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The WorkOps Podcast is your weekly conversation with HR leaders and People Ops practitioners doing the real work.
In every episode we dig into one story. A process that went sideways, a system that just didn't work, and what someone actually did about it. Packed with practical lessons you'll want to bring back to your team. Whether you're supporting 500 employees or 5,000, this is how the best People leaders are building for what comes next.
riverside_the_workops podcast - amy garefis_kinfolk's_studio
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[00:00:00] The advice I would really give to that person in HR or wherever they're starting out is you gotta learn the business too. It's not just the craft and the details that you're responsible for. In my mind, the most effective people in any department are those that understand how the business works, not just how to, like, complete their nine-to-five
Welcome to the Work Ops podcast. In every episode, we dig into one story, a process that went sideways, a system that just didn't work, and what someone actually did about it. It's packed with practical lessons that you'll want to bring straight back to your team. This podcast is brought to you by Kinfolk, the AI service desk built for HR.
I'm your host, Jeet Mukherjee, and with that, let's dive in.
Hey, everyone.
Today, I am joined by Amy Garefis, who's the Chief People Officer at ZipRecruiter, which is one of the largest online marketplaces in the US, and it uses AI-driven matching to connect millions of job seekers with small businesses all the way up to enterprises. Amy, [00:01:00] very excited to have you on the Workos podcast today.
Thanks for having me, Jit. Nice to see you. Yeah. Likewise. Likewise. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, where you started, and how you ended up choosing HR? Right. Yeah. So I don't have a traditional pathway to this role, and I'm learning that more and more of us, uh, people or HR leaders are like me, who kind of find ourselves in these roles.
But up until about a couple years ago, my entire career path has been in finance. So I was a CPA and leading accounting teams through different industries throughout my career. I joined ZipRecruiter in 2013 when the company was about 60 people, and it was- Wow ... pre-fundraising. Um, and I joined as an individual contributor as the first accounting hire.
And, you know, it's been almost 13 years now that I've been with the company, and the company's been through so much in that time period. Um, [00:02:00] tons of growth. You know, a couple months after we joined, we did our series A, then we eventually did a series B, and in 2021, we did a public offering. So started as that individual contributor leading the accounting team of one and grew it all the way to a public entity with a full accounting team that's SOX compliant and doing all the stuff that you have to do as a public company.
And I'd say about a year into being a public company, I was loving it. I'm a huge nerd, so I love accounting and numbers. Um, but I started to talk with my manager, my CEO, and my, my boss at the time about, you know, what else can I get involved in? I love the job I have. I love the company, but I wanna do things that are more impactful to the business outside of the accounting team.
And I was really just, like, looking for more projects to work on. But about, you know, six months later, my leader, Dave Travers, mentioned to me that the chief people officer at Zip was leaving, and [00:03:00] they'd been thinking about offering the job to me and what would I think. I realized that I was excited about taking the opportunity.
There's... We can get into it, but there's so many things that are-- that work well between the accounting and finance team and HR. There's so much overlap as it is. I realized I'd maybe not seen myself completely transitioning roles, but I was already working on a lot of things that were HR adjacent. So I had managed payroll, managing benefits, very involved in compensation and equity comp.
Mm-hmm Wanted to be more involved, especially through our IPO on employee communications and employee engagement. So I was kind of tiptoeing towards some of these things, and, you know, I took the job. I felt like I had great support, and now it's been almost four years, and I'm really, really loving it. So that's how I got here.
Love that. Love that. What would you say has been the most surprising thing that you found in the last four years from the transition to accounting [00:04:00] into, into HR? I don't know if it was surprising, but I think the hardest thing for me was the mind shift of, in accounting and finance, there's always a right answer, and there are shades of gray, right?
You can interpret accounting guidance one way, and you can get creative in other ways. But with people, it's often the opposite, where there's never a right answer, and getting comfortable with knowing that you're always gonna be wrong in some respect. And a lot of people, it's easier to resonate with people issues, and so therefore you have a lot more critics, and I wasn't used to that in accounting, where, like, if I made a bad accounting call- Right
unless it was really, really bad and, like, impacted our financial statements, the blast radius was small. But I find in HR, like, every call that you make, everybody has an opinion because they can all relate to it. So it was really just getting comfortable with, okay, in [00:05:00] accounting and finance, I know what I'm doing, and I know I'm gonna make the right decisions, and I have the right guidance.
