I gave my best friend a kidney because I believed her life deserved more than what it was going to be. People still bring it up like it was a remarkable thing I did once. It wasn't the exception. It was the prototype. Everything I've tried to do since has been some version of the same move, with more people in it and worse odds.
I've spent more than twenty years in talent, most of it inside large companies, leading recruiting teams at Amazon and at Office Depot across corporate, retail, and supply chain. I've built assessment methods aligned to competencies instead of gut feel, designed the candidate process for an HCM cloud implementation, stood up sourcing channels that did not exist before somebody had to build them, and sat in the rooms where headcount actually gets decided.
That last part is the part that matters to me. I sat at the leadership table and watched the message get manufactured. I know the distance between what gets said in the all hands and what is true, because I've helped write both versions. Fear has replaced voice in corporate life, and silence keeps getting read as agreement.
I grew up in a small town in West Virginia with parents who were okay with what they had, and I went to Marshall. I chased more than they did, not because anybody asked me to, but because I wanted them to be proud of something.
Now I run People ATX with Andres Traslavina. I write for the person absorbing a decision made above them, because for twenty years that person had nobody in the room.
I'm a dog mom, a proud aunt, and I still call home.
