Gusto’s head of employee engagement shares how to build programs workers actually need

Welcome to another installment of Tips from the Top, a series featuring HR leaders’ career advice for people professionals with big aspirations. Have insights you want to share? Get in touch here.

Don’t be afraid to leave your lane.

Doing just that got Dashini Jeyathurai, Gusto’s head of employee engagement, into HR.

Jeyathurai, who had been interested in the people profession, dipped her toes early in her career by participating in an onboarding and development program as she worked in a non-

HR role. That eventually led to her taking on her first HR role, and pursuing a career in the profession.

“My first foray into HR was actually while I was sitting within the business, which I think gave me a really interesting vantage point, knowing what people needed to deliver, and then thinking about how do we build programs that support the needs of the employees of this very particular organization,” Jeyathurai told HR Brew.

Practitioners “growing up” in the HR function should make sure they’re branching out and learning other parts of the business, too. Jeyathurai recommends earlier-career people practitioners take any opportunity available to expose themselves to the rest of the business—whether that’s attending all-hands meetings or reading over company strategy docs—so that they understand the needs of the company and build programs that actually address them.

“Keep your finger on the pulse of what is going on so that you can be, one, an informed employee of the company, but also be an informed HR practitioner,” she said.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about an early career experience that helped shape the HR leader you are today.

I was helping select participants for a high-potential leadership program, and there was a woman on the list who’d turned us down once before. I suggested we not ask her again. I thought I was being considerate. She was busy, the timing still seemed bad, why add to her plate. My boss stopped me immediately and said: “Let her decide, don’t decide for her.” That’s stayed with me for years, because I had almost quietly removed an opportunity from someone based on my own read of her capacity…It was a small, well-intentioned decision that, if made a hundred times across an organization, is exactly how people get overlooked. Most of the talent work I care about now is really about making those rooms less opaque, making sure there is clearer criteria, visible paths, fewer things happening to people without their knowledge.

What is one skill that you think every HR leader should develop early in their career?

Developing taste. It’s the thing that separates people who ship good work from people who just ship a lot of work. Taste is knowing which program is actually worth building, which framework is elegant vs. which one is just complicated and being willing to kill your own idea because it isn’t good enough. You develop it the way you develop it in any craft: by paying close attention to work you admire, asking why it lands, and getting honest feedback from people with better judgment than yours.

How can early career HR professionals find a good mentor or sponsor?

The work is the brand. Do excellent work, say yes to the cross-functional project that puts you in front of leaders outside your function, and be the person who follows up and closes the loop. Make it easy for someone to advocate for you and be clear about what you want next, so when the opportunity comes up, they know to say your name. Nobody spends their political capital on a person they aren’t sure about. So, the fastest way to become someone worth betting on is to be the person who takes an ambiguous, unglamorous problem and gets it done without needing to be heavily managed.

What professional development opportunities do you think future HR leaders should pursue?

This is a little biased but the best investment of my time in the past couple of years was completing UC Berkeley’s Transformative CHRO Leadership Program co-led by Laszlo Bock. The curriculum pushed on gaps worth closing for HR leaders: financial fluency, making strong data-based recommendations, and what AI actually changes about how work gets organized versus what’s noise. Beyond what we covered in the classroom which was great, it gave me a peer group outside my own company to pressure-test my assumptions and that’s been invaluable.

What is the best advice you’ve received in your HR career?

The best advice I ever received was that your job is the business. Very early into my career, a leader told me that if I couldn’t explain how the company made money, I had no business designing anything HR-related for employees. That changed how I viewed my role. It meant not just working to develop domain expertise in HR but reading everything I could to build my understanding of the business, whether that was past earning calls, quarterly business reviews etc. It also made me a better editor of my own ideas.

What is the worst advice you’ve received in your HR career?

The worst advice I ever received was basically to run past playbooks that I’ve seen work at other companies. It sounds efficient, and the advice came from a place of generosity. However, a solution often works because it’s an answer to a specific company’s problems at a specific moment: its stage, its margins, its manager bench, its culture. If you lift that wholesale into a new context without understanding the nuances of the particular problem you’re trying to solve at the company you’re at, people feel that immediately. And you almost never solve the problem at hand. What I’ve learned is to bring the questions from past roles rather than the answers because those diagnostic instincts travel well.

These views do not necessarily speak for the company, but instead are personal responses from individuals.