Social media as strategic HR infrastructure: What every leader can learn from Hootsuite's CEO Irina Novoselsky

In a world where five billion people spend three and a half hours a day on social media, companies face a stark choice: engage authentically with their audiences where they are, or risk becoming irrelevant. For Irina Novoselsky, CEO of Hootsuite, the stakes are clear.

"Without having access and visibility to social listening, it's like basically operating without a phone to your business," she says. "Your doors are slammed shut, and your windows are colored black. I don't know how as a business you can operate without having the perspective of what your customers, employees, the market, the industry are saying about you."

After three years leading Hootsuite—the social media intelligence platform serving global enterprise customers—Novoselsky has transformed how she thinks about social media. 

It's not a marketing channel or a customer service tool. It's business infrastructure. 

And for leaders willing to lean in, social media is a competitive advantage that touches everything from brand sentiment to employee engagement to talent acquisition.

From finance to social: An unlikely journey

Novoselsky's path to leading a social media company wasn't conventional. She started her career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, then moved to private equity investing at Apollo. That foundation gave her something invaluable: the ability to quickly distill what matters.

"It just gave me this amazing skill set at figuring out 80-20," she says. "How do you distill a lot of information coming at you to figure out what's the 20% that can drive 80% of the value?"

But her most formative experience came earlier. Novoselsky came to the United States as a refugee from Ukraine, an experience that shaped her entire worldview.

"There are two lotteries in life," she says. "There's the geography lottery, and then there's the parent lottery. I didn't win the geography lottery but won the parent lottery that then took me to the right geography." 

That background instilled in her a particular approach to obstacles: "I just have this appreciation that ‘no’ is a suggestion. When I hear ‘no,’ it doesn't really dishearten me, it doesn't disappoint me. All I think about is, okay, great, you're the wrong person, let me find somebody else."

That mindset—paired with data-driven thinking and genuine curiosity—became her formula for building teams and scaling businesses.

Hiring for potential, not pedigree

One of Novoselsky's most distinctive leadership approaches is how she thinks about talent. Despite having an elite resume herself, she doesn't prioritize traditional credentials when building teams.

"I'm a firm believer that just because you haven't done the job doesn't mean you can't do the job.” 

Her hiring criteria comes down to three things:

1. Curiosity
2. Enthusiasm
3. Data orientation

The results speak for themselves. Novoselsky estimates that more than 50% of her executive leadership team didn't have the specific job title before she promoted them. Nearly 80% had never held C-suite roles before.

Her most dramatic move? Promoting her Chief People Officer to Chief Customer Officer. 

"When you dig into what makes a good Chief People Officer, they are building an internal customer experience. They're doing operations to make sure the employee is engaged, the internal customer is engaged. They have their own funnel math. And so it's very similar skill sets on the customer side, they're just called different things."

The risk of promoting from within, she argues, is actually lower than hiring externally. "I've been able to test their personality, their skill sets, how they show up. I've had a pretty good hit rate internally. Yes, of course, here and there it doesn't work, but the majority has worked."

Walking the talk: How Hootsuite develops leaders

Novoselsky's philosophy about hiring for potential over pedigree would be empty rhetoric without a robust system for developing that potential. 

At Hootsuite, that system involves precision skill development through 1:1 development sessions in partnership with Growthspace. 

The results speak for themselves. Across all 1:1 skill development programs with Growthspace, Hootsuite employees consistently rate their experience at 4.69 out of 5, with Growthspace experts earning an impressive 4.75 rating. 

More importantly, participants report tangible value at 4.57 and progress toward goals at 4.55. These metrics indicate real skill development, not just feel-good training.

The skills that matter

According to our Growthspace platform, the focus areas reveal what Hootsuite prioritizes as leadership capabilities. Across all seniority levels (from VP to individual contributors) the development emphasis centers on:

• Communication and influence: How to give feedback effectively, build reliable working partnerships, and participate in strategic conversations
• Strategic thinking: Moving from tactical execution to strategic leadership and product strategy influence
• Change management: Leading through uncertainty with resilience and positivity
• Authentic leadership: Building confidence, giving honest feedback, and creating psychological safety

These aren't technical skills that expire when technology changes. They're the durable, human skills that Novoselsky argues AI can't replicate. "I think the part that AI can't do for you is the leadership part," she emphasizes.

