Sylvia Correa

I attribute my success to the entire 25-year journey and everything I learned through the school of hard knocks. My mom passed away when she was only 38 and I was 19, and I left California to go to Colorado where I got an opportunity in HR. Even though I was nowhere near family or friends and didn't even have my degree yet because I couldn't afford out-of-state tuition, I knew I needed to learn everything I could from that situation. They gave me the opportunity to be an HR generalist with no experience at a small manufacturer that got bought out by Leggett & Platt. I came from a background where there wasn't a whole lot of support, so I was kind of just doing it on my own. I stayed there for about 6 years, and then when my grandmother got diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, I came home and took care of her for a few months. After that, I got an opportunity with Hot Topic's corporate office focusing on recruiting, and the director taught me everything I needed to know. I've always known that expanding my network was going to be worth its weight in gold, and it has been - I now have over 30,000 followers on LinkedIn, and I can say I know most of them because throughout my career I've helped them at some capacity. For every opportunity I had throughout my career, I was recruited and didn't have to interview for a role until way into my career after Tesla. I'm a student of life and always trying to learn and develop. What I didn't realize until starting Quillworx is how much this work impacts confidence - seeing my clients' confidence come back after it had eroded from being overlooked and ghosted gives me so much energy and makes me feel great, which is why I'm going to continue to keep pushing for Quillworx to be successful.

The best career advice I’ve ever received is that it’s absolutely possible to build a successful career in a field you genuinely love while also helping others succeed. That perspective reshaped how I define success—not just by personal achievement, but by the impact I have on the people around me. It reinforced the idea that fulfillment and performance are not mutually exclusive, and that when you align your work with purpose, both naturally follow.
Throughout my career, this advice has guided my decisions and fueled my passion for developing others. I’ve found that some of the most meaningful and lasting success comes from lifting people up, helping them recognize their value, and creating opportunities for them to grow. It’s a reminder that success is not just what you accomplish individually, but what you enable others to achieve alongside you.

I encourage young women to be intentional about their growth by protecting time each week to invest in themselves. Set honest checkpoints every 60 to 90 days to evaluate whether your current environment is helping you grow or holding you back. Always have a Plan B, but remain open to conversations and opportunities that may not look obvious at first. Most importantly, make sure your resume, LinkedIn presence, and interview responses clearly communicate your impact—not just what you’ve done, but the value you’ve delivered.

The biggest challenge I'm seeing right now is that high-performing women are being overlooked, under-leveled, and underpaid, not because they aren't capable, but because their experience isn't being interpreted correctly. Decisions are being made in seconds and most people don't even realize they're being misread. People are getting filtered out the minute they hit apply, and there are all these things about the ATS system that people don't understand. With my 25 years of experience in recruiting, I can tell you that you're getting filtered out immediately, and it's not made for them to understand. Another real issue that nobody talks about is what it's like to be in an environment after a layoff when you weren't impacted - your work gets overloaded overnight, any projects go dark because you're trying to stay afloat, you may be reporting to someone who doesn't know your value, you have survivor's guilt that clouds your judgment, the culture quietly shifts as fear replaces candor, compensation falls behind the market because companies in cost-cutting mode rarely reward people who stay with raises, and you lose professional momentum as your network gets cold and skills stay static. The opportunity I see is that early career professionals are surprising me - they don't have the resources to know how to show up in the job market after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their education. That's an area that needs a ton of help, and I'm opening up that lane to work with top performers from schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford through organizations like Public Policy Leadership and Summer Institute.

The most important value to me is making a positive rippling impact in this world. A lot of people are driven by money, but anybody who knows me knows that's what drives me - that's the core of why I established this company. I have a talent for seeing people's potential and their value, sometimes more than they do themselves, and being able to empower them is where I get my energy. I want people to know that I have a heart and that I want to share as much as I can to help others. In my personal life, spending time with family is number one - I have a 17-year-old son who just turned 17 and wants to be a doctor, so we're doing campus visits to UCLA and Stanford next month. I've been married about a year now, and it's been going amazing. We love to spend time outdoors - Kauai is our yearly trip where we go kayaking, surfing, hiking, and chasing waterfalls. My husband is a bit of an adrenaline junkie and always wants to do something challenging that gets us outside our comfort zones. I also value personal growth - I'm a student of life and always trying to learn. I read a lot of self-help books and business books, not really fiction, because it's more about how I can develop. I meditate 30 minutes every day, we work out a lot, and we make sure to have our sunset walks and morning walks when possible. We're in Huntington Beach, California, so the beach is our backyard, and as a family we for sure get our sunset walks.