster. We actually just did a people team hackathon, AI hackathon, where we kind of map the employee journey around a room, and folks identified key pain points. I could pick pain points that they were really passionate about, and got into groups of three to build a custom gem. And it was amazing to see what pain points people were able to solve using AI that just previously, it was just such hard manual work, or a person always had to be, you know, at the ticket like, you know, fielding ticket for questions and answers, and so just exciting. That sense of possibility and expansiveness is really exciting right now. I think all organizations have to navigate kind of the hype and the expectations and the realities of what the technology can do. But the technology, it's like every model that of these huge AI companies launches is so much better than the last, and so it's exciting to see just kind of how fast the industry is getting up its own curve, and how fast organizations are learning with that. So we're just our as a company, we're really trying to learn, lean into learning, experimentation, understanding, low hanging fruit. What are opportunities? What are kind of opportunities to drive impact, and just kind of get into the mindset of using the technology, not for the technology sake. Like some companies have said, We're AI first. We are still customer first. We are here to serve our customers through whatever means is best. Same the same way that people team is here to serve employees through whatever means is best. If it happens to be AI, then that's great. Let's go for it. But it also might not always be the right solution. It might be more complex and more expensive than it
Chris Rainey 29:22
even needs to be. Yeah. I mean, what first thing, it's great that you've created that, like, sandbox for the team to play around and, like, create the hackathon, and for people, because that that's that's giving them a safe space to be able to do that right and come to you, and you're benefiting from the collective diversity of thought and experience of everyone in the room. And I'm sure you've got some great ideas that some great ideas that came out of that, like as a CPO, what are some of the use cases that have, like, resonated with you, that you've identified? It could be a simple one, right? Could be, does it have to be crazy advanced? It could be simple tasks. They could be automated. What are some of the things that have come up?
Jelena Djordjevic 29:56
Yeah. So I think one of the the first use cases that I. Participate, most people, teams will explore implement is going to be something? Is a chat bot for answering employee questions? Like, we have so many, you know, there's such a plethora of information that employees need access to, like, what are my benefits? What's the PTO policy? How do I get promoted? You know, all the standard questions that get fielded through different channels. Like, we have a Slack channel, where you can ask questions, email aliases, where you can ask questions, and there's people on the other side of them fielding those questions. And so I anticipate that being one of the top three use cases in the early days that people teams are exploring, that's something that we're exploring and assessing if and how we do that. And then I think there's sort of like the next layer of like the next layer of, how do you get people information that they need? And that almost like kind of side coach, coaching sidekick. So an example of something that we experimented with in our hackathon was a new manager onboarder, kind of like onboarding guide, or like buddy. So if you are switching from an IC role to a manager role, we do have lot of training that we offer them. There's a manager Essentials program, but like, there's some of those tactical and basic questions that you just you need to know and answer. And so how do we have kind of an onboarding buddy that can help coach you through that process, as well as coach the leader of the new manager? Because they also forget, like, oh, this new manager has probably never had a compensation conversation with a direct report, like, I need to make sure that they're equipped to have that. So some of those kind of, like coaching tool aids, almost is how I categorize them. And then there's a lot of process, core processes, like opening up a headcount wreck. If you're a manager, you got headcount approved. There's, like, a bunch of approvals and documentation and process and job descriptions, like things that you have to go through to get your new employee in. And so how do we kind of coach people through that process as well, using AI? So we've been looking at it. What are like, what's of the volume of questions that we get from employees? Which ones are can be automated? Which ones can we use AI to address? And then which ones do we still are really sensitive or critical moments where we really want to preserve a human touch point, because either the stakes are too high or they're really critical moments for relationship and rapport building.
Chris Rainey 32:14
Yeah, that's such an important part you ended with there. It's like ensuring the human, the human in the loop, and making sure, like, because the last thing you want is, like, for example, someone having set conversations around their struggle with mental health, exactly, and they get, and they get a generic response from an AI agent, and no one knows about it, like, you know, like, that's, you know, that's kind of extreme version. But, I mean, that's that I already know of companies that are already having that issue? Yeah, right,
Jelena Djordjevic 32:42
totally, yeah. You escalate things to the right channels. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And I think that, like, the the thing, I think a challenge that people, teams will face is both, like that, the accuracy rate that they're willing to to live with, like, it's 100% 99 95% because there is, you know, hallucination problems with AI, and then what are the escalation paths? And are they built up to really catch the critical things? It's and it's no different than, say, in a customer service world where they're using AI, they've got to ask those same questions, but when it's all 100% fielded by employees, you can use your judgment the whole time and control the whole process. But if you're kind of seeding some of the process and the control to an agent, an AI agent, you got to make sure all of that is thought through and really test it. Like, I think the testing process has to be really rigorous, and then the company has to determine what their kind of risk tolerance is, for lack of a better
Chris Rainey 33:35
word. Sure You can't just lay it loose out there as well. Like, we built like, approvals into our agents now, like, where you could ask it to take to action tasks. So again, that's kind of where we're moving from, really, like asking, like, now large action models actually can take, take action, right, and do the work, but then it will then send an email for you to approve it to go and do take the action. So, like, that's kind of way that we've done it right now. It's like, so I get, like, a Slack message or an email saying, like, I've drafted this, Chris, I'm going to send this over here, and then I'm going to update this system. Do you approve these steps? Click, approve. It's still taking, like, saving so much time, but it's that, but it's that additional step that I can just do it, but I can also, if it's done the same task multiple times and it's repetitive, I can set that to automatic, yeah, to be able to keep doing it, because it's a repetitive task that doesn't need me to approve every single time. So it's just like, those guardrails need to be there early on. So, but yeah, we, none of us know really how this is going to evolve, like it's revolving what we're doing now. I thought we was maybe, like five years from now, we're already here doing it. How does this? How do you view this in terms of upskilling and reskilling the organization for the future as that you're going to bring, you need to bring in new skills and capabilities. These, for example, engineers that are going to be able to work within the product and prepare the business. How are you looking at that?
