Her Story
About Sarah
My career journey has been unconventional. I spent the first half of my career on the operations side doing project management for banking institutions at Accenture, without any true HR background. When I was pregnant with my oldest and came back from maternity leave, I was being staffed on projects around the United States and wanted something more stable. A recruiter reached out about an HR role, and even though I had no HR background, I took it. It was a business transformation role from a Six Sigma lens for Accenture North America, and that's when I really understood what HR was and all the different centers of excellence. I fell in love with HR operations and have stayed there throughout my career. Most of my career has been coming into companies at transitional times when they're trying to pivot into a central model and become a scalable practice to support what's happening on the business side, or when they're revisiting their standard operating model for HR to gain efficiency. I've always managed people since I've been in HR, and I take coaching, mentorship, and development really seriously because if I can't do it for them, then what am I doing in HR? I'm an owner-operator who gets my hands dirty with everything from building strategy to filling in for team members, senior talent acquisition, sourcing, and interviewing. What I've really enjoyed about my career is that there are so many different practices within HR, and honestly, my day is a little bit of everything.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sarah
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to two main things. First, I've had really good mentors early on in my career, and mentorship has been number one for me. Second, I've always been weird. I've always thought slightly differently than everybody else around me, and I'm not afraid to try things. I'm an early adopter of most things and am not afraid to fail at it and then move on. I don't look at failure as a negative, and I try every day to showcase to people that you can fail, and you can get back up, and you can do whatever you want. You have to keep going.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
My number one advice is don't try to be perfect. Apply for the job where you only meet 60-80% of the requirements and see what happens. I think as women, a lot of times we get stuck in this mentality of thinking everybody else must be this perfect thing or be doing something that we're not, or we see people and think they have it all together but we don't, so therefore we don't try. That is the biggest facade that I encourage women to get over. No one knows what they're doing, and everybody's figuring this out, so just go try. Don't let the perfection facade keep you from trying.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest opportunity I see is still leading HR decisions through true analytics and forecasting. It's really hard to forecast the people function, but that is exactly what businesses need. I think that is still the biggest opportunity, even though I've been striving to do that for the last 15 years. The biggest challenge right now is honestly engagement. It's employee engagement and burnout. It's helping people to feel and understand how to feel connected into what they're doing and keep that momentum in order to impact retention. 100%, that's the hardest challenge.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Kindness is number one, and kindness does not mean nice. Kindness means leading through empathy and actually being brave enough to say hard things in a way in which you can listen and understand somebody else. I think it is a value that we have lost, and it is the most important thing at work and at home.
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