While HR pros come to the field in myriad ways, some seem to share a background in education.
That may not be surprising, since the two professions aim “to get the most human potential out of the team that you’re working with,” as DoorDash’s chief people officer, Mariana Garavaglia, previously told HR Brew.
Her ethos is similar to that of Mandy Mekhail, director of people and chief of staff at ClickUp. Before joining the project management software provider, Mekhail held administrative and learning assistance roles at universities and created educational content for companies.
When the pandemic hit, Mekhail was among the thousands of US workers who changed careers. She joined ClickUp’s support department in Nov. 2020, onboarding new hires, before overseeing quality, training, and curriculum development and becoming director of talent development and internal communications in 2023.
“I was fortunate enough to land in tech, still doing an extension of what I had been doing for a number of years, which is learning,” she told HR Brew. “And I slowly found that evolving into what was always at my core, which is a love for helping people.”
Mekhail currently serves as “the right-hand” to ClickUp’s head of people and legal, supporting a team of over 50 full-time staffers and contractors. While she more closely oversees talent development and internal communications, she also helps lead the people and legal team, including talent acquisition and total rewards.
If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a lot,” Mekhail agrees, but said her knack for stewarding others to success helps her get the job done.
“I like to think of myself as a player-coach,” she said. “Being able to very quickly get into the details, understand how things connect, serve as either that glue or that amplifier for people, that really fuels me.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?
I introduced role-specific onboarding for our support function at ClickUp. While that idea isn’t completely new, ClickUp grew extremely rapidly in early 2021, from 100 employees to 800, and there just wasn’t time for leadership to sit down and think about onboarding. I thought it would bring a lot of value to new hires and the organization, though, and outlined a program to help them get up to speed.
I created a four-week departmental onboarding. By the fourth week, the new reps were on the line with customers, and for the next four weeks, they continued to receive additional support and feedback to help them ramp up. With this program, we saw a 34% increase in reps hitting their support targets within the first two-month period, which just shows how important good onboarding is!
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What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
That HR is exclusively about complaints…a huge part of HR, even at my level, is optimizing how people work. That can be everything from working with people individually to see how we can help remove blockers, all the way up to designing company-wide programs.
What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
I love seeing ClickUp and the people who work here succeed. I joined ClickUp fairly early on in our growth, and now we span continents and our employee count has truly exploded. It’s kept my work interesting, as everything changes a bit as you scale, and I feel like I’ve been able to grow up with the company. And as I’ve grown, I’ve been able to see people that I work with grow, too. It’s a delight to see people that I’ve trained or interacted with get promoted during their tenure and very palpably feel that they are leaving their fingerprint on our success.
What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
I really believe that AI will improve project management. We can be much, much more efficient with AI. I use it to help me plan my day, see what tasks need my attention, process vast amounts of data, and generate insights that would be time-intensive for me to look into manually.
Many leaders in HR will say they want their team to be a “strategic HR” team, but they get bogged down by seeking validation from other parts of the business. With AI, HR can just focus on getting tangible results and data-driven insights, which bring that validation naturally.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?
I have doubts about AI in recruiting, at least right now. There may come a day in which AI for recruiting is beneficial, much in the ways that it is for project management now, but there’s an indelible human element to ensuring talent selection that AI currently can’t replace. Plus, there’s many valid legal concerns. For now, I just don’t see the practicality.