Many HR professionals who move from one function within the field to another didn’t necessarily expect to take that path—but their careers have benefitted from it.
That was the case for David Daniels IV, an HR consultant who began his career in recruiting for startups.
“I sort of branched out and became an HR business partner, which also saw me overseeing DEI back before it was called DEI,” he told HR Brew. That wasn’t unique for startups, though, because employees typically have less-defined job roles than larger organizations. “From there, my roles just kept expanding. Because I stayed in startups, that was always normal,” he added.
It’s worked out for Daniels career-wise as he’s held blended HR roles at several organizations, including General Assembly, Better.com, and Lululemon. In 2020, he branched into consulting via his own company, DD4, taking projects that focus on anything from developing trainings, conducting organizational audits, to reworking a company’s performance management processes.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?
At Lululemon Studio, I had to create the employee demographic survey as part of the inaugural DEI work I was overseeing. We’ve all filled these surveys out before…they’ve never been particularly comprehensive. It’s very easy for people’s identities to get swept up into other things that are not necessarily accurate, because the forms are so limited.
I went out of my way to make the form more comprehensive than usual, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. There were people saying, “I never felt comfortable, as an Afro-Latino, filling this out,” or “I’m Middle Eastern North African, I’ve never had that option as a race, and now I have it.”
People were able to communicate the fullness of themselves through the survey…From there, you have way better employee demographic information to use when it comes to benefits, putting together policy, ERGs, when it comes to all of these things.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
All of it! Everyone hates HR, and I feel like people never actually know what HR is or does either. There’s so much ambiguity around the function, which is partially the function’s fault. When you look at any of the elements of people and culture work—HR business partnering, which I do, everybody hates those people. Recruiters? Everybody hates those people. DEI people? Everybody hates those people.
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L&D? you’re fine, but the rest are very controversial, even though they shouldn’t be—and it’s largely because of the lack of information that people have.
They’ll say, for example, “I applied to a job, and I didn’t get feedback. I hate the recruiter.” When the recruiter was on the other side begging the hiring manager for actionable feedback, and the hiring manager was refusing to give it. That’s not known.
What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
Seeing social evolution in real time. HR is the department on the cusp of industrial organizational psychology. You see in real time how workplace behaviors change and evolve, how we talk about things has changed and evolved at work, how we dress has changed and evolved at work, where we work from, et cetera. You have a bird’s eye view into all of this.
What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
More specificity of the function, which is ironic coming from me, because I’m very much a generalist. But I think part of the misinformation that I spoke to earlier is that so many people don’t know what the different segments of HR even are, and they mentally bucket it all into one thing.
It’s important for people to say I’m an L&D person, or I’m an HR business partner, I’m a recruiting specialist, whatever the case may be, versus, “I do HR.” That could be one of five different jobs.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?
Attacks on DEI. There’s so much misinformation that people have really strong opinions about something they don’t actually understand.
As someone who does DEI, I’m more than happy for DEI to be a national talking point. I think it should be. But I would rather talk about what the work actually is, and what it’s designed to do and how it operates, versus having to respond to lies. Because the lies have so much traction, and they come from very powerful people, there has been an obfuscation of the actual work. People are not pushing back to it based on what it is. They’re pushing back to it based on what they’ve been told it is…It’s really disheartening to see.
