Jamie Jacobs: HR Executive to Founder & CEO of Gig Talent

Jamie Jacobs spent two decades climbing the corporate HR ladder before walking away from it, and the thing that made the walk possible was courage she'd been quietly building since childhood. She grew up in the San Diego area with parents who stayed married and never finished college, and a father known around town as "Mr. Mercedes," a general sales manager at a Mercedes-Benz dealership for 25 years who could work any room. Her drive showed up early: her parents were called into her kindergarten class by a teacher worried they were pushing her too hard. They weren't. She fell into HR at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, starting in front office roles before a position opened on the people side. Five years later she was at Ingersoll Rand, hired as a generalist and covering her boss's role two weeks in when she went on leave and never came back. A pattern emerged: she was the person called in to build something new or fix something broken, never to maintain it. Somewhere along the way she ran an environmental training division, got certified as an underground storage tank operator, and found herself on a plane to Houston to teach Shell Oil about California law, a lesson less about expertise than about walking into the room anyway. The clocking out moment came at a fast-growing company where she was the first HR hire, scaling from roughly 150 employees to 675 in twelve months. When regulatory changes reversed the growth, she told the chairman of the board she didn't think they needed her role. She took three weeks alone to think, wrote a book on culture, started consulting, and in 2019 co-founded Gig Talent, buying out her co-founder at the end of 2024 and rebuilding it around a single question: what is this actually meant to become? She did much of it while raising a daughter as a single mom. This conversation is about the difference between success that looks right and work that feels aligned. About holding a goal lightly enough that it can grow past what you imagined, about fear as a signal rather than a stop sign, and about what happens when you stop asking what the system rewards and start asking what you're actually here to build. **Connect with Jamie at:** - Website: https://gigtalentagency.com - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gig-talent/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlatianojacobs - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamielatianojacobs/ and https://www.instagram.com/gigtalentagency/ **Follow Raymond:** - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondmlee/ - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/raymondlee.co - Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clockingoutpod - X: http://twitter.com/hrentrepreneur - Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@clockingoutwithraymondlee/videos Become a guest on Clocking Out: https://bit.ly/46sqClq