La'Toya Prieur

▶0:01HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. Latoya, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:52GuestThank you. I'm happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation. My journey started a little more than 20 years ago. I was a college student and I was bored sitting at home. So I found the USA Jobs, usajobs.gov job site, and I started looking for positions that would be flexible with my, my college schedule, and I lucked up. Found a couple of things with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and that is how my federal career in HR began. I was offered an administrative position with a human resources center in Detroit, and I was like, oh, this is cool. I'll try it. And I saw for the first time that the office was run by women, and I was surprised. They were beautiful, professional. Everybody came to them because they were subject matter experts, and I was like, these ladies are, are bosses. I might want to stick around here. So I did, and here I am, my 21st year as a federal servant, and I haven't looked back.

▶2:15HostThat's amazing. You know, it reminds me when I was in college, I had an internship with the State Department in Nepal. My path could have been very similar, and it's amazing to hear how long you've been in that federal ecosystem. I'm curious to get a little more about your perspective on your inspiration on choosing a career in federal government HR and how you navigated that journey from an entry-level position to the position you're in now, which is executive level.

▶2:48GuestSure. I have worked as— I was in the military under, my goodness, now the president's names are escaping me, but under the Clinton and Bush administrations, I worked in law enforcement for the state of Ohio. So this was really a natural shift to come into the federal government, but I, I got the job. I was a GS-4, and if you look on the federal scale, it starts from GS-1, uh, for general schedule, and it goes to a GS-15. Uh, I have never heard of anyone being hired at less than a GS-4, and it was a huge pay cut coming from the police department into the federal government. I still have my offer letter from 2007, and I made $27,000. So that wasn't a lot of money in 2007. So I would go on Craigslist and like look for odd jobs where people needed an assistant. Or someone to come and file things at their house to make money on the side. But I was able to move out of that program support assistant position. There was, under the Obama administration, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I was able to become an HR assistant, and then when I finished my undergraduate degree, I was able to progress into an HR specialist role, and that really showed me the ins and outs of federal staffing. I would say it takes at least 3 years to become comfortable as a staffer, because as you read through the Code of Federal Regulations, the United States Code, I encourage everyone to turn a page. That is in that job because you think you have the answer. And I tell you, there is an exception to almost every rule in federal staffing, and you literally have to read to the end of the chapter, read the footnotes, because some of the answers are literally in the footnotes. I had a supervisor that we nicknamed the Dragon because everyone was scared of her. She was mean. She was a little bit loud, but she knew more than everybody else in the office. And I said, you know, I want to go and work for the dragon. And that was one of the best decisions that I could have ever made because she really taught me federal staffing. And on that team, there were only 3 of us, but if we had a question, we had to go to the law and the regulation. To find the answer, and I just encourage any supervisor, anyone that is in human resources to just really become a master of your craft because I was able to rise from a GS-4 to a GS-14 where I was making over 6 figures in 7 years, and that is almost unheard of in the federal government. But it's because I took the time to read. I was responsive to my customers. Even now with the transition going on, I have people emailing me like, hey, do you know where my paperwork is? And I'm like, yep, we got it today and it'll be about a week before we process it. And they're like, oh my goodness, I cannot believe with all of the work that is coming down that you had time to respond to me. The same day. So I just encourage everyone to, you know, if you don't know the answer, don't fudge it, look it up, ask someone, don't fail alone, but be responsive to your customers because in HR, everyone in your organization has to come to HR. We're the money people, we're the benefits people. It helps to build those relationships, to be kind to people, and to be responsive to folks. And if you don't have the answer, just say, hey, I don't know, but give me 24 hours and I'll get back to you. So that's how I was able to come up so quickly.

▶7:27HostI love those lessons. You touched on a topic, uh, staffing earlier. I wanted to ask what challenges and successes you've experienced in large-scale federal hiring. Such as onboarding, say, 20,000 employees in 2 years?

▶7:44GuestMy goodness. Well, when I worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs, I worked on the hospital side for a bit. But when the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxic Act was passed in 2022, I was on the benefits side. So in Veterans Benefits Administration, which is a child agency of the Department of Veterans Affairs, There are 6 business lines, but the largest business line I would say that organization is known for is disability compensation. And veterans, service members, actually some family members are eligible for disability compensation if they have an injury or illness that can be attributed to their active duty service. Family members as well. You'll hear about the Camp Lejeune water contamination, things of that nature where family members are able to apply for benefits as well. And with the PACT Act, many folks have heard of Gulf War illness or Gulf War syndrome. And back in the '90s when the Gulf War was going on, we knew that something was wrong. You know, you're coming to the doctor and saying something is wrong, but there wasn't a diagnosis. Now the science has caught up to the illness, and doctors are able to call out some of those things that our service members were suffering from. So in response to that, we needed to hire claims personnel to answer the 1-800-My-VA number and tell people how to file a claim, how to get benefits. And then we needed folks to actually process those claims. I have never had a more difficult job in my life because Congress said, VA, here is the money, here are the people, now go bring them on board. I started off with a team of about 300. I think when I left Veterans Affairs last year, my team was almost 800 strong because you have to have personnel to bring these folks on, counsel them, give them their benefits. But we started a marketing campaign on USA Jobs with different chambers of commerce, on Handshake. We did some MOUs with schools and universities to get folks online. So it's not sexy to work in the federal government. We're not a Fortune 500 company. We're not Google or Meta or any of those places. So when people think about where they want to work, the federal government usually is not on the list. And I had a fantastic team that literally beat the streets, were boots on the ground. I remember we did 8 hiring fairs in 1 month and hired over 1,000 people. And that's how we were successful with mass hiring. We would go places. I know we went to Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Petersburg, Florida, Waco, Texas, and people were excited because here is a job where you can earn a living. You can actually get a pension because the federal government has defined benefits announcements. I believe they continue to do mass job announcements, and we were wildly successful. So that's how we were able to hire 20,000 people in about 2 years.

