How does an experienced engineer become a Talent Acquisition leader?

It’s one of the most frequent questions I’m asked by candidates. And on this, the day I celebrate 2 years at Twitter as a Talent Acquisition (TA) leader, it seemed like the right time to answer that question and reflect on a career, full of transitions. 

I’ve been involved in diversity recruiting in some way, shape, or form since 9th grade. When I entered Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep (SHCP) (a co-Ed Catholic high school in the heart of San Francisco), I was the only Black student in the scholar program and one of 6 Black students in my 9th grade class. Immediately, I set out to fix this and became an admissions ambassador. I knew that prospective Black students needed to see someone who looked like them on their tours and at their grammar schools to believe they, too, could attend SHCP. When I graduated, we had the largest number of Black students on campus, because of the community we built to support each other. This is grassroots diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) recruiting and retention at work.

I served a similar role during my undergrad days at MIT, except my focus was on recruiting scholars who came for the prestige, world class research facilities, and Nobel Laureate faculty to play women’s basketball. My pitch was that playing college sports was the ultimate time management tool that would keep you from gaining the “freshman 15.” I was pretty successful during these pre-freshman visits as I hosted 16-17 year olds on their recruiting visits in landing my pitch and growing our student-athlete population. We were able to build a program that became the foundation for today’s MIT women’s basketball excellence. In fact, our last coach (Sonia Raman) is now a Memphis Grizzlies Assistant Coach in the NBA. To this day, I remain close and receive support from my teammates – finding your tribe in any environment/organization/workplace is major, and an important key to retention. 

The next stop on my journey took me to my absolute favorite city in the United States, Chi-town, for graduate school at Northwestern University. I wasn’t there a good 15 minutes before I said, “Where are the Black and Latinx graduate students in the McCormick School of Engineering?” Lucky for me, my advisor, Prof. John Torkelson, was a tenured, well funded professor and the Associate Dean for the School of Engineering. When I brought to him my thoughts on how Northwestern can’t be a top 5 Materials Science and Engineering program and be okay with me being the 4th Black person to get a PhD from this department in a city like Chicago, he said, “How can you fix it?” With a little money from the Dean, my partner in crime, Dr. Jarrett Terry and I ensured Northwestern had a presence at relevant diversity conferences like the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) so that we could recruit Black graduate students. More importantly, we partnered with the Dean to ensure the cohort of current Black and Latinx graduate students met with every prospective graduate student. We knew that our message focused on the sense of belonging and STEM identity needed to be fully supported and leveraged by Northwestern to not only recruit diverse graduate students but also to retain them. (You’ll have to ask Jay to tell you how I showed up to help him barbecue for an event in my lab coat, lab goggles, and latex gloves just to be safe. ?? And he wasn’t the least bit amused.)

My intro to a research career in industry was through a program called Focusing on Industrial Recruitment of Scientific Talent (FIRST). (formerly known as Research your Technical Careers in Industry when I attended). After only three days in Cincinnati at Procter & Gamble (P&G), I knew I had found my company. This hiring program changed my course because I was headed to Tuskegee University to teach with a diversifying faculty fellowship and strong support from Dean Leland Burge. 

Once I joined P&G, I was not only an active participant in FIRST doing mock interviews (#PayItForward), but I became a campus and diversity conference recruiting leader at MIT, Northwestern, National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE), and Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). Many thanks to Dr. Ron Webb and Dr. Ray d’Alonzo for giving me these corporate recruiting opportunities.

But my first transition formally into TA leadership (like with a title that says "TA professional”) was owed in large part to Dr. Nick Nikolaides and Julie Strasemeier. As Nick prepared for his next chapter, R&D leadership and Julie (their HRBP) were looking for a leader with a PhD to be the new Doctoral Recruiting Manager. This job was not even on my radar or consideration set while I looked for my post maternity leave gig. That’s right, I was now 12 weeks pregnant with my twins (who are now 10 and returned to school this week for first time in over a year #COVIDLife). I used their upcoming arrival as my first reason to say “not interested” when approached by the leaders about this job. 

