Jessica Smith, Chief People Officer at Hays

Show Notes

From Big Tech to Staffing: Hays’ CPO on Accountability, HR Wellness, and Practical AI

Summary

The recruiting world is transforming at high speed—AI is reshaping workflows while markets stay volatile.

How do you keep teams resilient and deliver results?

Jess Smith, Chief People Officer, Americas at Hays (formerly at AWS, Amazon, and Meta), shares how Big Tech agility translates to a global staffing leader with 10,000+ employees across 23 countries. Jess breaks down how Hays is building “the Hays of the future” in the Americas—rethinking org design and tooling while putting people first.

She outlines an accountability-first culture with above/below-the-line thinking to create stability in constant change, how managers coach teams from finger-pointing to ownership, and why HR must protect its energy during emotionally heavy transformations.

On AI, Jess gets practical: balancing budget cuts with expectations, piloting over promises, guarding candidate experience, and planning for training, prompt fluency, and time-to-value. E

xpect usable coaching prompts, an AI evaluation checklist, and clear guidance for HR leaders navigating relentless change.

Timestamps

[00:45] – Guest intro: Big Tech lessons, “human capital strategist,” and agility in action

[01:59] – Inside Hays: global footprint, Americas growth, and services from placements to RPO/MSP

[03:36] – Navigating constant change and AI’s impact on recruiting

[05:34] – Building an ownership culture: accountability and above/below-the-line thinking (and how to coach it)

[08:13] – Protecting the people team: HR wellness and emotional labor in transformations

[11:06] – Practical AI in HR: expectations, budget pressure, and what to pilot now

[13:41] – How to evaluate AI tools: candidate experience, training needs, and time-to-value

[18:41] – Parting advice: self-care amid a once-in-a-generation shift

Takeaways

- Build accountability with above/below-the-line thinking to create stability during change.

- Coach teams from blame to action: What did you want to happen? What could you do differently? What’s your next step?

- Protect HR’s energy—plan workloads around high-emotion moments and normalize recovery.

- Set realistic AI expectations: pilot with clear success criteria, especially under budget constraints.

- Evaluate AI on experience, readiness, risk/compliance, training and prompt fluency required, and true time-to-value.

- Teach ambiguity tolerance and role clarity so teams can pivot without losing momentum.

AllVoices brings all your employee relations work together in one place. No more jumping between spreadsheets, emails, and legacy systems just one place to document and manage reports, cases, investigations, and performance conversations. It helps you run a more consistent process, takes busywork off your plate with AI, and makes it easier to spot trends early, so you can work proactively, not just put out fires.

See a demo at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.allvoices.co/

What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Emily Fenech (00:00)
Hello and welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Emily Fenech and today I get to chat with Jess Smith, who is the Chief People Officer, Americas, at Hays. Welcome, Jess.

Jess Smith (00:11)
Thanks, Emily.

Emily Fenech (00:12)
⁓ So Jess, you have a really awesome background. You have led people's strategy and DEI programs at Big Tech. And when I say Big Tech, mean big, big tech, AWS, Amazon, and Meta. Huge. And now you're leading people at Haze, which is one of the largest recruitment firms in the world. And so I'd just love to hear more about your background and how some of that Big Tech experience is helping you shape talent strategy for

Jess Smith (00:23)
You

Emily Fenech (00:40)
companies all across the US.

Jess Smith (00:43)
Yeah, absolutely. yeah, I, the short version of MLB agility, like that's probably the one that I use the most frequently. So to kind of start, I started my, actually I started my career in finance and then have transitioned into HR. And so I call myself a human capital strategist because I'm all focused on like, how do we think about getting our best return?

for our employees, but then also how can we ensure that our employees have the best experience that we can? ⁓ And so coming out of tech, the things that you learn quickly are about being agile and the ability to pivot quickly when needed. You learn a lot about building and coming into this industry, we've been lot of transforming. And so those are really similar types of skill sets. And so kind of putting those to use.

And then finally, how to motivate people to do their best work. And so those are really the three things that have really helped me to dive into this role in Hays and as I leave the people, function for the Americas.

Emily Fenech (01:53)
So can you tell us a little bit more about Hays, about ⁓ just the size, the employees that work there, how you're distributed? I'd love to sort of get some context on the people that you're leading as people officer.

