Ask an HR Executive: Tanja Guske of ShipHawk

In this edition of Ask an HR Executive, we sat down with Tanja Guske, Head of People Operations at ShipHawk, to explore her global journey through HR, from her start in Germany to leading People Operations at a fast-growing tech company in California. With over 15 years of experience across learning and development, recruitment, and employer branding, Tanja shares insights on scaling culture in a remote environment, navigating today’s HR trends like AI and flexibility, and her passion for building people-first organizations.

Tell us about your HR journey and how you got to where you are today.

I’ve been in HR for about 15 years now, and honestly, I kind of stumbled into it, like many of us do. I was actually in a training program to become a sales operations manager for a large German grocery retail chain. I’m originally from Germany. During that program, their international headquarters needed someone with store-level sales experience to help create a training program for store employees across different countries. They approached me, and I thought, “Why not?” That’s how I got my start in learning and development. From there, I began developing training courses for store employees, and that marked the beginning of my HR journey. I never looked back. Within the company, I had the opportunity to move through various HR departments, including learning and development, recruitment, and employer branding, all while supporting 26 countries globally from the international headquarters.

One of my employer branding projects actually brought me to the U.S., which was the newest market they were launching. I helped roll out their careers website to support a major hiring push. I’d always wanted to live abroad, so we made it work for me to move to the U.S. Initially, it was supposed to be just one or two years, but it turned into a much bigger adventure. It was such a shift, going from working in a large global corporation to what felt like a startup. We started with 100 employees, and by the time I left five years later, we had grown to 5,000. I was one of the first HR team members, so it was incredibly exciting to be part of that scale-up journey. After those five years, I realized I loved the builder phase, creating things from the ground up. That led me to the startup world, and I’m now with my second startup here in California, leading HR.

Tell us a little bit about your current organization. What is your role, and how does it align with the company’s business goals and objectives?

I’m the Head of People at ShipHawk, a scaling tech company with around 100 employees. We are a software-as-a-service provider in the logistics sector, offering two main solutions: shipping software and a warehouse management system. As part of the leadership team, I oversee a small yet powerful HR team comprising two members, one located in Europe and the other in the U.S. I’ve been with ShipHawk for about two and a half years now.

Our company’s goal is to become the go-to fulfillment operating system in the U.S. market. There are numerous opportunities for growth, which is where my role comes in.

HR is often viewed as a cost center, but I see it as one of our greatest opportunities. Our employees are genuinely our most valuable asset, especially in a software company where we don’t have a physical product. It’s all about the team. I focus on ensuring our employees can thrive so they can perform their best work. This involves building systems that foster retention, engagement, and growth, all of which directly contribute to achieving our business goals and scaling effectively.

What trends are you seeing in HR right now that have your attention?

One of the biggest trends grabbing everyone’s attention right now is AI. That said, I think we’re still in the early stages of understanding how AI will truly impact HR and the workforce. It may take months or even years before we see its full potential realized. What I find most promising is the opportunity AI presents to optimize how we use our employees’ time. By automating repetitive or administrative tasks, we can free up employees to focus more on creative problem-solving, innovation, and strategic thinking. This essentially allows them to work more in their “genius zone.” That’s where I see AI having the most meaningful short-term impact.

Another trend I’m noticing, which I personally disagree with, is the push by many large tech companies to mandate a return to the office. In some cases, it’s been as rigid as requiring full weeks back on site. I believe that kind of top-down approach doesn’t align with what many employees want today. At our company, we prioritize flexibility, and I think that’s become a competitive advantage when it comes to attracting and retaining talent. While the return to office trend is gaining traction in some places, it’s not one we support, and I believe we’re better positioned in the market because of it.

What roles are in demand on your team?

We just finished a big hiring push for new implementation engineers on the professional services side. We also recently expanded our technical support team in a new country by nearshoring to Brazil, which was a major focus over the past few months.

At this point, we don’t have major hiring plans for the rest of the year. Most of what we’re looking at now is backfilling roles as needed. There may be some slight expansion on the sales team, but overall, we feel we’re in a really good place in terms of headcount right now.

What’s the biggest challenge facing your team today and how are you addressing that?

In general, we have seen that in tech, especially, the floodgates of money are just not as available anymore as they were a couple of years ago. So, really doing something for the team and still growing and performing with maybe a little bit more of a limited budget, is something that we see across the organization, not just from an employee HR perspective, but overall. As we moved away from being in-person to being fully remote, most of the team upheld that company culture that we had when we were a Santa Barbara in-person-only startup and translated that into different countries for different cultures. And just as we’re scaling, that is always top of mind as well. How can we keep that, or adjust it, as we’re expanding and becoming more disbursed.

When you’re looking to add talent to your team, what does that process look like?

It really depends on the roles that we’re trying to fill. For our standard roles, we do it in-house, and we use our applicant tracking system, of course, and work with the managers and create a hiring process that works for them and us. Of course, there are more challenging roles, specifically when it comes to senior leadership roles, where we definitely would look into hiring outside help to really find the right fit for the company and the stage that we’re at as well.

What’s something that you want to accomplish in the next couple of years, personally or professionally?

Professionally, I would love to be able to be a part of an exit. The ultimate goal is, of course, to become a chief people officer. I would like to stay in the tech industry. I really enjoy it. Personally, just being able to travel as much as I can. That’s a really big passion of mine and maybe finding more flexibility within my work schedule that I can incorporate that a little bit more.

What would your ultimate dream job be if you weren’t doing this job today?

I do some coaching on the side, and I love doing that, but I don’t think I could do that full-time, to be honest. I also have a passion for interior design. So, who knows, in a different life I might be doing that. But ultimately, I really enjoy working with people. I got into this somehow accidentally, but I stuck with it because I really do like working with people, and HR is such a diverse field. I really enjoy what I do.