One hire, for a role that had been open and hard to fill for months, told the CEO she was only taking the job because of the person who interviewed her.
What got you into HR in the first place?
Ivana has always gravitated toward people doing interesting, dynamic things, the kind of work that comes with real challenges and something new to learn. That pull is what took her into HR. She had good people guiding her early on, and while the work was hard, there was always fun and joy mixed in too.
Before Soundzipper, what did your career actually look like?
It started in FMCG and Hospitality, where she sat in on her first hiring interview, for a Manager of Administration role, and realised how much rides on getting that one decision right and setting the person up to actually thrive in it. From there she moved into Telecommunications, working on projects in Uganda and Rwanda with a small team handling huge builds alongside local subcontractors. HR wasn’t the only hat she wore. In a team that size, everyone covers operations, supply chain, and finance when it’s needed, and that international stretch shaped both her career and her life. Later came years in BPO, running HR across large call centre workforces, where she learned the legal side of the job inside out, contracts, compensation, labour relations, culture, all of it, under a Director of Legal she still credits for how confident she became in that part of the work.
How did you end up at Soundzipper?
By what she calls pure luck, she met Adrian, Soundzipper’s CEO, and that was that. What sold her wasn’t a pitch. It was recognising Soundzipper as a place built for creative, gifted people who share the same outlook, somewhere new ideas keep showing up because the people in the room keep generating them.
What does your role actually cover?
Talent acquisition sits at the centre of it, but it stretches into onboarding, offboarding, and performance management too. Ivana also sees herself as the person responsible for representing Soundzipper’s culture honestly to anyone curious about the company, not selling it, just describing it straight.
What is Soundzipper actually looking for when it hires?
Curiosity, first. Someone with wide, varied interests who’s comfortable with startup pace and can run with autonomy without needing everything spelled out. And just as important, someone who’s a genuinely good teammate, respectful and supportive, easy to build something with.
Any moment on the job that’s stuck with you?
Two, actually. One employee once told her she was the only HR person who ever asked how they were doing. Another time, a new hire for a role that had been open and hard to fill told the CEO directly that she took the job because of Ivana. Those are the moments Ivana points back to. She calls herself a people person, and that kind of recognition is what makes the work worth it to her.
What’s Soundzipper actually like day to day?
Around the core business, there’s always some side project running, gaming tech, blockchain, Web3, virtual reality, robotics, things she never expected to touch when she started in HR. It’s opened up what she thinks hiring channels and recruitment strategy can even look like, and stretched her own sense of how creative recruiting can get.
None of the wins happen solo, though. The hard cases, the roles that took forever to fill, all of it is a team effort in Ivana’s telling. What keeps her going is watching people feel good around her, and knowing Soundzipper is built the same way, around the well-being of the people actually doing the work.
Bonus fact: Thanks to Soundzipper’s side projects, Ivana has picked up more about blockchain, Web3, and robotics than she ever expected from an HR career. Proof that even hiring paperwork comes with a side of the future here.