Jess Smith (02:05)
Yeah,

yeah, of course. So Hayes is, like you mentioned, a global organization. So we have offices in 23 different countries around the world. We have a little over 10,000 employees at this point, and we're definitely one of the biggest staffers, if not the biggest in Europe. Our biggest markets are in Germany and in the UK.

Australia as well as a really big market for us and the Americans as a market, right, where we're investing a lot and growing. And so it's an organization where across the Americas, we're in four countries. So we're in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Brazil. And we do everything from one placement, right? So I have someone that needs to be placed at one organization all the way to workforce staffing solutions where

We can get into RPOs, our MSPs, and even take over, ⁓ become a talent acquisition, the extended part of talent acquisition team as well.

Emily Fenech (03:05)
That's awesome. So when you think of the people working at Hays and we think about it's been a year of a lot of change, a lot of uncertainty, especially in the recruitment space, right? So what would you say has been, when you think about your people working at Hays, what do you think has been sort of the challenge that's top of mind for you, for them?

Jess Smith (03:28)
Yeah, definitely ability to deal with change, right? So as you mentioned, we're in recruitment, that industry is and is still changing. And then when you think about AI, you listen to what's happening with AI and a lot of the early work, right? And AI and HR starts with talent acquisition.

and in recruiting. And so it's definitely a space where we've seen a lot of change. I would expect that change to continue. so transformation is really been a key word for us and how do we essentially create the haze of the future? And so to do that, we need to think differently. We need to think differently about how we're organized. We need to think differently about what tools we use to be successful and to get efficiencies.

⁓ And so definitely top of mind has been how do we help the employee who the main times our colleagues are thinking, okay, well that change is over. Now finally it's quote unquote stability. But of course what we know and definitely what you learn in tech is that, know, or you're in a change or about to go into one or you're just finished. So there will be constant change.

Emily Fenech (04:43)
Yeah.

Jess Smith (04:46)
And so how do we help our colleagues ensure that they're prepared for that change and they're flexible is definitely top of mind.

Emily Fenech (04:56)
So a lot of that's mindset then, right? Because you can't, we can't control the environment as much as we we can, right? None of us can really control those, the velocity that it's coming at us. You we can't control that, right? So can you give us maybe some, a look inside how you're navigating that? Knowing that your people are getting hit with high velocity of change at all times. How are you supporting them and prepping them and helping them with their mindset?

Jess Smith (05:01)
No. That's great.

Right.

Yeah, so a really big thing for us this year Emily has been all about accountability and ownership. And so that can kind of sound like, but that's for the business. But really it's for the person to write because when you feel like you have ownership, you can own something you are accountable to what it is you said you would do. You feel like you're motivated that you can own the outcome and you being able to own the outcome.

means that you will, no matter what it is, get to the end of it, right? And be able to take that next step or tackle that challenge. And so we spent a lot of time this year talking about ownership and this theory from culture partners around above the line, below the line thinking. Because sometimes to a change, can create negativity, right? mean, a lot of people don't like change.

I saw statistics the other day that said 30 % of the people can deal with ambiguity. That means 70 % of the people cannot, right? So that means that change uncertainty would be unsettling. And so when you feel like, know, we always look for the thing, what can we do own? When you feel like you can own something, that brings at least some stability to the things that you're doing that you can control.

Emily Fenech (06:43)
Mm-hmm. So has it been sort of, you know, to give an example, is it just helping managers define that for their employees, right? Here are things that we can control. Let's focus on them.

Jess Smith (06:53)
Yeah, yeah, a lot of us that a lot of it too is that coaching. So for example, if someone comes to you and they say, well, because a lot of times to change, you can have finger pointing, right? So, oh, well, this team did this, right? And then you as a manager coaching, okay, well, what about that? Did you want to go differently? And then what could you have done to make it go in a different way? Right. And now what can you do next?

Emily Fenech (07:05)
Yes, yes.

Jess Smith (07:24)
⁓ And so really it's about coaching that colleague back to a positive state, but also and when they figure out what can they do and control to take the next step.

Emily Fenech (07:37)
Yes, that's great. I want to go back to challenges. We've talked about the challenges of what the people specifically are facing, a lot of change, a lot of change management. What about yourself and your people team, right? Like what is the biggest challenge facing HR leaders, people leaders in this moment?

