The environment in which HR leaders are operating today is nothing short of dynamic, as technology rapidly reshapes the ways in which work gets done and the strategic role HR plays in the organization. It’s no wonder so many are overwhelmed by the new mandates facing HR, says Teuila Hanson, chief people officer of LinkedIn.

But moving strategically—with a “laser” focus on the needs of employees—can help HR stay grounded and still move swiftly forward in an uncertain world. That’s the approach Hanson and her team are taking at LinkedIn: prioritizing data quality before diving too far into operationalizing AI in HR, strategizing alongside IT teams and keeping lines of communication open with employees.

She looks to other big moments of change during her career—from the Great Recession to COVID, during which she joined LinkedIn—for inspiration.

“The most beautiful lessons of leadership come through during those times,” Hanson recently told HR Executive during LinkedIn’s Talent Connect conference in San Diego. Hanson also shared how she’s finding opportunities through the challenges of change.

HR Executive: What is the biggest HR challenge keeping you up right now?

Hanson: Automation is here—or it’s quickly coming—and it causes a lot of questions around the future of work, the future of jobs, the future of workflows. On the one hand, [we’re focused on] managing the change so that employees feel optimistic and they’re inspired and not feeling anxious about the change. And then, on the other hand, every day—every moment—there’s a new model, there’s a new thing, a new GPT or agent. That creates an additional or deepened level of anxiety from the employee perspective: Am I falling behind? Should I learn this thing? Should I get that subscription?

There is so much going on that is unclear. We need to know what employees need to deliver in the current moment, how they need to learn, how they can embrace change and how we can help them manage through that. I spend a lot of time thinking about change management: How do you take all of those messages and make sure that managers and leaders have empathy for how employees are feeling right now? That they’re providing the clarity and the communication to help them manage through the process?

HR Executive: How does this environment challenge you as an HR leader?

Hanson: I want to do all the things. I want to help our leaders, our employees, focus on skills, implement a change management 101 course, I want to play with all of the AI tools. For me, it’s about being super disciplined around picking a lane: What’s going to provide the highest value to our employees at this moment? And just absolutely focus on that. That’s the challenge for any people leader right now. How do you start and make sure you’re laser-focused on a lane that is going to provide a sense of clarity and stability for your workforce?

See also: Recruiters need critical AI skills—but many still lack strategy

HR Executive: What is your take on how HR and IT can work more closely together in this evolving landscape?

Hanson: Just last week, I was spending time with our head of internal tools: What are you seeing? What are you buying? Where do you think that we, from a functional perspective, need to build our technical acumen? This idea that the tech talent just sits within a tech function is no longer a construct, but it depends on our technical team—making sure the data is super-clean, that there’s an opportunity to organize the data, that they’re thinking about what is that platform layer for applications so that the rest of the functions and everyday non-technical people can start to build out more sophisticated agents that talk to each other. Who’s going to own the overall agentic strategy?

Those are the conversations I’m having more of. We’re thinking side by side about: how is work getting done, what’s your piece of it, what’s my piece of it and how do we make sure we’re bringing those technical skills we’re all going to need across the entire organization as we’re rethinking our tech strategy?

I’m spending more time with the tech team than I ever have. Within our own HR team, technology reports right into me. So, every day, pretty much, I’m saying, What’s happening? What are you seeing? What are our vendors seeing? So I can stay on my toes. It’s a really important relationship.

HR Executive: What lessons from past experiences with disruption are you looking to today for guidance?

Hanson: I think about the dot-com bust, and when the markets crashed in 2008. I was at an off-site, and I specifically remember our general counsel coming to the table and saying, “Holy crap, Lehman Brothers has just folded.” We were like, “What? What is this world we’re living in?”

Those were moments of … Is this world going to come to an end? Are we going to be on a downward spiral? I had that initial feeling of … Is this it? But you realize it’s not. It’s a moment of time.

The [most successful] leaders are able to stand in front of an all-hands and say, “I have no idea if we’re going to end up having to close our shop because we’re now trying to make sure our financial partners are secure. We don’t know but we’re here, we have people who rely on us. We have customers who depend on us, and we’re going to make sure that we’re communicating and providing people with as much information as we can.”

It was the same thing during COVID. I joined LinkedIn in 2020. That was a moment where it was like, you’ve got to stand up. You’ve got to communicate what you know, own what you don’t know and provide some inspiration and clarity wherever you can. People do look to leaders for optimism.

This is a similar moment. It’s really easy to get in your head and think, are there going to be robots everywhere? I was walking through San Francisco International Airport and there’s one of the robot coffee machines there. You see all the people taking pictures, and there’s always a crowd. But the reality is that little machine has been there for years—and there’s still a long line at Peet’s, and the humans are still there making the coffee.

Even though this feels like rapid change, it’s incredibly important for leaders to be that place of inspiration, be that place of normalcy, and make sure that they’re bringing their employees along. Focus on what you have control over.

HR Executive: What are your priorities for AI integration into the HR function, and what’s informing how you set that agenda?

Hanson: We do have our AI transformation plan for ourselves. We look at our major workflows and consider what areas would be really interesting to introduce to AI.

We sort of held ourselves back and said, Before we can put a stake in the ground and say, “We’re going to automate onboarding from beginning to end,” we had to ask ourselves really honest questions: Is the data there? Is the knowledge management there? We want to make sure we have the best, most clean information so that AI won’t hallucinate or make a mistake.

We’re going to explore and play with agents on a small scale. But when it comes to larger HR workflows, let’s make sure we have the discipline to make sure our data is super-clean. That’s what we’ve been working on really hard since July: to get all of our data in one place, to make sure we’re testing it, that it’s clean. And then we’ll be able to move super fast. I don’t know that onboarding will be the place to start; it’ll likely be more aligned with employee self-service.

HR Executive: What are the traditional talent acquisition strategies that need to change the quickest to enable HR to create the workforce of the future?

Hanson: We are customer zero to our own LinkedIn Hiring Assistant. Technology is helping us from a sourcing perspective. We’re able to get insights and see talent we’ve never seen before, which is really great.

From a recruiting and skills perspective, it frees up recruiters to think about the very human connections that happen between candidates and recruiters throughout the entire recruitment lifecycle—all the way to offer. You can see the delight in our recruiters’ faces when someone [accepts an offer] because they’ve invested in that relationship, they build trust and they’ve been able to answer questions and understand someone’s career aspirations.

They want to make sure that, that from a recruiting perspective, they’re fulfilling a promise. How do you make sure that when somebody comes into the organization, that you don’t lose all of that goodness that you built as a recruiter, that it doesn’t go away?  How do you make sure the manager is set up for success with this employee?

There’s an additional piece of work that is going to be really important for recruiters to start thinking about as they are continuing to invest in a new candidate beyond the offer letter. Up until now, when a recruiter wasn’t using Hiring Assistant or AI tools, all they had to do was get their candidate to the offer letter. And then start new with the next one.

Now, wow, there’s such a great opportunity to take all that goodness and make sure the person is set up for career success on the other end.