Jelena Djordjevic 35:06
Yeah. So I think there's sort of two categories. There's concrete skills that either are already exist in them, in the market, in the industry, and one new ones, where it's like, we need more ml engineers, or we need, you know, prompt engineers, or whatever. It's like, a very concrete skill, because it's like, it's a task, task based, and that is, actually, I feel like that will evolve over time. Each year will. There'll be, like, new roles and skills that are kind of invented, given where the technology is headed and so that, and that's sort of for the respective leaders to think through. What kind of talent do we need? I think probably what's more amorphous, but is actually where the bigger change is going to be, is what are the underlying kind of capabilities and mindsets of the employee? So right now, like with AI, it requires a real beginner's mind, a growth mindset, a willingness to like you have to bring humility, you have to relearn a lot of things, an experimentation mindset. You have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and just get in there. It was amazing. At our at our hackathon, one of our senior leaders on the people team, she was sharing some remarks, and she talked about, Wow, I feel humbled. And she's one of the people that everybody looks up to as being like an AI guru, and she's like, I just feel so humbled. I learned so much, and I realized that I know nothing, and she's so willing to lean into that. And so I think that, like, it's some of those traits of, like, a beginner's mind, a growth mindset, humility and eagerness to learn and experiment, and a comfort with uncertainty and change. Like, those are more attributes that I think are gonna become increasingly important. And actually think that's what's gonna be like, what companies are gonna have to navigate. How do you make sure you're kind of encouraging those attributes and then also assessing for them, given the pace of change and people's you know, need to kind of evolve and to flex into what's changing. So that's what I'm starting to think through. And we'll kind of keep on kind of just seeing where the currents go over the next six to 12 months before we're actually very deliberately not kind of changing our career criteria at this point, I think it's still there's still still too early to tell, and there's still so much hype around all of this stuff that we just want to learn by doing. That's one of our kind of core company principles, is like, learn by doing. I just want to get into it, learn, observe, experiment and form stronger hypotheses before we really put them into
Chris Rainey 37:27
action. Yeah, I completely agree with everything you just said there, because the the technology is going to continue to evolve to the technical capability is going to be evolving. But those human skills, power skills, as it were, things like what you described. I'll include things like critical thinking into that same category. Those people can work across any part of the business, right? And as especially as we move to be more project based, because a lot of the technical capability is now you can, like, I can, I can code right now because I can actually just ask my AI to to write code. So more it's more important now is my creativity, my critical thinking, My resilience, my empathy, all of that is becoming more more important as the technology evolves as well. So it's super interesting how we kind of gone, like one AI, where the focus was already on the technical side for the last maybe, like 510, years, but now it's actually it's so important these human skills and these power skills are are the priority. And how do you assess for that? To your point, you know, because it doesn't fit, we're not, we're not talking about job titles anymore, yeah, we're not talking about functions. We're talking about that can operate across the whole business. So I agree with you. It's a very interesting time
Jelena Djordjevic 38:53
and also, but it's still like, yeah, the expertise and judgment and context are still gonna be really important. Like, I'm of course, yeah, certain jobs, you'll be able to do them easier, faster, better using AI, and you might be able to kind of expand your potential impact. Like, say, if you're in benefits, there's tremendous amount of expertise that's required to know. And while AI might make it easier, infinitely easier to summarize, especially, say, for us, we're virtual. So, you know, we were in like, you know, 35 odd states. That is a lot of that's a lot of information to and expertise to have for one person or one small team to understand, what are the leave policies across all the states, what are the, you know, workers rights across all the different states. So it might make it easier to do research, but, like, you still have to have deep expertise and the judgment to be able to make the right decisions. So I think that'll be interesting too, to see, I think expert, the importance of expertise, or maybe the ability to acquire expertise is still going to be important, and then the judgment to exercise that expertise is still going to be equally important. So, but it's more of like how the work gets. Done, and what type of work gets done, and the scope of the impact of an individual that will evolve and change. But I think it's my I feel like my thing with AI is that I don't find it helpful to pontificate about what could be in the future, because we just don't know what's going to
Chris Rainey 40:14
happen. And it doesn't either, because it's only trained on what's the now. Exactly.
