“I think if you spoke to any HR professional, the one thing they’re not going to tell you is as a child, they were dreaming of being an HR professional,” says Rebecca Pacillas, chief people officer at American Advisors Group (AAG), the top lender in the American reverse mortgage industry. “But I suspect they were dreaming of being someone whose job was to help people. I envisioned three places for myself in the world: as an attorney, as a psychiatrist, or as a marketing professional, and I feel like I’ve done all that in my HR career.”
Taking her mother’s advice that being a receptionist was the gateway into nearly every job in a business, Pacillas started in that role at an outsourced infrastructure and hardware company. From there, she made headway on what is now a twenty-plus-year career in human resources.
“I learned how to work with customers internally and externally, all the while figuring out ways to fix any issue that would come across my desk,” she says. “I very quickly got the attention of the higher-ups because they saw I had a strong foundation of wanting to make things better.”
With Pacillas’ foundational care and empathy for her co-workers, it was suggested that she interview for a recruiting role. “With recruiting, knowing job descriptions, talking to candidates, and understanding what that looks like, that’s when I fell in love with human resources,” Pacillas says. A move to the role of HR generalist only strengthened this.
Pacillas landed her first VP role in HR at 27, overseeing all North American HR operations for retail company TOMRA Pacific. Pacillas joined AAG in 2012 in a VP role before quickly rising to SVP, and now holds the title of Chief People Officer on the executive board.
When Pacillas joined AAG, the company had only 300 employees but was in the midst of a huge growth spurt. Her initial goal was to maintain and amplify the culture she had just become a part of. Then, as the company scaled up and up, reaching 1200 employees by the end of 2017, Pacillas had to figure out how to keep that culture intact with such a large headcount and remote employees around the country.
“That was always something we needed to make sure, that we were hiring for our core values, and providing the right tools and the right opportunities for employees,” she says. “Today, we are close to 1600 employees strong.”
AAG’s simple core values, which survived all that growth, are:
- Caring
- Ethical
- Driven
“Usually a company forms their core values and then wants the employees to replicate them,” Pacillas says. “Our employees are the ones who created the culture, which in turn created the core values. I will tell you, in the 20 plus years I’ve been in HR, this is the first company where I can go to anybody’s workstation, and everybody knows what our core values are .”
If ever there was a true stress test for HR organizations in businesses across North America, it was the COVID pandemic. And if ever there was a historical moment where HR departments could shine, it began with the kickoff of pandemic chaos that began in March of 2020.
When Pacillas and her team got the news of the changes that needed to happen, it was already eight o’clock in the evening. Immediately, she says, the questions began to multiply in her head: “How do we meticulously deploy over 1200 employees to remote work? How do we keep them safe and healthy? How do we keep them motivated? How do we take care of the 60 essential workers that need to stay in the office? And how do we also take care of the seniors that make up a good percentage of the customers we service?”
In just 10 days, AAG had 95% of its workforce working remotely. Of the many COVID-related changes that were made by the company to benefit employees, the one that Pacillas is most proud of involves a boost to the company’s mental health benefits.
“Before COVID. I firmly believed that we needed to do a better job with mental health,” she says. “And so, the moment we went into this pandemic mode, we went back to the organization that had actually trained all my HR professionals on mental health training, and we actually paid for it to give all of our managers this training so that they can identify and spot things as they were happening in real-time by Zoom or by phone.”
Another additional practice AAG added in March of 2020 is monthly town halls led by company CEO Reza Jahangiri. To maintain AAG’s fun and team-centered culture, the company’s employee engagement team worked quickly to identify creative ways to maintain connections in their newfound remote environment. Lunchtime trivia, monthly cooking activities, virtual walking clubs, and a digital employee recognition platform replaced AAG’s popular ping pong tournaments, chili cookoffs, and ice cream socials. And the company quickly transitioned what was typically in-person learning development programs to fully virtual while leveraging unique ways to keep students engaged.
As far as a return to the old ways we all knew pre-COVID, Pacillas believes that the landscape has changed forever. In many ways, however, it seems already that those new ways represent progress that needed to happen, pandemic or no.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to go back to the pre-pandemic working world completely,” she says. As for now, the company plans to wait on moving back to an office model until a clearer picture materializes of how well vaccinations are working in stemming the virus’ tide, as well as what state and local governments will dictate as best practices going forward. If the company returns to in-office work, it will only be when health and safety precautions to protect employees and clients can be fully guaranteed.
“Either way, we will continue to bolster our many learning and development programs to offer more trainings on topics such as how to engage with your workforce, how to use your emotional intelligence for reading somebody by Zoom. It’s a new world,” Pacillas says. “It’s going to be a very slow drip campaign, in terms of how we move our employees back to the office throughout the country.”
In terms of what makes the culture at AAG unique and special, Pacillas insists that the people are the culture in action.
“Finding those people is integral to our interview process. It’s not just a one-and-done. There’s a whole thought process to making sure the people we hire have those values we need to keep the culture organic,” she says. “It’s the people of AAG that makes us so unique and it’s also the people and product that we serve.” (She mentions that it also doesn’t hurt that the iconic Magnum P.I. himself, Tom Selleck, is company spokesman.)
“I believe we’re one of the few companies whose benefits package includes paid volunteer time off to encourage volunteerism in our local communities. So, we definitely hire for that caring disposition,” Pacillas says. “People have feelings and emotions that really generate why numbers and data come together.”
This people-centric approach extends to the company’s endeavors to consistently improve DE&I processes.
“As we started building momentum, we wanted to ensure that we had diversity in our workplace. And as you can see, we’re rated top five percentile for women and for minorities. We are hyper-focused on, regardless if we are in the office, or by Zoom, making AAG an even better place to work,” she says, neatly summing up the company’s transparency and its appeal to those with the caring dispositions that make it all work.
At the end of the day, a company is measured by its mission. AAG’s mission is to help seniors achieve and afford the retirement they deserve by utilizing’s their home’s equity. Those who are interested in working for a company with a mission that rings out as clear and true as a bell should apply today.