In HR, I have a great team from a compliance perspective who knows when there are black and white issues, but those aren't the things that come up to me. The decisions that I'm having to make and talk through with the team have never been done before, don't have a right answer, or have a zillion different ways to solve them.
So just getting comfortable with kind of that transition, I think, was the most- Yeah ... challenging. You sound like someone who's quite comfortable with uncertainty and very adaptable. I mean, that's quite a career shift, and you found the transferable skills. You've gone from 60 people, I think you mentioned, all the way to a public offering.
Yeah. Those are some pretty big milestones and changes. Uh, and you've seen it from, from both lenses, kind of the numbers side and also the people side. Would you recommend an entry level grad who's thinking about career options, would you recommend they go straight into HR now that you've spent a [00:06:00] few years in HR?
If that's what they wanted to do? Yeah. I would say yes. I think it's a good career path, um, and you have to start somewhere. I would say that the advice though I would give to anybody that's in an entry level position is when you're younger and earlier in your career, you should be taking more risks because the stakes are a little bit lower.
So you should quickly find out what works for you and what doesn't because it's easier for you to pivot. So I would say it's a good step, but I would definitely work at a place where you have exposure to a lot of different things. Yeah. Because what, at least for me, what's enabled me to have these pivots in my career is You know, supportive managers obviously, but being able to kind of walk over to another department or s- work in a smaller company where you've had access to kind of learn a bunch of different things.
And the advice I would really give to that person in HR or wherever they're starting out is [00:07:00] you gotta learn the business too. It's not just the craft and the details that you're responsible for. In my mind, the most effective people in any department are those that understand how the business works, not just how to, like, complete their 9:00 to 5:00.
Yeah. I really like that. There's so much in there, and I suppose the first thing is that we're seeing AI kind of break down some of those barriers even more, and it feels like some of those core capabilities and core skills of learning the business, regardless of whichever department you work in- Yeah
is gonna become increasingly important. Mm-hmm. And we've been speaking with other people, leaders, and they're seeing, I would say it's about 50/50, where some are saying, "Yeah, we're not hiring juniors anymore, um, because we need to grow at a certain pace and we need a certain level of experience." Doesn't mean that we're not gonna bring in any, but it's, it's reduced significantly.
They must be paired with someone who's been in the business for a fair few years and who's seen things around here. Where do you land on that? Are you hiring a bunch of juniors? Is there [00:08:00] time and space to invest in, in those folks, or have you shifted to the other side? Yeah, so two comments on that. We put out some research a couple months ago where we actually survey new hires and new entry to the job market, and those people are having some challenges breaking into the job market for a variety of reasons.
Yeah. One of the things that we're seeing that they're doing, which kind of speaks to what I said a few moments ago, is they're taking any type of work and exposure that they can get to kind of bolster their resume so that they have experience. Maybe it's not exactly what their future employer wants, but so they have some experience.
So side gigs, internships. I mean, this isn't, like, mind-blowing. It's kind of obvious, but they really are kind of diversifying their experience before they're able to land that first job. In terms of ZipRecruiter, we strongly believe in investing in early-in-career talent. We've had an engineering internship program that's been largely successful for the past several years.
Some of the best engineers that we have in the [00:09:00] organization now started out as interns, finished out their last year of college, then joined us as new grads. Yeah, it would be great if everybody could join the company and immediately have some experience that's relevant. But the flip side is that when you have experience, you also bring in existing- Biases or like ways of doing work and new and early in career talent Mm.
You have the opportunity to kind of set them early instead of unbreak habits. Yeah. And so we've had really great success. Our interns work on real projects, and they present their work, and like I said, we've been able to kind of grow and, and promote a lot of our interns. So we definitely believe that- That's awesome
it's important to be investing there Do you find that they are maybe ramping up faster because they are AI pilled or more AI pilled than people already in work [00:10:00] and they're able to pick things up much faster? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, before we started recording this call, you talked about how you don't think AI is a tool.