Jelena Djordjevic 40:19
Yeah, right. But what do we know today? We can learn quickly every quarter is so different than the last, and so let's just make sure that we're kind of staying abreast of what the current trends and use cases are, and staying ahead of like staying with the wave, not behind it, and then kind of quickly iterate and evolve and make, just make really smart decisions. Like you don't want to make one way door decisions haphazardly you want to figure out where do you have flexibility, like, where you don't want to cause too much organizational churn with hard rights and hard lefts. So there's a lot, I think, given the like, the ambiguity and uncertainty of the change is a very nuanced change management exercise that's very different than, like, rolling out a one one really controversial decision. No,
Chris Rainey 41:00
I agree. I agree. And it's ever evolving. I think we've any I think we haven't seen anything like this since, maybe like the internet, where people didn't really know how it was going to evolve, and it looks nothing like now than it did when it when it started. I think what I'm excited about is, for example, we've built multiple agents right now, for example, you mentioned compensation and benefits. Imagine that agent is always learning. So it's collecting all of the knowledge and experience of your entire team. So whenever they ask a question or input information, it has a memory. So if someone coming into the business, we've just built a sales agent which is trained on all of our sales teams, knowledge, experience, the questions they ask all of our materials. Now, if someone comes in to HR leaders, they can ask that agent any question about sales, and it has the collective knowledge of our best sales people, anyone who's ever been in this business, all of the materials I need, you know. Give me the objection handling sheet here. Okay, here's some of the objections of how Ken, who our top sales executive, addresses these objections. So now you start to have these sort of like expert agents that are retaining all of that information, and they're connected to all the existing technology and platforms in the business. So you can draw from your HCM, it can draw from your LMS, right? It can draw from your ERP and and it understands the context of your business. That's the missing piece of most tools, right? Now, if you go to chat GBT and ask a question, has no context, yeah, of your organization, your why, your value, your culture, your principles, right? What it means to work at funtech, it can now, and that's
Jelena Djordjevic 42:40
the bit getting up the learning curve.
Chris Rainey 42:44
So I know we went super off track, like it was super, it was like, so interesting. So we just went down a little bit rabbit hole. And this is perfect, because this is what the show is all about as well. Before I let you go for those HR leaders tomorrow, you know, climbing the ladder, as it were to be, I don't think it's a ladder anymore. Things are gonna be going up. I say, I can't even use that word anymore. They will be sitting in your seat one day. What advice did you wish you had before you sat in the seat? What advice would you give to the HR leaders of tomorrow?
Jelena Djordjevic 43:19
Think, embrace the change and uncertainty of the moment. There's there's no avoiding it and learning. You know, being able to ride the waves yourself and guide the organization through it is one of the most important skills and attributes you can have right now. I think people, the people function, has gone through such a transformation over the last 10 or 20 years, and really has a seat at the table and is a really critical voice in the business. And so I think really viewing yourself as a business leader, first and foremost, and a key partner to all the executives, whether it's your CFO, cmo CEO, whoever it may be, that's gotta be your first team, like the business has to be your first team and the success of the business. And so how do you forge really strong partnerships with all of your leaders and identify kind of shared goals that you have and support each other through that? I think is really important. It's very easy to kind of stay in your you're kind of laying in silo, especially if you grew up in the function. And then the third is to remember it's just a job. Real Life comes first, and you have to make work work, and it's so important. It's so easy as you're kind of climbing the ladder and trying to get bigger roles and get promoted, to get so focused on work. And it's important that we care and we bring bring our like, our full commitment and intentionality to work. But there's so much more to life as well. Maybe that was a hard lesson that I learned and and it's really important that you maintain that bigger picture on what matters to you in life, what are your values, what are your full life priorities? And put work in the context of that, I think that's what really helps sustain you. I think otherwise, it's so easy to crash and burn in this job.
Chris Rainey 44:56
No, I love that, and I'm glad we ended with that. Yeah. Because of everything we just shared, it can be, and I've definitely a culprit of doing, of not taking care of that, and making space and setting boundaries and really looking at, why am I doing this right? You know, really. And so appreciate you taking the time to come on the show. And where can people connect with you? Want to reach out and say hi? Yeah, you
Jelena Djordjevic 45:19
can reach me on LinkedIn. Yelena, George. It's a long last name there, but you should be fine if you just look for Yelena Thumbtack. No
Chris Rainey 45:25
worries. I'll make your life easy. Anyone who's listening right now the links below, I'll make that really easy so you can hit the link. Make sure you connect. But I appreciate you taking the time, and I wish all the best until we next week.
Jelena Djordjevic 45:37
More from the HR Leaders Podcast
Jelena Djordjevic, Chief People Officer at Thumbtack.