Inventing a New HR Playbook

from The Darden Report Winter 2023

Questions CATHY FRIEDMAN (MBA

If talent is destiny these days, Shristi Kauffman (EMBA ’19) has her hand on the scales as the senior director of compensation at CoStar Group. Leading compensation for more than 5,000 global employees comes on the heels of her time at Darden as a student in the Global Executive MBA and more than a decade taking a startup from pre-seed to acquisition by a Fortune 5 company.

Kauffman ran the gamut of HR roles during her time in startup life. “The startup mentality is that you roll up your sleeves and do what needs to get done,” she said. Ultimately, she found that focusing on employee compensation satisfied her desire to have a meaningful impact on people’s lives while flexing her own talent with data.

Kauffman’s perspective also aligns with recent pushes for using transparency to improve equity in compensation. “We are headed in the right direction, but there is a lot more work to be done,” she said.

Kauffman described her time at Darden as transformative. “Having grown up in Nepal, my parents always ingrained in me the importance of education. And yet, I kept finding reasons why the time wasn’t right to pull myself out of the workforce to get an MBA that I always knew I wanted. Pulling the trigger and going to Darden is one of the best decisions I made in my life.”

She observed that what many students carry forward is more profound than the hard skills they’re initially seeking: things like an open mind, the ability to tackle tough problems, comfort with not knowing all the answers and self-confidence. “I think you come out a better person at the end of the program. Maybe you had it in you all along, and Darden simply gave you the tools to dig a little deeper and bring out the best version of yourself,” she said.

On the heels of the birth of her second daughter last year and returning from maternity leave, Kauffman is more determined than ever to achieve her career aspirations. “I have a very strong motivation with my girls to give them a strong female presence to be proud of; to show them that you don’t have to choose between being a mother and being a business leader.”

At CoStar Group, being an HR leader amid the Great Resignation has been challenging but also a moment of great opportunity. “Who would have imagined HR leaders having to navigate COVID and the return-tothe-office initiative? It’s a concept that didn’t even exist before.” Things are changing wildly in compensation, too, as hiring and retaining talent has become an urgent priority.

“It’s been a really fulfilling time to be an HR leader, to get to work on some really nuanced, never-before-seen issues and to get creative in terms of handling it, because there is no playbook.”

— Molly Mitchell

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