Her Story
About Mallory
Mallory Miller brings 18 years of experience to her work in recruiting, with deep specialization in hardware engineering, firmware, electrical, mechanical, systems engineering, and embedded software. She launched her career with six years in staffing in Chicago, where she recruited engineers for defense, medical device, and manufacturing firms. Mallory joined Fitbit when the company had about 300 employees, led talent acquisition for all technical areas including research, software, security, and hardware as it grew to 1,800 employees and went public, then spent three years at Google managing a team of up to 25 recruiters supporting the Fitbit line and devices and services products such as Pixel and Nest. After time away following a layoff, she joined Mill over a year ago, where she focuses on providing excellent candidate experiences. She earned her education at Wittenberg University, a small liberal arts school where she studied abroad in Italy and later contributed to community work in Lesotho, Africa. Among her achievements, she was named Midwest Top Producer at Aerotech, reached the Million Dollar Club, and won five contests.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Mallory
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute a lot of it to my father who really kind of came from very humble beginnings. He worked the entire time he was in college, he got a scholarship to Colgate University. Both my parents went there, and he washed dishes while everyone else was at the football games. I grew up in an upper-middle-class family because of his hard work. I'm competitive by nature. I played sports growing up, I danced, I'm a competitive person. Right now I'm in my mom season and what really keeps me going is getting people jobs that they're super excited about.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I've ever received is in a moment of frustration walk away, take a walk. If you still want to send that email the next morning send it. When recruiters face a lot of rejection take a walk, regroup, get a coffee, see how you feel in 2 hours and 9 times out of 10 you've cooled off and can be a little bit more cool calm collected in how you respond to things and assume good intent from everyone.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
There's gonna be really really hard days but if you keep going and you just keep working at it and trying and don't get too high on the high days and don't get too low on the low days. Try to stay as even-keeled as possible and you will see success and you will see your hard work start to pay off. Recruiting is very up and down like sales. Stay true to yourself. Find your own niche. Take little parts from your peers and make it your own.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge is where does AI fit into recruiting? It is both an opportunity and a challenge. A lot of companies have cut recruiting teams so they're running super lean in the hopes that AI can do a lot of the work. AI can automate a lot of our tasks and is helpful with some of the administrative part but reading people and doing phone screens and understanding what is truly motivating someone to get a new job is not something AI can handle. The relationship piece is human. Recruiters are getting a bad reputation right now because they're doing the work of 4 people.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Empathy 100 percent. Just understanding everyone's just putting yourself in anyone's shoes. Show up for the people that show up for you. Treat your friends and family how they should be treated. Pick people up. Don't sweat the small stuff. Hard work. Keep an open mind. I'm very non-judgmental. I'm a big believer in meditation journaling gratitude.
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