TO BE SUCCESSFUL as a Career Coach/Recruiter, you have to be solidly grounded yourself, the better to point the best way forward for your candidates. This month’s Apprenticely Insider earned her chops through many an early leadership experience, not least the daunting assignment of coaching an entire university’s fraternity community on the niceties, and otherwise, of college life. “I had literal and metaphorical fires all the time,” she says.

_____________________________

I love some of the things you say on LinkedIn: You have “a passion for mission-driven work.” You talk about “the power of people and purpose.” You want to connect individuals with “opportunities that align with their values.” I want to know how the person who wrote those words became that person. So tell me about your growing up and what you thought you might want to do with your life.

I grew up in Danville, the third of five girls. Ours was a very close family, and my parents are really selfless people. My dad works in utilities for the phone industry. My mom was a school teacher. They did a lot of things that demonstrated the power of being involved in your community and helping people wherever you can.

Growing up, I didn’t know what I wanted to do—but I knew I wanted to be a leader. I was always picking different careers. But when I was in college at Arkansas Tech, I got really involved in student organizations and I thought, I’m going to work in government. I’m going to work in politics. I’m going to do something where I can see a goal and help with a team to achieve it.

Were you thinking in that direction before you went to college?

No. I went to school thinking I would become a doctor, but I never really loved the medicine. I just loved the idea of helping people.

Very quickly I changed my major to business, thinking that maybe I could become an entrepreneur. Then I got involved in student government and that was what sold me on politics and government.

Let me double back a bit. Tell me about you and your sisters. Were you a leader in the house?

I was the bossy one. I was the middle child who had to have her hands in everything. If something needed to be said but nobody wanted to say it, I was that person who did. It was probably a gift and a curse in some ways. But my oldest sister is a housewife. She does a lot for animals. My next oldest sister works as an interventionalist at an elementary, and she’s always helping people, whether it’s trying to run the band boosters or get clothes donations for kids at the school; Dardanelle is a Title 1 school. Kelsey, the sister below me, is an ER nurse and she’s just thriving. She started that role a year ago. Then the youngest, the baby, Kodi, is a dispatcher for emergency services.

So they’re all doing things that I think reflect the values of our parents. Ours was a very religious community, but while my parents weren’t necessarily involved in the church, they were always demonstrating those values that I thought were of the church. They took in a homeless man and we got a lot of flak for it because we were bringing a stranger into our home when they had five girls. A lot of people were worried about what would happen with us. But they put him in an apartment above our barn and got him a job at the school as a janitor.

So when I think of their selflessness, that’s what I always go back to; it’s my guide in life. You’ve got to help people where you can. I tried working in a corporate environment for a while, but it just wasn’t true to who I am. That’s part of why I feel so right at Apprenticely, because I need to be working for a mission toward the greater good. For my own well-being, I want to help where I can.

I was going to ask if you have heroes, but it sounds like you’ve answered that already—your parents were your heroes.

Absolutely. I feel really blessed to be able to say that because I know not everybody has that experience, but they’ve taught me so much, and they still are. I start every workday by calling them in the morning just to kind of get my head in the game. When my dad used to take us to school, he would say, “Make a hundred, give it your all.” So calling them kind of gets me in that mindset. They’ve done so much for me. They’ve done so much for others. They’ve done so much for themselves. I just try to emulate them.

Are they still there in the family home?

They are. My mom is retired. My dad’s still working. He runs a phone company in central Arkansas and they’re always going to different conferences where he speaks, so they’re just great people for me to look up to.

Well, tell me about your college years.

I was more of a student leader than a student. I loved the involvement that came from working with students. When I was a senior, I started being a mentor to freshmen and I got to guide them through student organizations, life on campus.

Was there a framework within the university for that?

There was: I was a Tech Tradition Keeper. Part of that program was what’s called Freshman Leadership Academy, and I was selected to be one of the mentors for it. I was president of the Student Government Association, so I was meeting with the board of trustees and the mayor. I really loved getting to connect and work alongside all these people. My biggest project was getting sidewalks built in Russellville from the Vista Place Apartments to campus. We also got a Fall Break implemented. I was just really proud of seeing how a little city can run. Because to me, that’s what colleges are—little cities.

And, lo and behold, somebody taught me, “Hey, you can do this for real. You can go to grad school for this.” So I decided to move to Kentucky eight hours away after one visit. I didn’t know anybody there and I went to Western Kentucky University to work toward a Masters of Higher Education.

My time at WKU was full of challenges and growth. I’m happy I had the opportunity to live in a different place, and meet new people, but returning to Arkansas was always the plan and I was excited to start a career here. I got a great job at UCA when I came back to Arkansas. They hired me to be the fraternity advisor for all of the IFC (Inter-Fraternal Council) fraternities on campus.

Wow. What did those fraternities think about this young woman telling them what to do?

The first question I got in the interview was, “We’ve never had a woman in this role. How can you do this?” And I said, “Sometimes it takes the right woman for the job.”