I don't think of it that way either. It's like a mindset and it's a way of doing work. And so the new grads and the younger generation, they're not gonna know what it was like without these tools or these options. So- Yeah ... expectations are gonna evolve, but they're not gonna know any differently. So there's a totally different way of approaching the learning curve for them than it is for people like me who knew about life before this and after
Yeah. It's like pre-post internet, pre-post Facebook. Right. Now, now this. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And the other thing you mentioned a couple of times too is that you had a really good leader, and you had a manager who you were able to kind of discuss where you wanted to go, and then ended up choosing the HR path, and you had that support.
And the other trend that we're hearing and seeing is that a lot of managers are actually now happy to shift to an IC role 'cause they're [00:11:00] like, "Hey, I now have the experience, I now have the tools to be able to do the thing, so I'm actually pretty happy moving to IC as opposed to continuing on the manager path."
And we're seeing almost some of those layers get a little bit squeezed because there's an expectation that everybody needs to be at the coal face and building or delivering value. Yeah. What are you seeing or hearing? Yeah. A, a couple thoughts. I think with the adoption of AI, it kind of is turning everybody into a manager, where everybody has the ability to delegate and review and, and take ownership of work, whether you're building processes or you're literally just like throwing some email into AI to like help you rewrite or put your thoughts together.
So I think some of the skills that we're getting are applicable to ICs or a- applicable to managerial skills, even if you don't have like an actual human sitting beneath you in the org chart. In terms [00:12:00] of managers turning into ICs, that's a really interesting concept because at least I've been at ZipRecruiter, like I said, for 13 years now, and I've seen the company at 60 people, I've seen the company at 1,600, I've seen the company at nearly 1,000, where we are now.
And at every level we've always had managers who are working managers, and that's- Yeah ... what I prefer as a style of work as well. Like, I love being able to dig my fingernails into problems and really understand what's going on, but I also know that I need to delegate and grow the people around me. And I've been at very large companies too, where I've seen the like kind of ivory tower managers that like don't do any of the work.
That's just not my style. I can't help myself. So I really like environments where- You have that balance of like, okay, we have this team mentality and I'm going to dive in if I need to, but I also am working to make sure that my team beneath me can, like, support and grow as [00:13:00] well. Yeah. And how do you balance, again now with AI, we're hearing that there are some leaders who are saying, "Hey, I used to go and ask someone for a dashboard because I needed to understand the analytics or the reports for the last couple of weeks, and then they take a few more hours, they click a button, they generate the report and send it to me.
Whereas now, with MCP Connectors, I can go in, I can look at our data, I can query it myself, so I don't need to ask them for that stuff. Are you seeing that happen as well? Are, are you seeing that actually the things you were asking your team to do, that is now changing, and it's actually creating more work for you even though it's maybe faster?
Or are you seeing the same kind of work, but just slightly evolved? Yeah, definitely seeing more work faster, and work that has evolved and of higher quality. You didn't say it exactly this way, but like that hasn't netted me any free time. Like- ... in work, like any free time that you get gets [00:14:00] consumed by other work.
So I think one of the things that we just have to be diligent about as we're kind of seeing this evolution is, how am I going to use my free time? Because if you don't kind of plan like for what are the strategic things that you're going to invest in once you are able to automate this, then other things are just gonna creep in and consume that time.
So definitely see the change happening, and it's really just being cognizant about what are you going to do once you've optimized this process or figured out how to solve this, you know, elephant thing that used to take eight hours and now it takes five minutes. And are you using AI within your team currently?
It sounds like you are. What are some of the ways that you're, you're using it? Yeah. So we have all subscriptions to like the Frontier Labs. Our engineering team is using Claude extensively, and we are using Gemini and Google Suite as like kind of our core accesses. We're also making sure that we're optimizing and understanding all the [00:15:00] AI that's like embedded already in the existing technical things that we have.
So you know, even, I hope you can't hear it, but I'm getting pinged, you know, a million times on Slack in the background. Yeah. But like all of the existing tools that we have are rapidly iterating on what their capabilities are, so making sure we're kind of staying up to date on what those capabilities are.
