Beyond HR Admin: How Strategic People Leaders Drive Engagement with AI

Welcome to the Built by People podcast, where we highlight the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Now, let's Let's get started and welcome our next guest.

Hi, and welcome to the Built by People podcast. I'm Dallin Demke, and I'm joined today by Desiree Apricuma. Desiree, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Absolutely. Hey, as a starting question, I always love to ask if you can share more about your career journey. What led you here?

Sure. Yeah, I would say I didn't really set out to be in HR, to be honest. I think HR kind of found me. I had a mentor when I was working at a retailer as a sales manager tap me on the shoulder. I said yes to an opportunity, and that has turned into a career that I've loved for almost 2 decades. So, I think HR is where my natural curiosity for people kind of met my ability to solve problems, and I've just been hooked ever since.

I love that. That's great. You know, in the spirit of HR, what's, what's the biggest challenge you're currently facing within HR?

Oh my goodness. I mean, we deal with people, right? So on a daily basis, there's various challenges. I would say probably, you know, working in a remote environment has posed a unique challenge for my current employer. And we are constantly thinking of ways to keep our team members engaged, to find meaningful, memorable ways for them to connect, to build rapport with one another. I think, you know, in a post-pandemic world, we were forced to just get really creative and leverage technology. And I would say at my current employer, that's one that we're constantly, you know, thinking through and trying to figure out how best to, like I said, use the tools at our disposal to connect. So there's been a lot of great innovation in the space to help remote teams connect virtually. And then of course, we've kind of built our own toolkit about best ways to— and most effective ways, I'll say— to hold an in-person meeting so that when we do get together, we're really maximizing our team members' time and getting the most out of, you know, the couple of days we're together live and in person.

Oh, that's great. What's keeping you up at night besides that?

I think my mind doesn't stop at night because there are a lot of challenges that we have as HR practitioners. I am pretty creative, and so a lot of times I'm thinking about, how can I leverage AI? It's a hot topic, not just at my current company, but in so many different industries, right? There's all this amazing technology before us. It's evolving every hour on the hour, it feels like. And I always want to make the best use of team members' times and leaders' times and how can I use this technology as an HR leader to be more effective, whether it's leveraging it for, you know, all the virtual meetings that I have and note-taking or helping to summarize notes, but just ways to cut down a little bit of that admin that we have to do and spend it in more strategic conversations, right? Literally every day there's a new update to a new prompt that you can use or, you know, thinking of chatGPT GPT, like a new, a new upgrade that they've done that makes it easier to search or summarize things. So, it's pretty interesting, but also, it just feels like, you know, green space, so many things that we can explore, and I'm always looking for creative ways to engage people and leverage that technology. So, that tends to keep me up.

Okay, makes sense. Well, and along those lines, my next question or questions, I have a two-parter for you, is about tools. So, which tools or partners are most critical for you today? And the second part of that is, if I could wave a magic wand for you and fix one system or process, what would it be?

Oh, goodness. I would say one of the— I mean, you know, as a people function, one of our number one tools that we leverage is, you know, our HRIS system, which happens to be Workday. I have several colleagues who just got back from their conference, and we're just speaking this morning at a meeting about some of the cool enhancements that are coming. So we, as an organization, have to remain nimble and learn to adapt as these new things come our way. I think with that, the change management aspect of maybe employing new processes with our systems, right? Figuring out where things might be broken to make something easier for our team members, not just on the people team, but for the business that we serve, right? We have to, you know, as people practitioners, we're looking at not things just from an HR perspective, right? We don't want to build processes that only work for the HR team. They need to work for the business. And so, you know, we're constantly looking at ways that we can evolve, you know, our current practices to make them a bit easier for team members that we serve at our organization.

I love that. That's great. Thank you. Well, if I came back in 12 months from now, Desiree, what would you hope has changed within your HR org or within your company?

Well, I think we're going to continue to grow and hire some great people. So, one thing that will change is some of these critical roles will be filled with amazing new hires. We're doing a lot of recruitment right now at RisePoint. It's an exciting time. We're building up our tech product management team and have, you know, a bunch of like AI engineer opportunities available and product management roles. And so, I think, you know, we would've done an amazing job at recruiting the talent, again, nationwide because we're remote, to fill those critical positions to move forward our mission.

That's great. And as a final question, just want to ask, what parting advice would you like to share with our community? Or other HR experts, leadership, things like that?

That's a great question. I would say, and people are complicated, right? When you're dealing with a business that has people, which all of them do, right? That's why we're here as HR. We've got to handle with care. So stay curious about their stories, but also about the business that you support. I think the best HR leaders know the people and they know the numbers. So if you can speak the language of both, you'll always have a seat at the table.

Awesome. Well, Desiree, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thank you.

Thanks.