▶11:46HostThat's amazing. And what advice would you give to someone considering a career in federal HR, particularly through the lens of growth opportunities and common misconceptions?

▶11:59GuestSure. I would say be patient because it's not a, a 1-day turnaround. So the federal government has an 80-day, 80-calendar-day time-to-hire model, and that is from the time a customer says, hey, LaToya, I need a job announcement until we actually get a body in the seat. So if you are interested in working in the federal government, I can attest it's a fantastic place to work. Working for VA and helping service members and veterans was an extremely noble mission. Now that I have transitioned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, there are a number of disasters that have happened all over the country. And the mission of FEMA is to help people before, during, and after disasters. So the agency is very active with Hurricanes Helene, Hurricanes Milton, all of the wildfires that are happening in California. So if you want to help fellow Americans, by all means, look us up, www.usajobs.gov. There are resume writing templates to make sure that your knowledge, skills, and abilities are accurately reflected on that resume. I would say to answer the questions truthfully. In FEMA, we are always looking for reservists. So for folks that are unemployed, underemployed, especially for folks that are retired or just want to supplement their income a little bit. We always have a reservist cadre that we're looking to deploy to different areas of the country to help people who are disaster survivors. So by all means, put your best foot forward, make sure that you practice interviewing, when I got this job a couple of months ago, I practiced interviewing on my phone and answered questions, made sure that I recorded myself, that I sounded intelligent, that I answered the question, that I wasn't looking off elsewhere. So yeah, make sure that you're prepared for your interview and to provide relevant and recent examples and You know, my staff would love to review your application and see where you might be a good fit.

▶14:39HostThanks for that, LaToya. And what an important mission that you're driving at your organization. I'm curious to get your perspective on how you align HR initiatives with your organization's mission to drive employee empowerment and engagement.

▶14:55GuestAbsolutely. I view my employees as customers, so we have a customer base of 26,000 employees, but I have about 550 employees and every single one of those folks is my customer. So I make sure that they are prepared, that they are accurately trained. I have an open door policy, so anybody can come and ask me a question. There's really a strong focus on training. This year, but also on innovation. What low-level tasks are there? What low-hanging fruit is available that we can develop an automated fix for? One of the things that I really enjoyed when I was doing the mass hiring was using an automated interviewing system to interview, because I will say for our claims assistant jobs, We easily received 300,000 applications in a single year. Yes, I see your face. 300,000 applications for a telephone operator job to answer the phone, to just say, yes, you're eligible for this benefit. Let me assist you. It is impossible to interview everyone that is highly qualified. So some of my friends that work in Fortune 500 companies have been using automated interviewing for years. This is something relatively new to the federal government, but the same thing that I basically did when I was preparing to interview for the Chief Human Capital Officer position, you log into Google or Microsoft Teams or another app. And the app asks you a set of standard interview questions, and you provide a response. And depending on the tech savviness of the hiring manager, you can build a calculation system in the tool and let AI score the interview for you, or you can view it yourself. I loved that interview format because there were some people that were super, super prepared for the interview that were fantastic interviewers. And then there were folks that had their pajamas on that were laying in their bed. And I was like, oh my goodness, I cannot believe this person is in their pajamas, you know, with milk and cookies on their bedside table. Interviewing for this position. So, you know, some you say no to those and yes to the people that are highly prepared. So looking at secondary assessments as another means to sort out who is best qualified from minimally qualified. So absolutely looking to see how we can drive innovation and just make this a great place to work. Where people want to come every day.

▶18:13HostLatoya, what parting advice would you like to share with our audience?

▶18:17GuestJust to be prepared, to put your best foot forward. Like I said, I started at the very bottom, $28,000. And to be quite frank, working in the Department of Veterans Affairs was my first white-collar job because I came from the military. And the police department where I wore a uniform to work every day. So I laugh about this now. When I started working for VA, I didn't have corporate clothes, so I wore my church clothes to work every day. And people noticed. They were like, oh, that's the little church girl that comes to work. But I dressed for the job that I was doing. I wanted and not the job that I had. I was professional. I studied. If there was a training opportunity, I took it. And I will share that with your resume. Don't copy from the position description of your job because I know what an IT specialist does, what a human resources specialist does. You should really build your resume on things that you have participated in. So if you have written a paper, if you have led an organization, if you have a budget that you are responsible for formulating and executing, write your resume based on things you've led, uh, and projects that you've participated in. And really make it results-driven. Don't copy from a job description because I like to see what you've done, and that's what hiring managers like to see. Can you do the job? Make sure there are no typographical errors. A spell check is your friend. Use the dictionary, use the thesaurus, and just put your best foot forward. Make sure that you have recent examples when you are selected for for an interview. And by all means, if you're looking to come to the federal government, look at FEMA. That's where I am. I would love to review or have my staff review your resume and your application. And that's the advice that I have for everyone.

▶20:46HostWell, Tonya, thank you so much for joining us on the Built By People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶20:52GuestThank you so much. My pleasure.