And then in terms of the people team, we've got all different levels of adoption. Um, I think at a baseline everybody's using Gemini to help with their version ones, their brainstorming. Research is another one that's kind of like the baseline level of how we're using it. And then we've got our super users, you know, and everything in between.
But the super users are like building out processes and workflows and automating things, and so we're still in the like experimentation and building- phase. I don't think we've, we, we haven't, like, rapidly transformed any roles yet, and I think that's pretty normal for where, where- Totally ... the people teams are.
But [00:16:00] it's gonna be really interesting over the next few years to think about how those roles really evolve when you don't, you know, to call back to what you said earlier, when, you know, an entry level person from 10 years ago was probably spending eight hours a day typing stuff into your HRIS, that's, like, gonna be non-existent.
I mean, it kind of- Yeah ... is non-existent now, but, like, what else are we going to be able to consciously use that time and resource for? Exactly. That seems to be the big growing question now. As you already put, it's like, "Hey, I'm gonna automate this stuff," but no one sits still. I haven't come across a single business that goes, "Yeah, we're just gonna stick with this revenue number now that we've hit it."
As soon as you free up some empty time, you're gonna wanna fill that with revenue generating or strategic activities in any case. How do you think the people team is going to look, maybe not in three years or five years. I mean, ChatGPT, I think, came out four years ago, so, so much can happen in five years.
It's, it's difficult to say. Yeah. But what about in maybe 12 months? Do you think [00:17:00] there's gonna be a, a shift in, in the way the people team is made up, or are we gonna stay pretty consistent? I think in 12 months it's probably n- not gonna look that different. I think the technology is very rapidly iterating and getting better and better.
So I think in most companies, ours included, the people team does not make up a large portion of the whole company, so we're not trying to, like, rapidly optimize every single role here. I think in companies where you have, you know, lots of engineers, where the, the AI technology is frankly a lot better at this point, is where you're gonna see the most rapid growth.
But in terms of the people team, I think in the next 12 months, we are just going to have- We will have automated many up our manual laborious tasks. I think we largely will probably have the same processes, but they will be automated. I think the next phase will then be really thinking through like, okay, did we just do what we were doing and now we've automated [00:18:00] it, or do we need to start thinking about a totally different way of doing it?
Yeah. My hope is that each team member is spending more time on the things that are require like an actual human. So strategizing with leaders through org design or tough conversations, or thinking about how to incentivize talent through, you know, you can automate some like comp and performance stuff, but also just like real development and like the emotional part of it.
So I think kind of honing in on those things that we all as people leaders would love to spend more time if we didn't have to do the paperwork, is where I think we'll take up like a bigger piece of the pie in terms of where we're putting our effort every day. Yeah. On the right stuff, on the more, the human judgment requiring stuff- Yeah
rather than the- And our company, like what we do is we're matching job seekers to their hopefully dream job. And so from what we wanna do as a business is like we [00:19:00] know we can invent the greatest technology, but at the moment, like the hiring decision happens when two people are talking Yeah. And so we're trying to build a system at ZipRecruiter's marketplace where we wanna get you into a conversation with a real person as quickly as possible.
So we know and we believe that, like, you can't remove humans from all the processes. Absolutely. And it's about balancing that, like what do you hand off to AI and what do you hand off to, to a human at the right time. And it feels like we're in a bit of a period of tension because in order to get to that magical moment when all the paperwork is gone, everything's automated that should be automated, and you can focus on...
Your entire team can kind of focus on the best, more strategic human stuff- Mm-hmm ... there has to be an investment now to bring everybody up to a certain level of maturity or AI fluency, let's say. Sure. And you mentioned earlier that people are at various levels of adoption, which is super common, and some people put their hand up and say, "I'll go ahead and build workflows," and some folks are a little bit more hesitant.
How do you kind of think about that? Are you running AI fluency [00:20:00] courses, hackathons, or is it happening organically? I'm curious to kind of hear how it's bubbling up for you and your team. We're kind of doing all of those things. We don't have a super sophisticated plan for the whole organization yet on what we're doing, and I think there's kind of natural evolution within different functional groups.
I mentioned earlier, like engineers have been adopting and using in a way that far different than like our customer service team or our people team or finance team. So we have a very simple framework and baseline of like offering a few courses about how to best utilize the tools that are available to everyone, like Gemini, for example.