They needed a different viewpoint. I helped teach the fraternities how to recruit students for their organization. “You have to narrow down your values,” I said. “What does this organization mean to you? Is it more than just the brotherhood?” When I was in grad school, my thesis research was on “Why do first generation college students join fraternities and sororities?” My analysis showed that a lot of people whose parents went to college joined because of tradition, of legacy. Whereas first-generation students want accountability. They want belonging more than anything. They want to feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves, but they want that accountability to help them navigate the college experience. So I would present that data to my fraternities and make them quantify “What does this organization mean to you? How do you talk about it?”

Did you speak to the entire fraternity or just the leaders?

I spoke to the entire fraternity. I would also talk about other topics, such as sexual assault on campus. “This is what consent is,” I told them. “This is what hazing is. These are why it’s not okay.” I would try to meet them where they were and put it in the way they were thinking. But we did presentations all the time. They had to have mandatory hours. A lot of this was regulated by the university, so we would develop this curriculum and then teach it to them.

I suppose you had some fraternities that were worse than others?

We did. I had literal and metaphorical fires all the time. I’ll never forget, I was at the Joint Comedy Club down in Argenta, and I got a call from one of my fraternities: “We accidentally put charcoal in a plastic trash can that caught the house on fire. Can you come help us?” And I said to my now husband, whom I was dating at the time, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go to campus.” And he was like, “Okay.”

That’s fraternities for you. So how did you settle on recruiting and career coaching?

I knew my time at UCA was coming to an end because the work-life balance wasn’t where I wanted it to be. I was on campus till 10 PM or later some nights. So I started looking on LinkedIn and I had made a list of my transferable skills. They were all higher-ed or fraternity- and sorority-based, of course, but recruitment was such a big piece of what I did. I thought, If somebody will take a chance on me, I think I could do well in this.

So I applied to what was then ACDS and Ashley French called to interview me. I remember feeling so intimidated to interview for something out of my comfort zone, and I thought I bombed the interview. Then Ashley called and said they wanted me to come join the team. I never will forget being so shocked, because I just didn’t believe I communicated who I was very well.

Well, tell me about your work from ACDS to what’s now Apprenticely.

I remember I had to learn recruiting within a couple months because Ashley was going on maternity leave. So I had a book, IT Recruiting for Dummies, or something like that, and I read it several times. I would reference it when I was on a call. “Hold on,” I’d say, “let me check something.”

But it was really getting to talk with the candidates that I think put everything into place for me. Just getting to talk to a stranger and trying to figure out What are you looking for? What can I do to help point you in that direction? Do you need help with your resumé? Do you need help communicating your skills? Do we need to define what your transferable skills are for this new industry?

There’s so much that people don’t realize they don’t know. All it takes is saying, “Hey, I think your resumé needs to be reworked and we can make it grasp the attention of a recruiter. Recruiters are notoriously busy. They have so many resumés to look at. Here’s some simple tweaks we can help to not get it caught up in the A.I. machine that’s doing a lot of recruiting now.”

What would you like the world to know about Apprenticely that you think maybe they don’t know?

What I want candidates to know is that we’re here to help. Beyond looking at your resumé, let’s do a mock interview. Let’s practice. Let’s really get ready for your interview. Even if it’s not a company partner through us, if you sign up for a Reskill program, we will do your mock interview and help get you prepared because we truly want to help Arkansans get jobs and stay in these jobs.

If I’m phrasing the answer toward an employer partner, I would say just give people a chance. There’s amazing talent out there, and all it takes is taking a chance on somebody and seeing their skills develop. If Ashley hadn’t taken a chance on me, I wouldn’t have had this recruiting career, but I had the transferable skills. I also think that the experience and the value of interviewing someone one-on-one is not something that can be replicated by A.I. I’m not anti-A.I.; it’s just that I believe there’s so much value in the nuances of getting to talk with somebody one-on-one.

Speaking of that, what are you hearing from the candidates you’re working with?

A lot of candidates feel very discouraged by the job market. They’re applying and getting auto-rejected by A.I. in their ATS system. That’s why I think the power of networking is so important. Through truly human connection, somewhere there’s a door that can be opened.

I used to think that networking was a boring article idea, and then I was told that lots of people are actually afraid of it. So I realized there’s something much deeper in that subject.

I think there’s something to be said about Gen Z being afraid of what they call IRL experiences—In Real Life. Because they’re always online and everything we do is online, whether it’s social media or just being available through the phone or texting. There aren’t a lot of what we call “Third Spaces” where we go and interact anymore—coffee shops, for example. We’re not doing enough stuff in person now, so that causes social anxiety around networking.

If there’s something I could leave our readers with, it’s this: The job search is sometimes a marathon instead of a sprint, and that means you need to take care of yourself. One piece I’ve been trying to mention when I speak to these candidates is, it can feel personal when you’re being rejected for something that’s going to pay for your livelihood, but a lot of times it’s not personal. I don’t want people to take on that personal toll.

It takes a lot of perseverance to go through a job search, and it’s important to protect your mental health. So get enough sleep, practice good habits, and spend time out in nature. I can’t emphasize the importance of that enough.