Christine van Hoffen, People Lead at Tracksuit, is a force of nature in the rapidly evolving world of HR. At Tracksuit, a brand tracking start-up revolutionizing how brands measure their value, van Hoffen has been instrumental in crafting a workplace celebrated for its unique and thriving culture. Joining the company as employee number twelve, she quickly transitioned from Operations Manager to People Lead, supporting the explosive growth to over 120 employees and a significant expansion into the U.S. market, working with brands such as Steve Madden, Supergoop!, and The RealReal.
A Foundation of Diverse Experiences
Van Hoffen’s journey is a testament to the power of diverse experiences. With an educational background spanning Biomedical Science, Digital Design, and an MBA from UCL focusing on pay transparency, she brings a unique blend of analytical rigor, creative vision, and business acumen to her role. This fusion allows her to craft people processes grounded in research and best practices, while remaining innovative and aligned with business goals. She is passionate about pay transparency, supporting working parents, and fostering a culture that balances high performance with genuine care.
An Unconventional Path to HR
Her path to HR was anything but traditional. “My path to HR was not exactly traditional, which had its challenges but also brought me unique perspectives,” van Hoffen reflects. “I’m very passionate about giving opportunities to people who may not have a conventional background, which I find especially valuable in the startup environment where there’s more room to get creative with hiring.”
Starting with a BSc in Biomedical Science, she transitioned through roles in medical publishing, contract management in university research, and even ran a small illustration studio. These experiences honed her skills in employer branding, research, negotiation, and entrepreneurship. A stint as an executive assistant to the CEO at Crimson Education provided invaluable insights into people strategy and operational challenges, while simultaneously pursuing her MBA.
Building a People-First Culture at Tracksuit
After maternity leave, van Hoffen found her place at Tracksuit. “As the team grew, I found myself increasingly focused on people operations – onboarding, recruitment, policies and benefits,” she explains. Despite lacking formal HR qualifications, her CEOs recognized her potential, promoting her to People Lead and then Head of People. “Unlike many professionals in this field, I didn’t follow a direct route, but the steps I took throughout my career and educational journeys to find what I was truly passionate about gave me skills and insights that are invaluable to my role today.”
Van Hoffen’s story is a compelling reminder that diverse backgrounds and unconventional paths can lead to remarkable achievements in HR, particularly in the dynamic world of startups.
In our latest Faces, meet Christine van Hoffen.
Who is/was your biggest influence in the industry?
My former manager at Crimson, Pene Barton. At the time, she was CPO, and her depth of knowledge and skill was unparalleled. She has an exceptional ability to understand people – truly better than anyone I’ve ever met – while also being highly commercial, data-driven and cross-functional. These qualities have only amplified in her current role as CEO. Pene has always offered invaluable advice, both broad and specific, always striking the perfect balance – a crucial trait in both HR and startup environments. Her guidance has had a lasting impact on my career.
What’s your best mistake and what did you learn from it?
It happened in my early days at Tracksuit when I was still the Operations Manager, and the team was about 20 people. I spent far too long doing an unsolicited gender pay gap analysis to present to leadership. On reflection, I realized that the data wasn’t useful and probably caused more frustration than necessary.
However, it set the tone and expectation very early that we would hold ourselves accountable and provided a starting point for future progress. Today, we routinely assess and present progress on gender gaps to the board quarterly. If we hadn’t started that as early as we did, it may not have been on our radar when we prepped our board packs early on. This experience helped me learn how to communicate these types of initiatives to leadership.
What’s your favorite part about working in the industry?
HR is the most incredible merging of my generalist skills where every single one gets used every day. Both sides of my brain are constantly lit up, something I truly enjoy. For example, when designing a new parental leave policy, the analytical side comes into play as I collaborate with the VP of Operations to assess its impact on forecasts, conduct literature research, parse information and map out implementation steps.
Meanwhile, the creative side is also flowing, as I find creative ways to make this policy uniquely “ours.” This part of the process also enables me to think about how we’ll communicate it to the team and prospective employees, in addition to brainstorming Tracksuit-y branding moments.
One of my favorite principles we follow is that we never import policies or processes from elsewhere—we create our own by rebuilding traditional approaches from the ground up and tailoring them to our needs while leaving room to iterate and improve over time.
What’s your least favorite part, and how would you change it?
Performance management is always tricky, but it’s especially tricky in a small team where colleagues often feel like friends or even family. The worst part for the People Team is that despite managers giving feedback (whether they are or think they are) oftentimes the employee feels blindsided.
In startups that is extra hard because it’s chaotic and can be hard to tell how you’re performing or what the expectations are, and documentation isn’t as thorough as in a corporate setting.
My focus for the first quarter of 2025 is to find a way to approach this in a Tracksuit-y way so that there is never a surprise conversation and people feel like they understand their own performance relative to themselves, the wider team, our expectations, and company goals and performance. Instead of implementing an off-the-shelf solution, we’re creating a performance management, calibration and tracking process from the ground up. It’s both daunting and exciting, and it’s an opportunity to design something that’s uniquely suited to our team’s values and dynamics.
It sounds like through your experience you really care about people, and you want to help them feel safe and comfortable, which is important in the industry. Please elaborate here.
At Tracksuit we believe we can win without stepping on people. Success doesn’t have to come at the expense of others’ well-being. In fact, caring for people is the foundation of long-term success. When people feel safe, supported and valued, they thrive, and so does the business – and there’s plenty of research to support this.
