While studying marketing at Lehigh University, I secured an HBO advertising internship through family connections. Inspired to independently attain my next opportunity, I leveraged alumni contacts to secure an internship at News America Marketing. This experience was pivotal, cementing my career interest in sales and leading to an entry-level account executive role at The New York Post, their sister company. As one of the youngest salespeople there, I developed creative strategies to reinvigorate dormant accounts, earning three promotions. After five years, I transitioned briefly to another newspaper before being recruited by Amazon for an exciting, undisclosed project – Amazon Local. Hired as the first salesperson, I played a key role in shaping the business, hiring team members, and establishing meaningful relationships with leadership. My efforts led to international expansion opportunities and a promotion to sales team manager.

A critical component of building diverse and inclusive organizations is around recruiting and hiring, and it often presents one of the greatest challenges. “How can we build a more diverse candidate pool?” “How can we diminish drop off through the hiring process?” and, ultimately, “How can we improve our retention statistics?” The implications are significant, not only relevant to fulfilling a corporate commitment, but fundamentally impacting long-term employer brand.

As a recruiter at CFW Careers, this Women’s History Month, I find myself reflecting on today’s challenges around building and sustaining diverse, equitable and inclusive workplaces, and how different the considerations are from those of decades past. Regarding gender equality, today a major challenge remains setting the conditions for women’s career progression and growing the representation of women in leadership and on boards.

Almost three years ago, I was introduced to Chantel George by Myrna Datilus. As Myrna said to me, “She’s someone you should know…” That was an understatement. Following Chantel’s launch of Sistas in Sales, attending her first big event, and then witnessing how she grew the organization, was awe-inspiring. We’re fans and eager to promote and contribute to her cause, a cause aligned with our mission of building diverse and inclusive workplaces and helping individual careers flourish. We spoke with Chantel via Zoom, to learn more about the upcoming Sistas in Sales Virtual Summit 2020, September 18th-19th, and to learn how managers can best support their employees through this difficult time and beyond.

When we consider how satisfied we are with our jobs, there are often various dimensions we take into account: Am I good at this? Is there a career growth path for me here? Do I get along with my co-workers? Does my manager motivate me to perform at my best? Do I earn what I feel like I should be earning? Is this aligned with my purpose? or Is this work fulfilling?

The Razzle Dazzle room at AppNexus was abuzz with energy last week for the most recent event in our Changing the Conversation series: “What does it really mean to hire the best candidate for the job?” Over a hundred attendees listened on intently as our panel of trailblazing women, each bringing a unique perspective to the stage, discussed the business case for diversity, introduced the idea of “culture add” vs “culture fit,” and presented actionable recruiting strategies for attendees to employ in informing the Diversity & Inclusion initiatives at their own organizations.

We're thrilled to feature panelist Stephanie Sandberg, Director of Out Leadership and President of Sandberg Consulting, in a spotlight for our upcoming Changing the Conversation event on April 26th! Below, you can read about her experience with a challenging boss, trusting your gut, and the correlation between corporate diversity and greater equality.

The next featured panelist for our April Changing the Conversation event is Diane Herz, President, Director and Chief Diversity Officer at Mathematica Policy Research. Here, Diane describes the struggle and importance of authenticity, being intentional as you build your professional toolbox, and creating buy-in for diversity & inclusion programs at all levels of an organization.

Our upcoming Changing the Conversation event includes a presentation and panel discussion with power-house women leading power-house organizations, and we’re excited to feature them in a spotlight blog series. The series asks each panelist to describe a challenge that she's faced in her career, offer a piece of advice to her former self, and comment on why she cares about diversity in the workplace. Our first spotlight features presenter and panelist Ashley Babinecz, Director of Talent Acquisition at AppNexus. See what she has to say below, and learn more about Ashley’s thoughts on diversity recruiting at our event on April 26th at 6:30pm!

Over the years, Changing the Conversation has evolved from a forum about individual paths to success to a more action-oriented, topic-driven conversation about the various ways in which we can equalize and diversify corporate leadership. Thursday’s event was centered on the importance of the sponsor-sponsee (an outgrowth of the mentor-mentee) relationship.

Rabia de Lande Long, our moderator for the upcoming event on Sponsors: How to Find and Manage This Essential Relationship, gives us amazing insight into how this theme was conceived, and why it’s such an important conversation to have.

The next featured panelist in our blog series is MaryAlice Holmes, the Managing Director for Sponsored Activities at Harvard Business Review. Below, she gives us some insight into past challenges, advice to her former self, and her thoughts around the importance of professional mentorship.

We’re excited to feature some of our panelists for our upcoming event with Changing the Conversation in a series of blogs, where we’ve asked each to describe a challenge, offer a piece of advice to their former selves, and comment on their experiences with being or having a sponsor. Our first featured panelist is Pete Danielsen, Owner of Danielsen Design and the former EVP of Programming for BET Networks. Check out what he has to say below, and don’t forget to get your ticket for the event on October 26th at 6:30pm!

This week marks the 44th anniversary of our founding (originally as Careers for Women), and we celebrated the best way we knew how--by holding our fourth event in the Changing the Conversation: Empowering Women in Business series. Generously hosted by Stack Overflow (an online community for programmers), nearly 100 women of all ages and industries joined us for wine, cheese, and conversation.

The final spotlight blog leading up to our Changing the Conversation event on April 20th features Kristin Haffert, Co-Founder of Project Mine the Gap. Kristin offers great insight into how she manages expectations and sets boundaries to thrive in leadership roles.

Last week we hosted our third event in the Changing the Conversation: Empowering Women in Business series. Set in the sleek, open office of eMarketer, a leading market research and industry insights firm, over 70 women of all ages and industries joined us for the morning event.