Jess Smith (07:58)
Yeah, really it's two things I would say. First is for me and I speak a lot about this in conferences, that other side of transformation. know, as HR we are part of every transformation. And so, you know, how do we keep that our people teams healthy? You know, that be mentally and physically that wellness aspect is really important. Great, because

we're in the middle of all of it, even if it's not our team or impacted by it. And so how do we keep people healthy is really been a big one for

Emily Fenech (08:37)
Like literally healthy,

Jess Smith (08:44)
Exactly. Exactly. Thank you, ourselves. Yeah. And a lot of times you, I feel like you get missed, Emily, like, you know, go through a big transformation or if you're doing need to leave you right as an HR team.

Emily Fenech (08:40)
like ensuring that HR is taking care of themselves.

Jess Smith (08:55)
⁓ some type of reorganization or it comes with a lot of emotions from others. And so naturally, you also have your own emotions, right? Which you are putting to the side to then manage the situation that you're in, but that doesn't mean you also don't have feelings. And you are receiving the feelings from others. And so I talked to my team a lot about protecting yourself in that moment and leading up to those moments and

Now for myself, for example, I'll lean in and out of activities in different ways when I try to just protect my own energy, right? Because I know that I'm going to need that energy for this other emotional task that is coming. So that's definitely one. And then the second one is, I would say, as AI comes into the picture, right?

Leaders are expecting us to be like most teams, right, more efficient, to be able to do more with less. And it's not clear yet, right, in the HR realm, what exactly are the efficiencies we need from AI? Which one should we use, right? And what's the right stack to put together to make that net new efficiency that you can now repurpose that, you know, to do something else? It's still being formed.

And so managing expectations is still a big challenge. I saw this morning, Gartner does a webinar for CHROs and the one this morning was saying that 65 % of CHROs are expecting their HR budget to be cut. And so, but the amount of things they need to do is the same. And so how do you manage that as a technology is still evolving is another really big.

Emily Fenech (10:40)
Yeah. And I also hear the expectation to drive AI adoption, which oftentimes involves tools and costs. That doesn't fit nicely alongside each other either, you know? And especially in recruitment, think the, spend a lot of time looking at tools, evaluating tools and so much of the AI focus is in that recruitment space, right? In terms of, yeah. And I know there's a lot of complexity there, but

Jess Smith (10:47)
Yep, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Emily Fenech (11:10)
How is Hayes thinking that through? And how are you, if you don't mind sharing, how are you leveraging AI in that, you are recruitment, right? How are you leveraging that to be more efficient in the service that you offer?

Jess Smith (11:18)
Thanks.

Yeah, so we're definitely using it a lot with clients, but the big thing right now internally, we're doing a lot of testing. So we have a big project ⁓ where we're testing. There's lots of different tools to see what is going to work best. Me personally, I also do some advising for some of AI tools, especially on voice interviewing. And I know you've had, I saw on your LinkedIn, you have experience.

or yeah on a blog post or maybe it's an article from a business.

Emily Fenech (11:55)
It was a business insider.

I wrote a LinkedIn post about an experience I had getting interviewed. was, I told you, I spend a lot of time using these tools as well. I really didn't like my experience and I just was, you know, pretty just laid it out there. And then business insider reached out to me to say, would you mind sharing that experience with us? And then they posted about it. And now I have this reputation as like AI interview hater, but I, but to be honest, there's certain things about it.

Jess Smith (12:04)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Emily Fenech (12:23)
that I can be as pros. Since then, I've talked to lot of people on the other side of that argument to get a balanced view. But you have to weigh the pros and cons for each situation on how much are those time savings worth in terms of the candidate experience. So.

Jess Smith (12:23)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yes.

Yes, that's

big. which is exactly why. And the mode where we are. But yeah, absolutely on the personal note, definitely. I'm looking at some of that too and doing lots

Emily Fenech (12:51)
Yeah, as you test it, what are some of the things that are top of mind for you? Do you have a mental checklist on sort of maybe where your boundaries are with things that you're looking for AI to automate, maybe things that you're not? What do you think about when you're testing these tools for particularly in recruitment?

Jess Smith (12:59)
Yeah.

Yeah, so definitely where the experience part, right? Because ultimately we're a service. And so we need to make sure that the experience and whatever it is or however it is we're going to use AI works well. And then from an employee standpoint, also to I'm thinking through, OK, how much and this is going to sound weird, like training, right? It's going to be required.

Because I say that because what I've seen is that when we're releasing some of the pilots, know, people are trying different things. And I'm seeing the other day somebody was presenting a presentation to me about something in their area. And I said, this presentation, doesn't say anything. Where like, it says, like, it has a lot of designs. It's pretty, but it doesn't actually give any content. And so how can we make sure then, like, what does the other work?

right, that will be created by implementing this type of technology right into our workforce because ultimately it will need something else, right? Is it training or is it prompt training? You know, how do people know that if they're using it in a way that they can actually get efficient?

