Alumna looks to revolutionize HR, make space for everyone in the workforce

“Punk is about revolting against a society that doesn’t think you deserve a revolution” is one of Jess Von Bank’s favorite quotes. While the quote’s source is unknown, the St. Cloud State University alumna and human resources industry revolutionary said its message couldn’t be more clear.

“I think everything I do is punk. It’s sort of like a gentle reminder to ‘the man’ that we still live and work in a society designed by ‘the man.’ By being so vocal and visible, I’m literally like a physical, omnipresent reminder that women work in tech, that women work,” she said. “I feel a bit of a responsibility. I like it and I’m passionate about what I do, but doing it so vocally and visibly gives permission for others to join. I could be Joan of Arc on a horse saying this stuff is important and I care about it and we need to change things — that only goes so far. This can be a much more effective movement, if it’s a movement.”

It’s important for Von Bank that others realize they have a voice, and don’t have to settle for the status quo in the workplace.

“It’s OK to be yourself at work, it’s OK to know your voice and use your voice. It’s OK to advocate for others or for issues that matter. It’s OK to remind people that there’s more to this conversation and invite more people into the conversation,” she said. “So for me, using words like punk and rebellion, it’s just a reminder that everybody belongs here. Everybody deserves a space in this conversation and you’re designing for a whole lot more people than you think you are.”

Von Bank initially went to SCSU to pursue a career in journalism through its mass communications department. She graduated with a bachelor’s in speech communications in 2000. While finishing her degree she was recruited into a sales training program, and worked as a sales professional in the insurance industry following graduation, before eventually making her way into the HR industry.

“I wanted to be Oprah. I thought I wanted to be a TV broadcaster. I’ve always been a fan of journalism and storytelling and explaining things and headlines and following the news and stuff. I’ve always loved that, so it’s kind of funny,” she said. “I’m kind of like the Oprah of HR tech. I do a lot of speaking on the future of work, impact on talent, labor trends, global workforce trends, and because I have a pretty inclusive mindset about how we apply solutions to positively impact the most possible people, I get asked to speak about DEI topics a lot — inclusive approaches to designing technology solutions for people, that kind of thing, I advocate for women and work all the time.”

Von Bank has worked in the HR field for roughly 20 years, and currently works for Mercer as a global leader in HR transformation and technology advisory. However, she said the HR label is a misnomer. She works more with tools, services and solutions used to innovate the work experience — a job she didn’t know existed in the early days of her career.

“HR, in my mind, were the people who hired people for companies and got them paid, and you went to them if you had issues. The new role of HR is really a much more data-savvy, technology forward, design-thinking sort of role,” Von Bank said. “They’re using a lot of tech to design the function and design work and jobs, and that’s the part that probably wasn’t even true 20 years ago. It’s definitely true today. So the industry is disrupting itself and changing.

“Work is changing so fast, and there’s so much technology innovation, there’s AI disrupting jobs and how we design work that — when I think of my own kids who are 15, 13 and 12 — it is probably more common than not that the jobs they’ll hold one day don’t exist, or they’re not defined the same way today as they might be then. The pace of change is just accelerating as we go. It’ll be faster tomorrow than it is today.”

She credits SCSU with giving her a foundation that has held steady through an ever-changing workforce. Hailing from North Dakota originally, Von Bank said coming to a school where she didn’t know anyone was exhilarating, and she loved her experiences through studying abroad and being involved in different clubs on campus. She feels she really learned how to be an adult while in college.

“I wanted to experience the whole college life. I did international business club, I worked, I did the broadcasting stuff with UTVS. I also worked my tail off. I worked my way through. I had a couple of scholarships and obviously leveraged some financial aid, but I worked as many as four part-time jobs — always at least one, usually two, and as high as four jobs at a single time — to finance not just my tuition, but my study abroad experiences, and to make sure I could have a car at school,” she said. “I think I literally learned how to adult because I had to figure out how to get good grades — which I did, be socially active and kind of figure out college life without going off the rails. I was a hustler and that was really good experience for me when I got into my professional life, because then I felt like I knew a little bit — you know, you never know everything. But I knew how to adult because I had already been adulting in college.”

It’s important to Von Bank that she passes that work ethic down to her children as well as the girls she mentors through the nonprofit Diverse Daisies, but also to have an impact on the workforce those children will eventually enter into one day.

“The fact that there’s still a pay gap in my lifetime is utterly insane to me. I’m not going to close it myself, and I probably won’t see it closed in my lifetime, but I look at the fact that I’m raising three girls who will be in the world of work themselves within a decade — and the world doesn’t even deserve girls, period. It’s not good enough; the world that we put girls into is not good enough for them, or other youth, for that matter,” she said. “If I can impact parts of that in positive ways that they can see and feel in their lifetimes — like our relationship to work and the employer relationship  — that seems like such a microcosm of a thing, but that’s a big part of our lives.”

For Von Bank, it’s paramount that more equitable experiences are provided for women, people of color and other underserved communities in the workforce. It’s even more important now as artificial intelligence and other innovations in technology impact industries, and impact certain communities in a disproportionate manner.

“The impact I hope to have is distributing access and opportunity so that we can distribute more evenly the positive impact workforce innovation can have on people. I’m also a woman who works, who happens to have kids, and somehow we’ve placed this misnomer on working moms. Nobody says working dads — literally nobody. So why do we have to be this special underprivileged class of people who requires all these exceptions in order for us to participate equally in the workforce?” she said. “That’s up to us to change the system — not to bend women to a broken system. I’m super passionate about not just women and working moms, but anybody who falls into that underrepresented, underprivileged; where the system is broken for them. I’m a huge proponent of fix the system — don’t fix people, fix the system. I feel pretty lucky that in my line of work I get to talk about that, because it’s part of literally every conversation I have around inclusive technology, human-centered design thinking and designing solutions for the whole person.”