5 Best Career Lessons From Six Months of Conversations With HR Leaders

About six months ago, me and Ksenia Izotova decided to start hosting HR Circle, a podcast where we sit down with HR and Talent leaders and talk about careers, people, leadership and how our profession is changing.

The idea behind it was pretty simple.

Through the International HR Club, we meet a lot of interesting professionals with very different backgrounds, careers and perspectives. HR Circle became an opportunity to take some of those conversations further and share them with a wider audience.

And one unexpected benefit of hosting these conversations is how much I learn from them myself.

Sometimes it's something a guest says directly. Sometimes it's a story that makes me revisit an experience from my own career. And sometimes one thought stays somewhere in the back of my mind and comes back weeks later.

So after half a year of HR Circle, I went back through some of our conversations and picked five ideas about career and professional development that stayed with me the most.

Not necessarily universal career advice.

Just five things that made me think.

1. Empathy is becoming more valuable, not less

This thought came back to me after my conversation with Maria Pronkina, when we talked about what actually makes someone a strong HR professional.

Maria's answer was remarkably simple: empathy.

You can learn frameworks. You can learn processes. You can develop technical expertise. But when your work revolves around people, being able to understand another person remains fundamental.

And it immediately reminded me of one experience from my own career.

I was going through one of the most stressful periods I'd had at work. At one point, I was personally managing around 15 offers at the same time, which is quite a lot when you're not working in volume hiring.

I knew it was temporary. I just needed to get through it.

Then one of my stakeholders messaged me on Slack:

"Hey, are you okay?"

They had noticed that even the way I communicated had changed. Fewer smileys. Shorter messages. A little more distant than usual.

That struck me.

They didn't just see the recruiter responsible for delivering hires. They noticed the person behind the work.

The workload didn't magically disappear. But that small interaction genuinely mattered.

And I keep thinking about this now that AI can give us frameworks, templates and information in seconds.

Perhaps the more technology becomes part of our work, the more valuable our ability to notice and understand another human being becomes.

2. Your way of working isn't the only way of working

This was one of the themes that stayed with me after my conversation with Kristina Pecherikina, where we discussed working across different cultures and how differently people can perceive deadlines, agreements, communication and initiative.

But I've also experienced this myself.

When I first started working in Budapest, the working culture was quite different from what I'd previously experienced in the CIS region.

And my initial reaction wasn't particularly sophisticated:

"Why are people stopping at 5 p.m.? There's still work to do."

But after a few months, I realised that nobody was doing anything wrong.

Candidates weren't particularly interested in speaking with recruiters after working hours either. People protected their evenings and family time differently.

I was applying my previous definition of "normal" to a completely different environment.

So I adapted.

And interestingly, my results became better.

That's probably one of the most important things international experience has taught me: working across cultures isn't only about understanding how other people behave.

It's also about questioning your own assumptions.

3. Start with the goal, not with the tools

During my conversation with Marina Paych, one idea was described as "Step Zero": before deciding which tools to use, understand what you're actually trying to achieve.

And this is something I've heard from almost every good manager or coach I've worked with.

"Okay, but what's your goal?"

It's such a simple question.

Yet if you can't answer it, there's a good chance you're spending time and energy without knowing exactly where you're trying to go.

• Should I post more on LinkedIn?
• Should I get another certification?
• Should I network more?
• Should I learn another skill?

Maybe.

But those are tools.

What are you actually trying to achieve?

I've increasingly started applying this question not only to career decisions, but to professional development and my own projects as well.

Before deciding what to do, define what you want to change.

4. Know yourself before choosing your next opportunity

My conversation with Tatiana Koval brought another idea back to the surface.

When we discussed how she would choose an employer herself, she started not with companies, titles or salaries, but with understanding her own strengths, values and previous experiences.

She even talked about having a personal "stop list": things she knows she isn't willing to accept in her next environment.

And I've noticed something similar in conversations with career and professional coaches.

The good ones rarely tell you:

"You should become X."

They ask questions instead.

• What are you good at?
• What do you enjoy?
• What gives you energy?
• What can you realistically sell on the market?
• What matters to you?
• What don't you want anymore?

We often approach career decisions from the outside in:

What's prestigious? What's growing? Where can I earn more? Which company would look good on my CV?

But perhaps we should sometimes reverse the process.

Start with yourself. Then look at the market.

5. Be ready to pivot

And finally, Anastasia Mizitova, SHRM-SCP, PCC said a word that probably describes modern careers better than almost anything else:

Pivot.

Anastasia's point was that at some stage, what brought you to your current position may stop being enough. Something changes, you become uncomfortable, and you have a choice: stay where you are or learn something new and change direction.

Think about how differently we worked just seven years ago.

Before mass remote work.

Before hybrid became normal for millions of professionals.

Before generative AI became part of everyday work.

And now we're watching AI change individual tasks, professions, businesses and entire ways of working in real time.

I experience the same thing while building my own projects. Something that worked two years ago doesn't necessarily work today.

So perhaps one of the most useful career skills right now isn't knowing exactly what you'll be doing in ten years.

It's being comfortable with the fact that you probably don't know.

Learn. Experiment. Adjust. And when necessary, pivot.

Five conversations, five reminders

Looking back at these HR Circle conversations, what I find interesting is that none of these ideas is particularly complicated.

• Understand people.
• Question your assumptions.
• Know what you're trying to achieve.
• Know yourself.
• Be prepared to change.

Simple ideas are not necessarily easy ones to practise.

And that's probably why these five stayed with me.

And what's one career or professional development lesson you've learned recently that you want to carry forward?

Listen to the Conversations

These ideas came from five different conversations on HR Circle. If you'd like to explore any of them in more detail, you can watch the full episodes here:

• Maria Pronkina — "We're fine where we are": why business teams resist becoming multicultural, and how to change that → https://youtu.be/GeN-TSmb62c
• Kristina Pecherikina — One deadline, five interpretations: why "I'll do it" means different things across cultures → https://youtu.be/eLsrwUdVgIw
• Marina Paych — How HR Careers Are Really Built: Network, Visibility & Timing → https://youtu.be/iZDzD9IFy7M
• Tatiana Koval — Employer Branding Done Right: attracting Talent that stays → https://youtu.be/T3rw6uP3o9M
• Anastasia Mizitova — Be The Best Of Whatever You Are: SHRM Faculty Anastasia Mizitova on AI, HR Certification & Coaching → https://youtu.be/0rL6uejsZLY