Laura joined the leadership team in 2018 as Kinetix’s first Vice President of Client Advocacy. With an impressive resume and undeniable talent industry success Laura comes correct with killer strategies that serve up exactly what our clients ordered. Laura is one of those people who can make things happen in the RPO and employer branding spaces – in fact; she has spent the last 25 years raising the bar for talent management pros across the country.

Before joining the #RPORockstars at Kinetix, Laura was a Portfolio Executive for the IBM Talent Acquisition Optimization team where she developed relationships with key stakeholders and ensured top-notch delivery of RPO services. Laura is no stranger to leadership in the talent world; she held multiple roles at the leadership level when she was a top dog at FutureStep and Recruitment Enhancement Services.

We are pretty stoked to have such a passionate industry leader bleeding orange with us at Kinetix.

1. Tell us why you’re in the RPO game and how you got here:

RPO – Maybe it’s my love of puzzles mixed with a need for creativity. I spent the first part of my career in transactional staffing, moving on after I got a taste of building a full recruitment solution with paper clips and gum. So when I got to Recruitment Enhancement Services (RES, part of Bernard Hodes Group), it was a natural fit to take our transaction-based recruitment tools and piece them together to create a total recruitment solution for Kellogg’s, hence why RES was named the “Inventors of RPO” by HRO Today. I love the mixology of the process, technology, data and the creativity of talent branding, all under one roof!

2. A great tradition in Major League Baseball is that each batter for the home team gets to pick their own intro music as they walk up to the plate. If you could choose a song to play as you entered the Kinetix HQ, what would it be and why?

I am certain no World Champion Astro would ever pick my kind of song! I have never heard of most the songs they walk on to. Maybe Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” Or better yet, Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World.” I think we should suggest that Jose Altuve walk on to “What a Wonderful World”!

3. Give it up—2 things that the people outside of Kinetix don’t know about you:

Native Texan- born in El Paso (long after Texas took control from Mexico in 1846!) moved a bit (17 times) and have been back in Texas for over 30 years now.

I love games & puzzles- Scrabble every Sunday with my mom and sister; get whooped by my mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in Rummy whenever we can get together; and used to partake in Murder Mystery dinners, so I guess you could say I have a little in common with Annie in Game Night. But I’m a better shot than Annie!

Not sure who knows this, but in my earlier days I hocked a few pieces of my artwork to unsuspecting buyers! Mostly florists, because my subjects were almost always flowers and my medium of choice was Pointillism (a technique in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image.) I did install a piece of art on the wall of a bar….it was a hot air balloon and I spent way more than I made trying to get it right. “Art for sale!”

4. What’s your favorite HR/recruiting buzzword to openly mock and why?

This could get me in trouble – but seriously, in business in general, there are many! And a few I might even say myself. Agile and agility hang incessantly in the air like the humidity in Houston! Certainly, there are very appropriate times for these words to be used, like when one is developing software. The best definition I have heard of being agile is moving with “quickness, ease, and grace.” I read it at some point a while back when I was researching agile methodologies. And in recruitment, quickness, ease, and grace are fitting. Or just say “put a wiggle in it.”

Then there’s Best Practices, Value Add, Disruptive, Synergies…

5. Describe your first car to us. Please let it be a junker that embarrasses you:

Oh, yes, a very sexy faded brown Fiat Brava, circa mid 70’s. It was literally a square sitting on four circles, like how a kid might draw a car! My brother drove it first (chick magnet), then I was fortunate enough to get ahold of it! Not complaining, always grateful I had wheels!