Ever worry about showing up to the wrong job interview?
TL;DR
- Fran Katsoudas started at Cisco in an entry-level call center role due to a mistaken interview.
- She advanced to chief people, policy, and purpose officer, focusing on creating opportunities for early career talent.
- AI has disrupted entry-level customer support jobs at Cisco, leading to a rethinking of onboarding processes.
- Cisco aims to leverage AI to help employees navigate technological changes and evolving roles.
That apprehension might prove beneficial. This happened to Fran Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people, policy, and purpose officer, who began her thirty-year tenure at the digital communications powerhouse following such a mix-up. She discussed with HR Brew how that error launched her career, and her thoughts on prospects for current entry-level workers amidst AI's workforce disruption.
Call center to HR. Katsoudas, who had been working in business development for a startup, thought she was interviewing for a similar role when she discovered she was actually interviewing for an entry-level customer support job at Cisco’s call center, a position that would require her to answer as many as 80 calls a day once hired—many from unhappy customers.
While the gig was below the pay grade for the role she intended to interview for, and she wasn’t familiar with Cisco’s technology, something about the job called to her. “I recognized that it was just a really cool opportunity for me to learn something new. It’s funny, because I think it was the first time where I actually trusted my gut,” she told HR Brew.
Katsoudas accepted the position, and the following year, she advanced to team supervisor. She was subsequently offered a director position with the same team, but declined it. This decision proved beneficial for her.
“I passed on the role because my realization was I had never made decisions, up until that point, based on title or a level,” she said. “And it took me two years from that point to make director in a totally different area, which happened to be HR.”
In 2003, Katsoudas transitioned to Cisco's HR division. She expressed her curiosity about HR's internal operations and appreciated the team's emphasis on integrating business strategy into HR practices, a concept they embraced long before it became common best practice.
“We were able to take elements of Cisco’s technology strategy and say, How does this then connect to decisions that you make around people, culture, your tool set,” she said. “I loved that problem. I thought it was really messy, and a good one to solve.”
Rethinking entry-level. Katsoudas became chief people officer in 2014, and chief people, policy, and purpose officer in 2021. During her decade-long leadership in HR, she’s focused on creating opportunities, like the ones previously offered to her, for early career talent.
“I just remember having a ton of gratitude for the zigzag of my career and feeling committed to helping others have their own zigzag that they could be really proud of or really energized by,” she said.
Numerous entry-level positions face faced significant disruption due to AI-powered automation. This situation mirrors Katsoudas's initial position at Cisco. In 2022, the firm deployed an AI assistant (updated this year) was developed to handle basic customer support queries directed to its Technical Assistance Center. This AI technology has since managed over 1 million cases, leading Cisco to discontinue its level-one customer support jobs.
That transition didn’t happen overnight, Katsoudas told HR Brew.
“What happened was the existing team started to get some help on particular types of cases with customers. As their volume was growing. AI stepped in, and then those people became second-level support,” she said. Now, entry-level call center employees are hired into second-tier support roles, which has prompted Cisco to rethink onboarding for that team.
“I feel like our onboarding approach is so much more robust than it used to be,” she said, adding that “you have to give them all of the learnings of level one because they’re stepping in where the technology couldn’t solve. Maybe a customer has two or three issues that they need help with. Maybe it’s not as simple.”
Her team's current efforts involve employing AI to document the competencies and duties expected of all Cisco staff, and to grasp how these will change with technological advancements, she stated. “My goal for Cisco and for the organization is to leverage AI to help people navigate AI, and just to have as much transparency as possible around how we see the world changing,”
“I don’t know of anyone who would say that the role that they’re in today was exactly the same as a year ago. Our roles are constantly evolving,” she said, noting that most jobs were evolving long before AI put those shifts under a microscope.
Despite this natural evolution, she said HR teams will have to be much more intentional with the opportunities they create for entry-level talent, whether through mentorship programs, new-hire communities, formalized onboarding processes, or other initiatives.
“I just think that people are all running so fast that if you don’t build programs around it, you may not get the impact that you want,” she said, noting that the first six months of a person’s job are critical to their longevity, performance, and satisfaction at a company. “I always laugh a little bit because they [new hires] are investments that you make as a company, but I’ve always seen that they return that investment and more as well.”
This report was originally published by HR Brew.