About Me

My early professional experience was in corporate human resources. I started my career in a non-profit science center, where I was responsible for identifying and recruiting outstanding people using a very small recruitment budget. When I started, our primary source of recruitment advertising was through print ads in a large local newspaper. While I was there, we built a strong work-study program with a local university. This was a total win-win for the students and the museum! We also started working on further developing our online postings in order to minimize the incredible amount of paper applications we received each day! There was never really a lack of candidates applying, but quickly identifying qualified candidates from a large quantity of applications was challenging. People who work for non-profit organizations tend to be passionate, humble people who believe in the mission of the organization with their whole heart. I learned that when recruiting for that culture, you are selling candidates on a mentality – a reason why you get up to go to work – and a mission, not a offer package made up of numbers.

The only thing crazy enough to get me to leave this environment was a small start-up organization, where I had the opportunity to dabble in all sorts of areas and there was huge potential for growth. My day’s work could vary from creating human resources documentation, training new associates, technical support (either over the phone or on-site), sales, customer service regarding billing, or even building or repairing alarm systems at the shop in our office! If you’ve ever worked in a start-up, you know that there’s really no budget for ANYTHING, so recruitment was mostly via referral and turnover was high. In the end, the unpredictability got to me too. I left to get back into corporate human resources.

My next gig was recruiting for a regional furniture company. It was previously family-owned and had just been sold to a large furniture manufacturer, so I had the opportunity to see how that sort of transition effects a company’s culture, especially with regard to recruitment. We had a much larger budget for recruitment advertising and were holding job fairs regularly to fill retail, warehouse and corporate positions at all levels. I’ll admit, it was exhausting recruiting for such a wide variety of roles. And at the time, little of our work was done via the internet. It seemed like I spent all day each Friday faxing ads to the numerous print publications we used in each region that was hiring! I knew there had to be an easier way. We weren’t close to most of the stores, so we relied heavily on the interview skills of our hiring managers – my job was primarily to promote the open positions and then funnel applications to our hiring managers. Once a candidate was selected, I would again step in to manage the pre-hire screening like background checks and drug screens. Hiring managers were desperate to fill open positions as quickly as possible, so I wondered if we were spending any time determining if the people we were hiring were the RIGHT people for our jobs or just available and probably not dangerous. HA! Let’s just say, I know what it’s like in corporate recruiting.

That brings me up to my current role in a retained recruiting and HR consultancy. What a huge difference! We’re hired by companies to look for the right people, rather than only sifting through applicants – although we do review applications as well. We support the HR teams by reducing their recruiting workload so they can focus on other important business objectives and supporting their workforce. As a retained recruiter, I have conversations with hiring managers about culture of their team and what personality traits are necessary to be successful, in addition to the ideal candidate’s necessary work history and qualifications. We call it learning “the DNA” of a company. When I talk to a candidate, I learn their “DNA” too. It’s their preferences, personality, goals – not just their experience! If there’s a match between the DNA of the client and candidate, then they are submitted to our client for review. As you can imagine, this means I’m constantly connecting, networking, reviewing and refreshing. I need a large network of high caliber people in order to whittle down to that perfect person for each specific role! And this is where I find my passion.