Some like safety courses, don't put this stuff here and, you know, make sure you're responsible for all, all the work. Stuff that feels intuitive once you like spend time, but are important like baseline frameworks. Yeah. So that's where we are as a full company, but like I mentioned earlier, we also [00:21:00] have a bunch of like evangelists that kind of naturally self-identify throughout the org that are kind of leading different initiatives- Mm-hmm
um, each department. And we're working now on how do we kind of harness those self-identified leaders to kind of create within each- Awesome ... department a little bit more of an organized framework. Awesome. What are your thoughts on having AI as a skill set or a capability on job descriptions? I mean, I know that it's based on ZipRecruiter data, we're seeing it- Yeah
more and more, and we're seeing it more and more in resumes. I even read an article the other day where it was looking at over time LinkedIn resumes, and like people are going back and adding AI into their resume, like in 2021 and 2022, when it was not even that big. But the second thing you said is where I think that it should ultimately go.
Again, I don't think AI is a skill per se in the long term. I think it's just a way of doing work, and it's just a [00:22:00] way that's gonna facilitate work, and it's gonna change our expectations. But I think right now, when people are kind of getting into that, like ramping- Yeah ... and understanding, like your example with the internet, like I'm sure internet was a skill at some point on-
but like that would be ridiculous now. So I do think it'll probably go that way. But right now, I think as companies are kind of figuring out what... And people have varying levels of their baseline capabilities, I do think it, it should start showing up in resumes and in job descriptions because right now we don't have that kind of baseline expectation yet.
You know, you have-- hear these stories about these a million extra engineers that are making millions and millions of dollars. That's great for them. They should definitely capitalize on that. But over time, I think the gap between the best engineers and the baseline is gonna kind of even out, and we won't need to necessarily call out all the detailed skills that are required.
It's just gonna be expected for the [00:23:00] job. Do, do you think, and maybe we need another podcast episode, episode on this, but as everybody skills up faster and catches up, I just saw your hand gesture, and do you think the salaries at the top will compress, or do you think everybody's salaries will go up because we're kind of increasing productivity and expecting more of people, and therefore what we do is worth more with AI?
I think they'll- Or will it be both? Oh, you think they'll compress down? Okay. Bit of normalization. Yeah. Yeah. I think the premium that we're seeing now, it's a scarce commodity because there aren't that many thousand Xers, but I think as it just becomes like expectation way of life that, you know, it's like supply and demand.
I think the supply will be more available in the next couple of years. Nice. Nice. I don't know. I- I have a crystal ball, so. Check in. I'd like to shift gears a little bit, and the story that you're bringing to us, you talked about how it's about human collaboration, in-person [00:24:00] collaboration, and you started by saying, "Hey, that you could walk over to, to someone, to your manager, and you can get support."
And it feels like some of that is being potentially eroded perhaps. We've talked a lot about AI. I'd love to hear your story about that in-person collaboration, what worked, what needed to change, and how you might do things differently today. Yeah. So the story I kind of thought about was not necessarily even in relation to AI, but I think the themes are with recruiters feeling, and might personally feel like that human connection is really, really important.
And like many companies going through COVID, we had the everybody was in office. Okay, everybody worked from home for a couple years and trying to figure out what that right balance is. And every exec, and like I said earlier, with people in general, everyone under the sun having a different theory, hypothesis, desire about what they want in terms of in-person collaboration versus work from home.
And our approach has been, for the most part, minus a few roles that are required to be in the [00:25:00] office most of the day, most of the time, um, but for the most part, people have the flexibility to work from home or to work from one of our two big offices in Los Angeles or Phoenix We allow that flexibility because it allows us to recruit from all of the United States and have access to a larger talent pool.
It's a competitive advantage for us because there are so many companies that are now requiring three, four, five days in office, and we definitely don't think that that's something, a restriction we wanna put on our talent. However, we, we're a really fun company, and it was really fun coming in five days a week.
So we wanted to make sure that, like, we have fun in our work, and we don't lose that connectivity. And when you are able to go out to dinner with a teammate and have that personal connection and spend that time, like, it makes the work more pleasant and more approachable, and really, like, having that team-building time we realized was really, really important.
