Engaging with the Office of Talent Acquisition | October 2018
Can you share a little about yourself and your background?
I am a Rochester native; I grew up in Greece. I graduated from SUNY Brockport with a bachelor’s degree in Accounting. Early in my career I got involved with recruiting and really enjoyed it. I have about 15 years of experience on the agency side with an executive search firm and about 10 years of experience in the corporate side of recruiting, managing large groups of recruiters, setting up processes and engaging with clients.
What is your vision for the Talent Acquisition department?
Our vision is to attract, hire, and retain top talent to further RIT’s strategic objectives. We are working on behalf of our internal clients (departments and hiring managers) and the candidates, so they both have the best experience possible when it comes to hiring. The candidate experience is particularly important now and their expectations are shifting based on the prevalence of quick, seamless, real-time mobile accessibility. RIT has tools through Career Zone, our applicant tracking system, that allow our candidates to feel engaged in the process.
Our department is continuously working to become more consultative with our internal community, especially as RIT continues to grow. We need to support hiring managers and search teams by proactively providing tools, guidance and expertise to ensure the best hiring practices. We have many new hiring managers and we need to engage them early on in the process. We want to ensure that they are utilizing the system effectively to maximize candidate engagement, including communicating with internal RIT applicants. We are also being good stewards of the finances for the department, as we build more efficient processes, making data-driven decisions, measuring the data, etc.
How do you partner or assist search committees, as they seek to hire and diversify their candidate pools? What are some best practices that you would share with the RIT community?
As we engage early in the posting process, we’ll get to know the department and the respective position openings, which will enable us to drive effective recruiting tactics and broaden our reach for a diverse pool of qualified candidates. We’ll also be rolling out a training process, guiding our internal clients through interview techniques and sample interview guides, unconscious bias training, and creating a proactive culture, where we partner for success.
Is RIT’s approach distinct and different from other higher education institutions?
Based on the benchmarking that I have done with similar universities, I didn’t find that RIT is lagging in our processes, but ultimately, we have opportunities to improve, and we want create and implement a process that works best for the university’s goals. It is very important that we develop relationships, reach out to our clients with tools and expertise, brainstorm on challenges ahead of time, and create a process that works best for RIT. I really enjoy meeting people, discussing possible solutions, and accomplishing our goals together.
When is the best time to reach out to you and your staff for help? Who would be their first point of contact?
We are happy to get involved as soon as a hiring manager is planning to start a search, and they can contact their recruiter (or any of us in the Office of Talent Acquisition). I’d like our office to be proactive and reach out to hiring managers as soon as the requisition is submitted in the system, if we haven’t already been involved. We definitely want to give hiring managers the tools to support them with their process from beginning to end: planning the search, posting the position, screening candidates, interviewing, offering the position, and onboarding the new employee – working together to meet each other’s needs to attract, hire and retain the best staff at RIT!