Balance is key, and while it’s not a difficult concept, it’s often neglected or forgotten about, especially in fast-paced industries. Whether it’s balancing ambition with empathy or ensuring people have the space to show up as their whole selves, these efforts make a real difference.
And it doesn’t always need to be about the most expensive or elaborate initiatives. One example is our Spark Spending program, where we give each team member a small budget each week – <$3 USD – to spend on another teammate in a way that is meaningful to them. In the grand scheme of all of our benefits and perks, this is a really low-cost idea, but the impact is amongst the most meaningful. We developed it in-house to be able to perfectly capture what our team needed. It shows them that we care about the little things that make life and work better. This kind of culture makes people want to stick around and contribute to something bigger than themselves.
How can HR most effectively demonstrate its value to the leadership team?
HR’s value becomes most evident when it’s proactive and involved from the start. When HR is brought in early to help shape the culture, we can avoid “HR debt,” which happens when people’s challenges pile up and become harder to solve. Laying strong foundations from the start makes a big difference.
Data is another powerful tool. Research-backed proposals and clear business cases show the tangible impact of HR initiatives. As we grow and collect more data to work with, I’m focused on demonstrating ROI and framing HR strategies in a way that aligns with broader business priorities.
Finally, communication is key. HR can feel like IT in that people only notice when something isn’t working. Finding ways to clearly explain what we do and why it matters is so important. Face time with leaders helps, as does co-designing initiatives with them so they can see the value in action.
Where do you see the industry heading in five years? Or are you seeing any current trends?
I think there has been a clear shift in certain industries moving away from “HR” to “People” – that’s not new. We’ve also seen more talk about People as Product and EX Design as concepts. I think these changes will continue to permeate through some of the more slow-adoption industries.
But the big thing I’m predicting is as part of the evolution of HR to People/EX/People as Product, that we see a much greater shift toward transparency in the workplace – and HR is a key player in making that happen. Millennials and Gen Z are gradually taking over the workforce and they are pushing for greater transparency and flexibility. They’ve been raised to expect openness via social media, online reviews and public accountability like no other generation has seen before. These demographics have also grown up in a world impacted by dozens of milestone events that shape their drive to seek greater trust and transparency from leadership and businesses, such as the pandemic, recessions, layoffs and movements like #MeToo.
Tangentially, I think we’ll also see a growing emphasis on transparency within the HR community, with more focus on the open sourcing of knowledge and policies. A great example to reference is Open Org.
What are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of completing my MBA, working full time at the fastest-growing startup in New Zealand and raising my son from newborn to 3.5 years old while doing so. Additionally, completing my Capstone project on pay transparency in U.S. startups has had a tremendous impact on my career.
At Tracksuit I’m most proud of our slow and steady commitment to chipping away at the Gender Pay Gap through scalable and long-lasting efforts. It’s easy to be performative and just accelerate the process with tokenistic actions but we’re deliberately trying to do this in a way that embeds it into our company as we grow. This has been shown through a generous parental policy, return-to-work support for primary caregivers, pay transparency, learning and development and more.
When I started as People Lead 18 months ago the gap was 30%. It’s now 13%. Consider the fact that we are a tech startup and 13% is a huge win. We’re on a mission to get it to zero in a way that embeds all those attitude changes and practices into our culture.
Do you have any advice for people entering the profession?
Lean into the power of finding good people to share knowledge with. Seek out opportunities for coffee chats, lunches, or casual conversations – as a lot of times, these can essentially be used as mini mentoring sessions. I leaned so hard into this when I started – and now return the favor by helping others now that we’ve seen what has worked for us. A lot of modern HR people are passionate about improving workplaces and recognize that sharing ways of doing this makes things better for everyone in the long run.
Go to every industry event and meet everyone you possibly can, then stay in touch. This is also super helpful for when you want to build out your People team.
Brush up on communication and marketing techniques—that doesn’t mean being disingenuous or varnishing the truth. It means understanding how people act as consumers of your product (your product is your company). This will give you the tools needed to create your ideal persona, segment audiences, target comms, A/B test ideas and more. Learn techniques to communicate feature upgrades – such as new benefits – and find ways to create engagement and interest, such as by building an internal community the way marketers tend to do. Develop a super strong Employer Brand; the HR papers I did in my MBA were helpful but honestly, the marketing papers were invaluable.
Anything else you’d like to add? We can talk about anything you’d like to discuss here.
A key differentiator for Tracksuit is its commitment to pay transparency, which has created a culture free from gender pay gaps for like-for-like roles, regardless of demographic backgrounds. This commitment has fostered an equitable salary structure that is blind to gender, age or other factors, encouraging open discussions about compensation that build trust and accountability throughout the organization. Tracksuit promotes transparency and fairness by publishing salary bands for all roles, adhering to them without negotiation, and providing full internal visibility of individual salaries.
Having centered my MBA Capstone on Salary Transparency trends within the US, my research has been integral in shaping Tracksuit’s transparency-led approach, making the company a standout in how it handles employee compensation openly and equitably. This level of transparency has enabled our company to attract a diverse talent pool and enhance employee satisfaction, positioning us as a leader in reshaping industry norms and setting new standards for how companies can lead with integrity and fairness.
Find what you’re passionate about and let it drive you, and your company, forward.
The post <strong>Faces of HR: How Christine van Hoffen Builds Tracksuit’s People-First Culture</strong> appeared first on HR Daily Advisor.