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Here is a brief snapshot of my journey in Talent Acquisition so far.

I hope you enjoy!

In September of 2013, after a full year of trying to break into the Talent Acquisition space, I joined a boutique NYC-based search firm, Onward Search.

My focus was on full-cycle recruitment for creative and tech roles at startups, advertising agencies, and Fortune 500 companies across all industries.

I had the fortune of sitting on a lean team with colleagues who taught me the importance of emotional intelligence, working with urgency, and knowledge-gathering to find the best candidates for our client’s business needs.

A little over one year into my time at Onward, I was promoted into a client-facing Senior Recruiter. The disciplines I worked on ranged from front-end engineering and UI/UX design to strategy, copywriting, and creative direction.

By 2015, my interests shifted deeper into technology, particularly with Product Design and Software Engineering.

While my colleagues at the time continued leaning into roles at creative advertising firms, I gravitated towards learning everything I could about UX case studies, atomic design principles, and different tech stacks on the front and back end.

I had an awesome work mentor at the time who guided me along the way. This led to many years of placing junior - executive level talent at startups like Savant Systems, Kangaroo, and Starry to more prominent brands like Twitter, Etsy, and Comcast Xfinity, partnering with their hiring teams on job intake calls, candidate reviews and strategizing best practices for their hiring funnels.

By 2021, I became a Senior Manager of Recruitment at Onward, directly managing a team of 3 internal recruiters with a dotted line to 3 additional recruiters.

This was an exciting opportunity to partner directly with the President of Onward Search, along with a regional SVP and VP of Delivery to rebuild our current talent operations. We held weekly syncs where we brainstormed new ways to improve efficiency and maintain team health.

The practices I helped put in place—from talent mapping/tagging systems to offer negotiation techniques—drove a significant increase in offer acceptance and time-to-fill rates for our entire delivery team.

By the end of 2021, I had placed several hundred candidates over the course of 8 years at Onward. I had also led an internal recruitment team to success in a volatile job market. It felt like I had achieved everything I wanted to in staffing. For that reason, I began to actively pursue a new challenge.

I was hired at Meta as a Senior Recruiter to help scale Facebook’s Product Design team.

Recruiting Product Designers to work on such a large-scale global product was the opportunity of a lifetime.

Within my first several weeks of employment, I was able to secure a high confidence hire decision for an IC5 Product Designer. I was elated to have calibrated so quickly. Unfortunately, a hiring freeze hit the org shortly after, and the Facebook PD recruitment team was impacted by the first of many RIFs.

By the end of my first year at Meta, I survived one round of layoffs and had been moved over to the Reality Labs team, where I managed to get five Product Design Leads in final round loops.

Despite the hiring freezes and constant uncertainty, I was proud of the work I achieved there, and so appreciative of the amazing teams and managers I got to learn from and grow with.

After being impacted by the second wave of layoffs, I once again began to look for a new challenge.

A lifelong gamer myself, the gaming industry was a very intriguing one to explore. It also presented an entire new world of disciplines to learn.

Shortly after my time at Meta, I began networking with people in the gaming space, joining online communities and grabbing virtual facetime sessions with engineers, artists, and recruiters to pick their brains, learning the nuances of their disciplines, the engines, and how game dev teams operated at both the AAA and indie level.

After 6 months of networking and knowledge-gathering, an opportunity to boomerang back to Onward Search presented itself, this time in their gaming division, Onward Play. I had no desire to return to staffing after Meta, but this was a chance to break into a new industry during a very challenging job market.

Although I had no professional experience recruiting in the gaming industry prior, my earlier preparation had paid off. I’ve placed engineers, designers, tech artists, and creative leads at studios like Riot Games, Blizzard, thatgamecompany, and Smilegate this past year.

In addition to Onward Play, I’ve also been supporting Onward Search by placing Product Designers, Technical PM’s, and Engineers at startups like Super.com and larger brands like Coinbase and Amazon.

It’s been a challenging but rewarding year recruiting for both the gaming and tech industries, but I am ready to transition back into an in-house TA role.

At this point in my career, the next logical opportunity would be one where I’d be able to either flesh out talent operations from the ground up or rebuild existing internal processes while also contributing to full-cycle recruitment on key hires, preferably focusing on Product Design.

If you are a hiring manager who’s made it this far down the page and are interested in chatting, please reach out and let’s connect!