So what we do at ZipRecruiter is four times a year we fly our [00:26:00] entire corporate, tech, finance teams, and m- more teams, but it's mostly... It's not sales. But we fly all of them to our Phoenix office, and for a week, and we call it Collaboration Week. And, you know, you kinda asked me what, what did we learn or what was different.
I think our first thesis on why we wanted to do this is we're like, "Oh, it's so much more productive if you're in person." Like, I can just go over to your office and just resolve this versus setting a meeting and then, you know, for a week from now. So our first thesis was productivity. We quickly realized that four times a year actually didn't really increase the productivity because- Hmm
you know, maybe there's this thing I can just call you about right now, Jeet, but instead I'll just see you in two weeks in Phoenix. Or I haven't seen you in three months, and on the way to have a meeting with you, I get distracted with 15 other people that I haven't seen for three months. And so it almost felt less productive to be in person in terms of actual output.
However, it was [00:27:00] like team building super boosted, where everyone was in the same area, learning the same things. You know, we have a good mix of, like, free time and programmed learning opportunities, and so it really... Like, the thesis now is more, like, camaraderie and partnership and team building. Um, obviously there is work that gets done too.
There are meetings, and we are still working. Yeah. But it's evolved, and I think honestly, like, listen, nothing's perfect, but I think it is a really good compromise or program that we've started that has given us a competitive advantage too because, again, we allow employees to have the flexibility of working from home or in our office if they want for most of the year, and a couple times a year we have that kind of supercharged team building.
And we do have a big sales office in Phoenix. However, most of the people that attend these weeks don't live in Phoenix, so it's also nice that we're all kind of, like- We're all [00:28:00] equally displaced Yeah and, you know, nobody's leaving early to, like, go drop their kid at soccer practice. We're all there, and it's like that four days of just, it's really fun.
It's also really exhausting. But that four days Doing what we need to do and delighted. Equally displaced. I really like that. And this is a question that we've been thinking about as well, is like how do you quantify the value of in-person time when we're not thinking about productivity? I think that's a really nice flip.
Mm-hmm. How are you seeing that? Or actually, is that the wrong question to ask? Should we not be looking to quantify those, the output or the outcome or the value of those four days at all? I mean, as a person that spent 20 years in finance, it's hard for me to say this, but like, I don't know. Like, there's no math formula that's gonna tell you ROI, like if these things are worth it or not.
I think the things that we're looking for are like, you know, we survey after each one, what could we do better? How did we like it? I said a few moments ago, we use it as a... You know, we [00:29:00] know that having the ability to work from home is an advantage, but like how much of an advantage over if we require two days in the office, is it?
I don't know how to do that math. So the way that we keep learning that it's important is like really just paying attention to the feedback that we get and understanding that, you know, these things aren't cheap, and it's not insignificant to ask hundreds of people to spend a week away from their family.
And so we're open to pivoting and changing those, but the consistent feedback that we get is that people really enjoy them. They're great for kinda newer hires to finally meet their team in person and have that experience. And so similar to how our thesis on why we're doing these changed, I think we're open to evaluating like, you know, at some point, if this isn't working in this format, being able to pivot.
But yeah, I don't have the-- Sadly, I don't have the exact mathematical formula on what the right investment level is. Damn. I was hoping with your [00:30:00] accounting background- Yeah. I- You know. For better or worse, we had signed a 10-year lease like two weeks before COVID in, for this giant office in Phoenix, so we kind of were locked into the fixed cost-
of like having a space to host these things. Nice. It sounded like a blessing in disguise, I, I suppose. And four times a year, it feels like you've hit the right cadence. Mm-hmm. Of once, once a quarter, essentially four days each quarter. Yeah. That sounds like a lot of work, though, to do every quarter. Mm-hmm.
For your team to organize- Yeah ... is it still a lot of work? It is a lot of work, but we're very diligent at consistency. So to make it easier for the team that's putting and hosting it, we always stay at the same hotels. We usually have that party that I mentioned at the same place. We have the same catering trucks.
