When Shanda Nikkel showed up at Express Employment Professionals’ Wilsonville office in 1992, she was looking for temporary employment somewhere in the community. She’d been working for a pest control company, managing their schedule, but they’d gone out of business. So she went back to Express, where she’d previously found temporary work at places like Nike’s distribution center, Payless’s distribution center, and G.I. Joe’s.
The great thing about temporary work, Shanda said, is the ability to try out lots of different jobs to see what sticks. At one point, she was hired by a company to do data entry and quickly became their credit manager. When she realized that role wasn’t a fit, she’d gone back to Express. But in 1992, when she found herself back at Express, she got hired as Express’s receptionist. And that time, it stuck.
Shortly after getting hired, she began placing temporary employees, which she did for three years. “I loved all the people who worked there,” she said. “We had a really great team and we had a lot of fun. But after three years, I was ready to do something different.” Still with Express, she moved to a client’s office, a circuit board manufacturer, and worked on-site managing their temporary recruiting operations.
Then, Express’s owners bought a PEO to expand their offerings, and eventually, on January 1, 2000, the company became Xenium, offering human resources services alongside payroll and employee benefits services. Shanda and current Xenium president Anne Donovan headed up the team, hiring people to specialize in each of the company’s areas of expertise.
“I ended up on the benefits side,” Shanda said, and her mastery of 401(k)s progressed naturally from there. “I grew up in it, and now I have all this knowledge, and I’m the expert on our plans.” This, she said, is the work she’s most proud of in her 26 years at Xenium. “It’s a good product,” she said, “and we definitely have refined it over the years to make it even better.”
Shanda has enjoyed working at Xenium because of the variety of her challenges. “There’s always something new going on,” she said. “And I like to learn new things and invent new things, like, ‘Oh, we need an HRA plan. Let’s figure it out and create it.’” She also credits her long-standing relationships with both colleagues and clients. “I know the clients,” she said. “Every single year, they still hear from me.”
Shanda was born and raised in Oregon, though in her childhood she moved a few times between Oregon and Alabama, her mother’s home state. Family is important to her, which is why her best advice to anyone who wants to get started in HR is to stay true to their desired work-life balance.
“I’m the type of person who takes work with them,” she said. “I don’t go home and stop thinking about it. It’s always there. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it.” To combat overworking, she makes sure the tasks she gives herself can be accomplished within a 40-hour workweek. “I keep a notepad by my bed, because I’ll wake up remembering something I have to do the next day. If I don’t write it down, I stress about it, running through scenarios in my mind. I’m really trying to let myself be at home when I’m at home.” Plus, with Shanda, Anne, and other long-term employees modeling this importance of work-life balance, everyone else at Xenium is encouraged to follow suit.
In her current role as Program Implementation Manager, Shanda supports new client implementation success by partnering with the Sales, Payroll, Benefits and HR teams. Her extensive knowledge of the entire company’s operations allows her to provide incoming clients with the expertise of how all the Xenium tools and services fit together and how they can most benefit them. This focus on connectedness is, she said, the key to starting a successful career in HR. It’s those groundwork roles that show employees how every facet is related—from payroll to taxes to worker’s compensation—that make the biggest difference in understanding the industry, she said. “Even if you don’t stay in our type of industry where you have multiple clients, it will serve you well, even as an internal HR person, to understand how everything is connected.”