Edith Ponnath

My career in talent acquisition started over 20 years ago at a staffing agency, and I loved it from the beginning. I realized I was really good at not just identifying talented folks for opportunities we were recruiting for, but also the relationship-building aspect of it. As I progressed throughout my career as a recruiter, talent acquisition manager, and then head of recruiting, I was able to foster my skills around influencing hiring teams to find the best talent by using data to help them make their decisions. I became really excited about working on initiatives that touched beyond just one hire at a time - looking at how we scale for growth and ensuring all of our candidates have a really great experience. I'm really passionate about ensuring my team has everything they need to be consultative partners to the business, which means removing roadblocks, creating automation, implementing best practices, and helping them shed any bad habits. I really focus on fostering whatever their superpower is in recruiting to the benefit of the entire team and organization. I've worked across multiple industries including media, entertainment, social media, SaaS companies, and big tech. I spent a good portion of my career working for LinkedIn - about 8 years. I started as a temp recruiter, and a year later they hired me full-time. I started managing a team during a time when the company grew from about 1,400 employees to more than 17,000 after being acquired by Microsoft. I had a lot of different experiences there managing different teams and working with really smart, brilliant people. Many of my former direct reports are now CEOs of startups and their own companies. I did a lot of my growth there as a manager, a leader, and recruiting professional - all of my best practices came from there. After LinkedIn, I was head of recruiting and senior director of talent acquisition at a biotech company. When that company started going in a downward trajectory, I had to lay off some of my team members, but those of us that stayed kept ourselves busy working on more than 100 projects in about 8 months. We worked on everything from tactical projects like auditing files to bigger initiatives, fixing things so that when we got busy recruiting again, we'd have everything in really great shape. When we were all eventually laid off, I think we all left really proud of all the work we had done. I was out of work for about a year and a half, and I knew I couldn't go work for a big tech company again because I felt a little out of my element and needed to ease back into work. Now I work for HealthRIGHT 360, a non-profit organization in California where I recruit staff throughout the state as a recruiting manager with a team of about 5 recruiters. I'm a very mission, vision-driven person, so being able to work for an organization that is helping so many people in our communities that really need the most support and help, those underserved communities, that's what brought me here. We provide behavioral health, substance use disorder treatment, reentry services, medical, primary, and dental care for those that need it most - the uninsured and folks on Medi-Cal and Medicaid. We see probably like 40,000 patients a year and run more than 50 programs in about 11 of the most populous counties in California. I'm getting promoted to an expanded role that will marry the talent acquisition part, which I love, with helping folks continue to stay here and develop their skills. I'll be focused on talent development and some talent management aspects, taking employee voice survey data and creating action plans for leaders so they can work on areas where talent is saying we need more of this. I'll also work on retention-focused initiatives and ensuring we are exiting folks gracefully from the organization, which is a piece that is often missed.