We have like coffee trucks and stuff. We-- Everybody sits in- Nice ... the same area. So we wanna like reduce the cognitive load of both the attendees, they know where to go, they know what to expect, and [00:31:00] then similarly, like we sign one-year contracts now with the hotels. Like we've got it down to like a science of what we have to do.
Yes, it's a lot of work, but we have the formula and the playbook written. Nice. So yeah, that's in- interesting. It sounds like typically what people would tend to do is they'd go to a different location and make the location the hero of the offsite, but actually you're stripping all that away and you're making the human connection the most important thing.
So people are really familiar with the space and they're not spending time exploring the space and actually, yeah. Phoenix is great. There's a lot of fun stuff to do there. But the main reason we do it is because we have that set up and so we can offer that consistency, and people know what to expect and they're not swirling around on Monday morning like, "Where do I go?
Where's my stuff?" Yeah. And how do you maintain that energy or those learnings or those connections between each of those four moments, uh, during the year? Yeah. I think, like, the high of it lasts a couple, like a month or two [00:32:00] after, so people are feeling really energized- Okay ... and excited after. We also offer kind of in-between collab weeks if you have a team or you have a good business reason, a problem you wanna solve or whatever, you can always plan.
So those big ones are called collaboration weeks. We call collaboration sessions if you wanna organize something in our Los Angeles or Phoenix office kind of off cycle. So it's not like all in person is cut off on the knees on Thursday when everyone's departing. And, you know, we have all the other stuff that most companies do.
We have biweekly town hall meetings to kinda keep everybody informed on what's going on and see some faces, individual team meetings. So we're very big on, as I said before, the human connection and having those conversations. Yeah. Thanks, Amy. Um, before we start to wrap things up, we've talked, uh, quite a bit about AI, and we spent a little bit of time on kind of the human connection and how important it is.
You led with the example around, yes, you're an AI matching platform, but the magic happens when [00:33:00] two humans meet and then that decision gets made. You're investing a lot in human connection as well. If you were to share any advice or things to think about for folks listening to this episode as they are navigating AI, uh, and they're thinking about adoption and maintaining what humans are good at and, and how to drive more usage within the business, uh, any kind of nuggets that they should keep in mind as they go through this phase?
Yeah. I think the thing I would say is you want to encourage experimentation, but that can be intimidating if people don't have any frame of reference. So I would say give them tools, give them like a finite set of tools, 'cause you don't wanna be overwhelmed by too many choices. And I would showcase examples, like real-life examples of how people are doing things.
Like, some of the hardest things is like, "I don't even know where to start." And so you hear about all these crazy cool things [00:34:00] that are being built, and you're like, "Oh, I don't even barely know how to fire this thing up." And so I would- Yeah ... encourage, like, you know, your super users and managers and leaders to kinda share even those, like, small incremental wins visibly, and that kind of gets the, like- curiosity brewing, and I've sat on countless webinars where people built all this stuff that probably took days and weeks to do, and I'm like, "I just wanna solve this one little thing that I know if I spent 15 minutes I could probably do."
So just make it accessible. Yeah. And do you find that actually those in-person collaboration weeks helps to drive that up where people share more? Do you find there's these, like, jumps in excitement and AI usage and adoption every time you do these kind of in-person collaboration weeks? Yeah. I mean, we're not-- That's not something we've, like, specifically measured, but even the last collaboration week and the one that we're planning, we've had some learning sessions specifically about AI.
So [00:35:00] last period we had three different people in the organization kind of explain processes that they've done. I think we had one from product, we had one from my team, and one other team I can't remember at the time. Just kind of showcasing, like, "Hey, here's something I built with Dom and I," or, "Here's something I did."
Yeah. We also have some great users in the marketing team who we've started kind of like a, they start a, a lunch and learn, a virtual lunch and learn where they're kind of showcasing some of the stuff that they've done. So we do try and... It's all anyone can talk about, right? Like so we always have something going on with respect to AI learning.
Nice. Well, thank you so much, Amy. Uh, it's been really fun to speak with you about hearing about your journey from accounting into, into HR and, and focusing on the human side, uh, of things. So yeah, I really appreciate you joining on the Workos podcast, and to everyone listening, we will catch you on the next one.
Thank you, Jit. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for having me.