Jessica McNulty

I really just try to do the right thing, and I think about things with taking the personal feelings out of it. I figure out what's the right thing for the business. I think if you can continue to show up and show that you're adding value to the business and that you're doing the right thing, not just for you personally, but for the greater good and for that community of people around you, that is really going to take you further than anything else. Because then people will understand that you're there to help them, then they will help you back, and that's something that I think is really important to success.

The best career advice I have received is staying true to yourself. Change is always going to happen, but being able to just stay anchored in who you are and what your values are is going to be one of the most important things you can do and help you show up consistently, no matter what company you're at or who you're working with or working for.

I would say to do not plan too much. That's a mistake I think I made, because there's opportunities that I didn't even know existed that I've been able to tap into. I came into HR expecting to do something, but I didn't really know what. So I did a rotation in my first internship at Bronto Software in Durham, where I had the opportunity to see different areas of HR, and that's when I fell in love with recruiting. If I had come in and just said, I want to do this, and I had my mind really made up, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to find something I really cared about. When I got into recruiting operations, it was really just by nature of there being a business problem where we didn't have someone to do this operational process, design, tech management work, and I just raised my hand and said, hey, I think this is a problem I could solve, like, could I start doing this? And then I did, and now I've had a career in that space specifically that I didn't even really know existed. So I think keeping eyes open, being open to opportunities, and not kind of boxing yourself in too much too early is important advice.

In this talent acquisition space, there's been so much change, and there's even more change right now, and trying to keep up with the pace of the change is so challenging. That is something that I know that I've struggled with, and I think a lot of my peers have struggled with as well. But keeping up with the pace, I think it's just really important to kind of stay connected with the community of what's happening in the industry, because that has helped me with that. Keeping up with the pace of change in today's world is just very challenging.

Community is one of the most important things to me, so creating a community that is inclusive and supportive, and that's at work, inside of work and outside of work. I think it's so important to invest in the community of people that you have around you and surround yourself with like-minded people. If you invest in them, they'll invest in you back, and so I think that, from a value perspective, community is incredibly important to me. And then also just maintaining the work-life integration, so being able to kind of flex between work and your life is so important, especially as a working mom, and having that ability to balance the two is something that is incredibly important to me from a values perspective.