HR and Talent Consultant Crissy Rollan has gone through her fair share of struggle and success—both at work and in her personal life. Now, she’s choosing meaningful impact above all.
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It’s a winding road out there for all of us navigating our careers. Here’s the thing: making the tough decisions about your life will never get easier. You will, however, learn from every opportunity, every decision, every win, and every challenge. And this isn’t just about navigating your job and career in the corporate setting. Whether we’re at the beginning or deep in the thick of it, we’re all learning in real time how to grow into the people we want to—or need to—become. It just so happens that for the most part, our life’s purpose and career intersect, for better or worse. Crissy Rollan knows a thing or two about all that.
An award-winning HR and talent consultant, life and career coach, inspirational speaker, mother, and content creator (though she doesn’t consider herself to be one), Crissy Rollan is the face of and mind behind CrissyTalksHR, an online platform offering career and HR advice, information, and insight. A longtime high-powered certified girlboss, Crissy quit her corporate job last year to go all-in on her platform on social media—earning less money, doing everything herself, but at the same time widening her reach and pursuing something that much more meaningful to her.
As a featured speaker at the MMGI Career Fair at the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Crissy held a masterclass for young students all about defining success and discerning your true goals and purpose. She herself had to make some tough decisions when it comes to her career and what she truly wants to do with her life, and each turning point in her journey has led to not just the birth of CrissyTalksHR, but far more opportunities to live her life with more intention.
Get to know more about Crissy and learn a thing or two about the humanity behind human relations in our full interview below.
INTENT, MEANING, AND HUMAN RELATIONS
What made you want to expand your reach and your platform beyond just doing HR for work? What made you want to start CrissyTalksHR?
Honestly, I actually quit my corporate job last year. It wasn’t because I was so burned out—it was really because maybe after working for 20 years, you start to realize the person you’re becoming and the person you want to become. And while there’s really nothing I can complain about the work that I do, and I’ve been super blessed with the company [I worked with], it also required a lot of traveling. I think that I was in a season in my life where as a mom, as a woman, we’re kind of like told na “Kailangan pumili ka.” But I wanted to have it all. But having it all meant that I have to also be very mindful and strategic in terms of how I put my energy into the different pockets of my life.
What does it take to do that? To give up something that has been your whole life?
Honestly, it really broke my heart. A huge part of my identity has always been about Crissy-with-a-job-title. And the job title also sometimes becomes your validation of how well you’ve done in your life. So I started to find the courage to really stand by my business, which has always been there, but has always been more part-time, because the full-time was the more predictable, sure, and stable [work] versus your own business.
So I took the courage to do that, because I knew that I wanted to still be doing what I love doing, which is HR and coaching. [I was thinking], I can’t be a present mom if I’m literally traveling all the time. Also, at the same time, I think 2024 was a year of breaking for me, in a sense that I understood myself better.
I have a very supportive husband, but money was the hardest for us. Money was the one that really hit us the most because we used to be a dual income household and then now here I am, “following my passion”, and it’s always going to be a question of “when will the passion turn into money?”
So it takes a lot of being mindful. It takes a lot of self-awareness to understand for yourself that because this is what I want to build, and this is my vision for what I want to have in the next three years, you understand that the things that you’re gonna sacrifice today—they’re not gonna be permanent. You will now have to work harder, but happier. More you, more yourself, and just you really going towards the direction that you’ve set for yourself, hoping that everything that I had to give up—which were things like money, travel, stability, the cushy job title—all of these things, I will make it up on my own terms when I get there.
There’s a certain pride in being able to go “I’ve built this.”
I think it’s less about pride for me. And maybe because I’ve reached a point in my life where it is no longer about what I have achieved, but rather, it’s about how I am now impacting the people around me. Kasi if I just look at things if I’m happy about what I’ve achieved, I’m more than happy with where I’ve gotten myself to. I started working at a very early age. I didn’t even have a pause after graduating, and I actually moved to Singapore right after graduation. I don’t understand what it meant to have a break. But I think I was pushed also to the edge.
Because I never took a break in my own life, it pushed me to break, and that breaking allowed me to understand that even if I reach the top level in a corporate setup—is that what I want? When you’re working, it becomes a race. When we talk about success, ang hirap kasi i-quantify ang fulfillment or contentment. What we can only see are the things we can touch and [measure]. The optics, meaning—what’s your job title, how you’re going to be respected, that all went away.
What was it like when you realized that you were making an impact with your content?
You know, it’s amazing because I don’t categorize myself as a content creator. And in fact, I have so much respect and admiration for people who are content creators because it’s so hard. [For me], it really started with really sticking to your core, sticking to your foundation. I knew that if I was going to get myself out there—I’m a very private person—it cannot be about me or my achievements. It has to be something bigger than myself, which is all about the pain points of Filipino professionals, and I’ve always believed that if you do things with intention, with honesty, with clarity, even if it just meant one person will listen to me, I was happy to continue on.
