Kira Guier

I attribute my success to the women in my life, especially this month with Women's History Month. I'm always so grateful to the women in my life because so many of my managers throughout my career have been women who were in my exact position and just really went out of their way to help me. My first manager was an absolutely powerhouse of a woman in the recruiting industry and in the compliance area. She really shaped me up and gave me a lot of tough love, for sure, but she made sure that it was never too tough for someone coming right out of college, and she really helped get me on track to be the best version of myself I could be in the recruiting industry. Same with the managers I had after that. I've been so lucky that I think all of my managers have been women who were just strong, independent, intelligent women who wanted to make sure that everybody they supervised succeeded in whatever way that looked like for them. My current manager has had long conversations with me when I was feeling down, when I was feeling happy, when I was in that gray area that most days usually are when you're in remote work, about what I saw myself doing in the future. Having those conversations with her has been so comforting because I know, no matter where I go, I have people in my corner that are going to make it possible for me to keep moving forward.

The best piece of advice I've ever received came from my mom, who has always been a big influence on me. She was an amazing professional influence in her expertise before she retired last year, which I'm very proud of her for because she had such a long and amazing career. She made it clear from a young age for me that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being an extremely strong person in the workplace and being the tallest person in the room. She was a very tall woman, and I am also pretty tall, so having presence is never a terrible thing, and you shouldn't be self-conscious of that. Making sure that your voice is being heard is not a negative and should never be considered a negative. That has helped me so many times, remembering that when I first started out and had to stand up for myself for the very first time in a room full of people who are more experienced than me, and having to show them that I was going to be someone that wasn't going to be pushed around and wasn't just going to be ignored just because I was the new person in the office and the newest person in the industry.

I would say make sure that you're not afraid to be the person that reaches out. It's so hard to network, especially when you are in remote work. I have definitely felt that struggle since the beginning of remote work, when COVID was still at its height and no one was going back into the office unless they absolutely had to. But being willing to send that first message, or send that first email, or ask if you can have a call with someone at your company that you're like, this person is so high up, why would they want to talk to me? You'd be surprised how many people want to talk to you and want to hear about your experience and want to help you, especially fellow women in your company who have been where you are, your managers, your supervisors, their managers even. They want to be there for you and want to help you find the best path forward for yourself so that you can find the most fulfilling career and life for yourself possible.

The biggest challenge in my industry right now is that our industry entirely is completely dependent on what our clients' industries are looking like. So we ebb and flow, which is the norm across the board for every industry, but we ebb and flow kind of against our will, entirely dependent on our clients. I've been very thankful that the client that I work with, for the most part, has stayed very steady over the last couple years. Not every client has been the same at our company, but you roll with the punches, you learn flexibility as much as you can, you move around whenever you need to, and you offer to help out when one person is busier than you are at a different client whenever you can as well. You just wait for the opportunities to come back at your current client, and when they do, you end up regretting how much you wanted that to happen because you end up so busy. It's an industry that requires you to be very flexible because you just never know when the work is actually going to be there. Ideally, every position would be filled and we wouldn't have a job because everyone is happy where they are and they have a role that they love. But obviously it doesn't work like that because people move on, people retire, people decide that they're going to completely switch careers, which happened a lot after COVID.

The values that are most important to me are balance and integrity. Balance, especially, is important. It's so easy to let yourself become consumed with your work without being able to step away when you're in remote work. Making sure that you don't work past the hours that you have set for your work so that you can go and live your life is so important to me. It makes you a better employee, and that's been proven in so many sociological and psychological studies that it is better for you to have time away from your work and gets you more focused on your work when you're back at your desk. Balance also means being balanced at work. You want to have the balance of focus but also being available to your fellow employees, to the people around you, to your team, to your manager, to the people that you are managing. That's just as important as focusing on your own work because you never know what someone next to you is going through unless you allow them to tell you, and that's just as important as having the courage of telling someone that you are struggling with something. You have to have the person who is willing to listen to you. And then integrity and owning your own work. So much of recruiting is so fast-paced, mistakes are inevitable. It's such an important talent to be able to own those mistakes and not let them consume you because it's too fast-paced to stick to one thing like that all the time. So you just kind of have to keep moving forward, make apologies, make the fixes that you need to, and then fix whatever you need to fix so that it doesn't happen again. Don't try to avoid it, it's never a good thing to avoid those things.