Life at Nautilus Interview with Nicole Newland – Senior HR Operations Generalist

In her interview for this article, one thing became very clear about Nicole Newland, Nautilus Senior HR Operations Generalist: she is driven by a desire to forge connections with and between people. At Nautilus, this drive enables Nicole to work cross-functionally, improve processes, and help people efficiently navigate recruitment, benefits, HR systems, and more. Below you’ll discover how Nicole’s love for people and connection led her to study psychology and later translated into a fulfilling career in HR.

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An interest in science driven by personal connection 

As an HR generalist, Nicole could probably work anywhere, but part of the reason she chose to work at Nautilus is her interest in science. Growing up in the beach-front city of Pacifica, CA, Nicole spent a ton of time tide pooling with her father. This spurred an initial interest in biology that was kept alive through great relationships with science teachers in high school and ultimately culminated in Nicole’s pursuit of a BA in psychology and social behavior. 

For Nicole, psychology provided a great balance between understanding how the brain works and understanding why individuals make decisions – i.e. it helped her understand people in a rigorous way. And she certainly didn’t pursue her degree lightly – conversations with her sister-in-law, an organic chemist, gave Nicole an appreciation for research that helped her decide to do her own undergrad research. Nicole is very grateful for her time in the lab of Dr. Salvatore Maddi and she proudly dives into the details of her work on psychological hardiness to this day. 

Moving into the HR space 

This thread of understanding people was also a key part of Nicole’s extracurricular activities in college. These included her membership in a sorority and interning as a recruiter for a nonprofit. In both positions, Nicole learned how to determine people’s interests and needs from formal interview responses. Nicole later leveraged this skill as a full-time recruiter, and continues to apply it in various part of her work today. By helping people understand what they want out of their careers and helping employers understand what skills they need in employees, she more effectively fosters lasting, successful professional relationships. 

Nicole stresses that establishing these positive relationships is what she really liked about the often-stressful job of recruitment. She was not so motivated by aggressively getting the most job placements, but by helping people find positions they’d enjoy. This is how Nicole first interacted with Nautilus – she worked with us to recruit some of our initial hires. During this time, she was always delighted to visit our headquarters because she saw her recruits were quite happy here. 

Shifting to Nautilus full time 

After recruiting for Nautilus through an outside firm, Nicole got the opportunity to join us full time and take on other HR duties. With so many positive interactions here and a desire to work on projects that further improve employee well-being, Nicole jumped at the opportunity. Since then, she’s moved up through a variety of positions to become an HR generalist. 

On a day-to-day basis, Nicole helps Nautilus team members navigate benefits, compensation, and HR systems – really anything to do with HR. In addition, she works with folks in IT and managers across the company to improve HR processes and make everything more efficient. She gets joy out of making changes to internal systems that result in their more effective use. For a given project she might make a system easier to navigate, proactively answer questions, or make the systems themselves work faster. 

Thankfully, Nicole has a keen understanding of how to work with and motivate the Nautilus team. She often focuses on data and outcomes to convince our largely science and engineering-oriented staff. For example, she might use metrics covering the time it takes to recruit new employees to explain how small shifts in interview activities can make the whole recruitment process go faster. Here again, her ability to understand people and their motivations is highly valuable. 

The future – improving processes and making employee’s lives better 

Nicole has been working with Nautilus since its very early days. One of the things that makes her happy is that she still gets to work with some of the people she recruited early on. She sees this as emblematic of the fact that, when people like where they work, they stick around. Over the course of her time here, she has also seen Nautilus’ technology advance dramatically. Today, she’s very proud to see novel data coming from fruitful collaborations. As we make it to the market and start generating revenue, Nicole’s mind is abuzz with ideas for how she can work with an expanding team and advance our HR systems to make Nautilus an even greater place to work.