Angelina Estrada

I would attribute my success to my family. My parents were very hardworking, and both my mom and dad showed me the benefits of hard work. I've always had a really good work ethic, thanks to my dad, who always made sure that we knew that once we committed to something, we had to stick to it. He made sure that we did the best we can and put our best foot forward, and that even if we weren't the best, that we were one of the best in our fields, whatever that looked like. My mom always said it doesn't matter if we picked up cans, as long as we were the best at picking the cans up.

The best career advice was given to me by a manager when I worked at Schlotsky's, and it was: You're only as good as the person who replaces you. You're only as good as the people that you invest in around you, so if you leave and everything falls apart, that means you didn't do your job as a leader to leave things better than when you got there. I try to live by that every day and remember that I'm only as good as the person who comes in after me.

I would say there's nothing that you can't do. Even right now, a lot of us recruiters are recruiting sometimes for mainly men positions - I mean what I mean by that is, like, we're recruiting for skilled trades, welders, plumbers, engineers, you know, male-native roles. But we know just as much, we can know just as much as they can. Growing up with a mechanic as a dad and having brothers who work in skilled trades, it's been really easy for me to kind of mold myself to that world and be able to talk with the men that are looking for roles just like ours, so there's nothing that's out of our reach.

I think right now the biggest challenge is that people want work, but they have unrealistic expectations. Just trying to cross that barrier of making people understand what is realistic for a job search with the skill sets and experience that they have, versus what they're looking for. As for opportunities, I think one of the biggest opportunities would be to be more diverse in the recruiting role. We have a lot of bilingual people in the workforce right now, and so the opportunity I see is to become more of a diverse and knowledgeable industry, where a lot of the recruiters should be speaking more than one language, whether it's English, French, Spanish, and at this point, even Mandarin or Japanese - those are big in our industry right now.

One of our values here at Express is actually grit, and I think that's really important - just having the grit to keep on moving forward, even when things get tough. No matter how hard things get, always remembering that you just gotta keep on pushing, because the problems are gonna be there tomorrow, so keep on pushing, even when moments are difficult.