And honestly speaking, I owe where we are today to the team. I owe it to them because I don’t think I’ll ever get to the reach that I have right now without the creative minds of the team that I’m blessed to work with. We understand that we don’t make money out of the platform. I wish we could, but because the focus has always been about the quality of the output that we present, it’s just a intentional as we go into our second year. We’ve widened the topics not just in HR, in the sense that we want to be able to talk about human pain points. And at the end of the day, it all goes back to that’s what HR is all about, right? It’s all about human relations. It’s all about being human and understanding each other as human beings.
I want to touch on that, the HR part of it. Because I know from my generation, I see it online—the qualms that people have about HR. There’s a lot of mistrust there. Why do you think HR has such a bad rep with young professionals, particularly?
That’s the reason why CrissyTalksHR was born. I have the opportunity to talk to more decision makers, but also to hopefully inspire, educate, drive a mindset shift in some of the HR [people] who are listening in the platform. My hope is that we understand that in an organization, there are three characters. There’s the owner, there’s the employee, and in the middle is HR. The HR’s job is so critical in an organization. It’s the bridge. If you are the bridge and you cannot be trusted, then you’re not doing a good job.
Topics like this is a taboo in the Philippines, because why would you talk about these things that are happening in your organization out in the open? Pero kasi, kung lahat ng tao mauubos ang tiwala sa isang organisasyon, then we all go to work depressed. So for me, my hope is that the platform becomes a voice for leaders to understand that HR’s job is not just admin. It’s not that I don’t want to be trusted—I want to! But you have to give me a chance. And for HR to understand that the employees get scared because they think “what if ma-memo ako?”. The job of HR is to bridge human relations. And we need to improve how those things are done.
I guess the misconception with it also is the power imbalance—that HR has a lot of power over employees.
I mean, I can’t speak for all of HR, but it all goes back also to how can you drive changes or how can you suggest things to the organization if you yourself don’t have the confidence na pakikinggan ka—that you have the power to actually move things? So the biggest thing that a lot of the HR need to learn is not so much about the technical skills. It’s really trusting yourself. You need to trust yourself so that others will trust you. HR needs to be headstrong in terms of remaining neutral and being in the middle.
Now let’s talk about young professionals and misconceptions in the workplace. It’s hard to set expectations for a first job. What are some things that someone going into their first job can prepare for?
I think it’s very scary to always think about what your first job will be like. My advice to everyone and anyone who’s gonna step into their first job is to accept the fact that you’re there to learn. Ask yourself, “what do I want to learn?”. “How do I want to learn?”
The preparation is about “what kind of learning do I want to get out of this?”. And one day, you’ll start to realize, “wala na akong gusto matutunan sa company na to.” Then resigning or moving to the other job is not about because you’ve found another job that pays more, or because it’s a less toxic environment. It’s now a matter of “can this job give me the further learning I want for myself?”
Life should be about continuous learning, even if you’re 50 years old, 60 years old. Because the way you stimulate your brain makes you sharp. And if the learning stops, your brain also stales.
Also at the same time, I cannot stress this enough—never take anything personally. I’m a very passionate worker. I will burn the hours because I love what I do. But sometimes, your love for the job, it doesn’t get reciprocated. And that’s when you start to realize, “why?” You forget that the people that love you unconditionally are the ones longing for your time. You give so much of yourself to something that, at the end of the day, is not going to fight for you. And there’s nothing wrong with giving your best to a job that you really, really love. But don’t forget that work is just one third of your life. There are other two thirds that’s waiting for you—the one third for yourself, and the one third for your family.
How can someone not make their job their life—especially creatives, whose lives are often so intertwined with their work?
I wish I can tell you a secret formula to balance how you get there fast and be successful, but also at the same time how you build your craft. Balance is personal. The definition of balance is personal. It’s always personally driven in the sense that if a person is sincerely happy that work becomes their life, the only thing I will say is that you have no right to complain, because you made that decision.
It’s more about having the conviction that if I make this decision for myself, then I need to suck it up. And your convictions will change. For your first job, honestly, the best thing to do when you’ve just gotten your first job is to burn the hours. Burn the hours very early on in your life, because you have the energy. You have the brain power. The measure of success is “how much growth, how much learning did I get from here?” And thinking about, “ah okay, naging worth it na.” If you decide for yourself that you’re going to enter the corporate world, there’s a certain balance na you understand your boundaries, but not be entitled about it.
And that’s why it’s so important to go for a job that you’re very excited about. The common misconception is that pag bago ka sa trabaho, habulin mo yung sweldo. Pero the right mindset is that habulin mo kung saan ka matututo. And for you to learn, it has to be something you’re interested in. Make it about the learning.
I love that insight. It’s the life beyond and the learning that matters.
Yes. It’s a normal feeling to feel that there are days when you want to resign. But there are things worse than missing a deadline or losing your job. It’s death. It’s dying. I lost a son. I knew he was going to die in utero, and it allowed me to see life from a different lens—that each day is so precious, and if each day is precious, you want to make the best out of it. When I lost him, I found myself with zero regrets. And even to this day, why I found my confidence, why I found my courage, is because seven years ago, I didn’t care about who I would be or what kind of impact do I want to have in this world, but if a little boy like that can impact me this way, I owe it to the world to share my story.
Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Photos by Meinard Navato, edited by Gelo Quijencio.
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