Emily Fenech (14:25)
Right. You may have to hire some agency to actually customize it for you because you didn't realize how complex the backend was. There's always, it feels like there's always surprises, right? When you're implementing something that sort of take away from that time to value. Some tools are really easy. Like you get those edge cases, right? Where you plug something in and you're like, whoa.

Jess Smith (14:32)
⁓ Yes.

Right.

Yeah. My work

is unexpected. Yeah, definitely.

Emily Fenech (14:50)
But usually there's a little bit more effort. Yeah, but time to value. That's a great one. Well,

wonderful. there been any tools that you've tried that, I know you mentioned you're an advisor for some, but have there been any tools that you've tried that really have captured your attention and you've thought this feels important, this feels like they're onto something?

Jess Smith (15:09)
Um, not yet. I was like, this is it, right? They are close by. It's ready. Um, so I've seen a lot where I'm like, this has a lot of potential. Um, but that readiness Emily, like that's where for me is the big caution. Um, because we deal with people, right? So

Emily Fenech (15:13)
Wow.

break.

Jess Smith (15:35)
Ultimately, if it's overly agreeable, it is right, like it also can create risk right from a company governance perspective, like there's so many things that needs to be ready for that there's a lot of good potential, but that readiness still to be seen. Wish for a favorite one.

Emily Fenech (15:55)
Yeah, those edge cases.

I'm, I'm biased. I work at All Voices and I think we're doing something special in, ⁓ in an employee relations space, but, but to be completely honest, like most of the potential of what we're building, what we're automating with AI is yet to be seen. I think that, I think, and if you talk to any person who's building a platform, an AI native platform right now, like most of the potential is still ahead of us.

Jess Smith (16:06)
Mmm.

Mmm.

Emily Fenech (16:24)
There's been a lot of, there's a lot of couple of really cool use cases that people go, that's nice. Right? Like for example, like in our platform, when you're working on an employee relations case, there's like a catch me up feature. So instead of digging through it, it's like, you always know the latest status, like, ⁓ this is where we are. That's nice. Right. And also once you put all the information in it, we'll generate a port for you. That's nice. I mean, it saves you a lot of time. It's nice. Right. But

Jess Smith (16:30)
Mm.

Mmm.

Great.

Emily Fenech (16:51)
but the potential for how much could be automated and how much information could be available to people as they're sort of working through these complex issues, like it's still more human than it is automated. Do you know what I mean? So there's a lot of potential that remains. And I think that's sort of the case for when you think of like my favorite tools too, like for scheduling and recruitment, there's a lot of AI tools that make scheduling easy. That's so, it's a minor little thing if you think about it, but it.

Jess Smith (17:02)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Emily Fenech (17:19)
It makes a huge impact when you're not, can you imagine, I picture telling my kids, like when I was your age, I had to send an email that was like, here are the 14 times I'm available. Like I just, things like that make me chuckle, but we can automate that now and it's amazing, but it's a little thing. It's just a little, it's one little use case, right? So I still think, I think you're correct in being, I wouldn't say you seem skeptical at all, but more just like realistic that.

Jess Smith (17:26)
We move back and forth. ⁓

Emily Fenech (17:48)
the potential is still in the future.

Jess Smith (17:53)
Yes, it's coming quickly. But yeah, think we're still, we have some ways to go.

Emily Fenech (17:59)
Yeah. Well, any ⁓ sort of parting words of wisdom for folks who are, you know, maybe in a similar situation, you use sort of testing, do you like navigating change, all the things we've talked about today, do you have any sort of last words of encouragement or advice?

Jess Smith (18:13)
Yeah, and we take care yourself. There is a lot coming and we're on the precipice of a just a huge shift, right? It's a shift that will impact the way we work, the way we live, the way we interact. And it's coming quickly. We need to deal with it at work, at home, right? You how do you deal with your kids? The teacher, even yesterday at my parent teacher conference, like I'm having to write essays in class.

and because of AI and so it's impacting all parts of our lives. ⁓ and the change won't stop. So take care of yourself.

Emily Fenech (18:43)
Mm-hmm.

That's great advice.

That's great advice. Well, thank you so much, Jess. I really enjoyed chatting with you.