At 17 weeks pregnant, reading Prenatal Prescriptions and running a thriving Analytical Chemistry lab, Nick and Julie approached me, again, about applying for the job. My fears ranged from the changes this would cause at home to thinking about what would people say about a MIT/Northwestern PhD Engineer moving to a HR focused role. Dr. Alveda Williams, one of my accountability partners, had made a similar career shift from R&D/Chemistry to HR/Talent and was a valuable thought partner to help me take that leap. 

And I am so glad that I took the leap to HR/Talent. Being the Doctoral Recruiting Manager (and later R&D Recruiting Manager) was hands down the best job I had at P&G. I loved being back on campuses to meet graduate students; host informational sessions; and hear professor’s research seminars. I attended many conferences, running into others passionate about #DiversifyingSTEMFields in academia and industry, and was able to use my broader skillset in rebranding P&G PhD Career pathways. Eventually, I would return to leading a team focused on disruptive innovation in various spaces across the Baby, Feminine, and Family Care division.

Fast forward to 2017. I had moved back home to the Bay Area and was working at Clorox. I was leading an innovation team focused on litter and charcoal and was an active member of the African American Employee Resource Group. I was very vocal about hiring process changes Clorox R&D needed to make to recruit and retain Black and Latinx talent. I was speaking to a lot of groups locally on recruiting Black and Latinx talent. So when Microsoft reached out in 2017 about doing talent acquisition full time again, I jumped at the chance as #DiversifyingTech was always on my bucket list.

Working at Microsoft Silicon Valley San Francisco (MSVSF) was great preparation for my career at Twitter. MSVSF was a hodgepodge of acquisitions comprising 3,000+ employees and competing for tech talent in one of the toughest markets. Being a satellite location away from the mothership in Redmond, WA, there was so much cross HR functional partnership needed. Many thanks to Rachel Evangelista, our regional HR leader, for her advocacy and support and to the lean Bay Area Recruiting team (Ebitie Amughan, Katie Moses) that helped to establish hiring practices and norms for the Bay Area that married talent needs and competitive landscape while building our talent brand and desired candidate experience.

So when Twitter approached in 2018, I was sold on the opportunity when the hiring manager talked about innovation, diversity, decentralization, and more. Sounded right up my alley. And as I look back on my 2 years at Twitter, I couldn’t be more proud of what we have built. We are the most diverse TA team in tech. We bring rigor and a data centered approach to how we do the work. We are truly partnering with the business on all hiring initiatives and together we are scaling and growing Twitter globally. We have maintained that startup grit and scrappiness necessary as we compete with bigger market cap tech companies for talent.

The exciting thing is that we still have more growing to do as a TA org. And are always looking for innovative change agents to #JoinTheFlock. Visit t.co/careers to see our openings if you are passionate like I am about making tech more diverse and inclusive.

I will close with a few nuggets I have learned during these career pivots to full time talent acquisition work:

1. Understand what transferable skills you will bring to roles outside your formal training. My passion for data and insights as an engineer who worked on product development serves me well as my organization recruits with a very data driven mindset and approach. My recruiting superpower is comfort with ambiguity which is a direct result from all those years in research at the fuzzy front end. I love to start small, fail fast, and succeed faster.
2. Never underestimate the power of mentors and accountability partners when faced with tough decisions. You don’t have to think through it all by yourself. These supporters will help you take calculated risks and have your back on the good and bad days. If you don’t have mentors and accountability partners, get some.
3. Learn something new in every role. I am still learning from people at all levels. My biggest lesson in the last year has been on how to balance the theory of organization design with the practical application of it so that the changes are implemented with minimal down time.
4. Follow your passions and do something you enjoy. Your happiness makes work not feel like work (especially on the tough days) and allows you to truly be your authentic self. The team will tell you I love recruiting programs and events because this is how I got my start in TA. Not that I didn’t enjoy my work in R&D for babies, grillers, and cats, but I had to read the tea leaves about why I kept doing TA/HR work in my “spare time”. #LoveWhatYouWorkOn
5. Walk in your purpose #OnPurpose. I tried to run from the inevitable. Me being a TA professional seemed counterintuitive to what I was “supposed” to do as a classically trained engineer. But recruiting is my calling. It is the way I have always contributed to organizations whether it was my official job or not.