The CEO's social media journey

Given her role leading a social media company, you might assume Novoselsky was a natural on social platforms. She wasn't.

But she forced herself to lean in and made all the classic mistakes at first. She shared product-forward posts, constantly asking, “click on this, see this new thing we’re doing.” She compared it to being the person at a dinner party who only talks about themselves. 

"At some point, you just slowly back away and try to get as much distance as humanly possible. But yet, that is how we all emerge into social media."

The market provided fast feedback. Posts that focused on products got little engagement. Posts that provided value, shared leadership insights, or offered behind-the-scenes glimpses resonated.

"The studies and the research that Hootsuite has found that basically you need to give nine times before asking once," she explains. 

For HR leaders: Your employees are already on social

When asked how HR leaders should think about social media, Novoselsky's answer is direct: exactly like CMOs do, just with a different audience.

"Your buyers are internal, and I can guarantee you nearly all of your employee base is on social in some way. How leaders show up on social drives employee engagement. It drives employees referring people to come work for you. Your candidate acquisition costs go down."

Understanding how your brand is perceived as an employer is as critical as understanding customer sentiment. Hootsuite connects these data sources to help HR leaders understand where their brand resonates, where engagement is strong, and where it's not.

"CHROs take that and drive engagement and lower cost to attract," she says, contrasting with how CMOs use the same intelligence to drive revenue.

Social media masterclass: How to get started

For individuals, whether CEOs, HR managers, or anyone looking to build presence, Novoselsky offers a practical roadmap:

Step 1: Start by following

"Start following people that you're interested in. That's an easy one. It requires very little of you to put yourself out there."

Step 2: Engage in the comments 

"The second thing is literally just comment. And by the way, this is the same advice I give CEOs, because I spend a lot of time with CMOs that are trying to get their CEOs engaged."

The algorithms reward commenters even more than original posters. And it's not about a thumbs up, that doesn't count. "It's actually something that resonated with you."

The result? "I almost can guarantee you that if you do five or so of those comments, you'll get inspired to do a post on something."

Step 3: Use tools to overcome the blank page

The biggest barrier people face is the blank page. Hootsuite's AI tools address this by allowing users to drop in an article or post they like and prompt the AI: "Can you give me five variations of this but do it in this tone or do it with this voice."

For companies with higher governance needs, such as regulated industries, Hootsuite also helps with compliance guardrails — making it easy for employees to reshare approved content or generate their own variations.

"Within a company when they're using tools like this, posting grows by 20, 30 percent, and engagement increases, because people are excited and it doesn't have to be posting around your products and services."

In fact, Hootsuite's most engaging internal posts aren't about products at all—they're about annual giving days, volunteer activities, and company culture. "People want to share what they're doing, and it also drives a lot of candidate traffic for us as well."

The cultural piece: Making social media everyone's job

Getting an entire organization engaged on social media requires cultural change, not just tools. And culture change starts at the top.

Frank Cooper, CMO of Visa, exemplifies this. When he started posting a year and a half ago, no executives at Visa were active on social. Now about 70% are.

Another example: the president and dean of San Jose State University completely changed their enrollment process using social media. They were 10% under the enrollment target. Now, they are 11% over enrolled because the president and dean leaned in and started posting, attracting Gen Z applicants. 

The one mindset shift that matters

Throughout the conversation, one theme emerges repeatedly: treating social media not as a channel, but as fundamental infrastructure.

"It's no longer social media, it's just media," Novoselsky says. "By not engaging, you're not protecting your brand. You're just making your brand irrelevant."

For leaders who resist and say their industry is different, their customers don't buy on social, or it's just not relevant, her message is clear: 

Whether you're a CMO tracking brand sentiment, a CHRO building employer brand, or a CEO looking to better understand their customers, social media provides a window into what your stakeholders actually think, say, and care about. The question isn't whether to engage; it's whether you can afford not to.

Resources

• Connect with Irina Novoselsky on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Hootsuite
• Explore Growthspace for precision skill development at scale