December’s Spotlight goes to Susan Kang Nam, nick-named ‘Shuffer Greene’ (from her sister Jenna – it means fast going, always moving, loving green). Susan is currently a researcher with her other sister Grace’s boutique called “Pink Olive Boutique”, and she resides in Northshore, MA with family.
As a researcher, Susan’s responsibilities include engaging in conversations with customers and potential hires via various social media tools. As with many researchers’ job duties, her position varies every day, so she does pretty much anything needed to help out with her sister’s boutique. The current industries in which they operate include retail and education. Susan plans to look for a recruiting/sourcing opportunity in a corporate site full-time in early 2009.
With around 2 years of experience currently under her belt, Susan first got into recruitment sourcing at Harvard University Central Administration HR corporate employment office. Her mentor/adviser at the time, Mary Cronin, Director of HR, advised her to reach out to the HR community. After putting together a SHRM event at Bentley with Mary Cronin as a guest speaker, Susan followed up with a job opening at the Central HR employment office and applied for an entry level recruiting position. After Susan accepted the position, she began taking Mary’s advice and kept up with and reached out to the internet recruiting community utilizing all possible resources available. During that year, Susan was able to establish an ad-hoc internet recruiting advisory committee where all 10 Harvard schools participated in putting together a grant proposal to submit to the special proposal committee at Central HR. With help from her manager, she was able to hire graduate work-study students from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to put Harvard on the map throughout all recruiting portals or sites and placed all hard-to-fill reqs in Administration, Research and IT. Susan also met with vendors from various sites to assist her manager in delivering information, negotiating, and providing them to the rest of the Harvard recruiting community. Susan continued to engage in conversations with potential hires via pre-screening and inviting them to Harvard site to facilitate the recruiting procedure for the Central HR employment office.
Susan credits her approach of the Harvard employment office recruiting team with her efforts to revamp the internet recruiting manual as having the greatest impact on her career thus far. That task encouraged her to further explore, prioritize, and audit all sites out there for the Harvard recruiting community to utilize and share. The task entailed interviewing, citing, further researching different recruiting vendors out there to facilitate all information available for Harvard.
For Pink Olive Inc, Susan has reached out to Ladies Who Launch to get Publicist information for the organization and soon to follow a press release for one of first celebrities to visit Pink Olive’s east village location. This has also given her the opportunity to network with other female entrepreneurs around the US.
Susan’s favorite sourcing resources at this point in time are Twitter and Craigslist, with LinkedIn following closely behind. Of course, utilizing Boolean strings over various search sites/meta search sites helps, and ‘Cloud Recruiting’ tools are definitely the future of it all. She is looking forward to exploring other creative sourcing options. When asked about the future of sourcing, Susan believes that best practices in sourcing have to include utilizing social media tools. Without them, it will be harder to find the best talent out there.
Susan’s first love is classical piano. She hopes to use this talent to raise funds for various charity and non-profit organizations. She is also an active supporter and gives back to the community by reaching out to public schools to assist with their needs. Susan supports and follows up with various nonprofit works via Harvard Club of Andover Inc., a couple of alumni organizations/clubs as well as promotions via various fashion-related projects. She also aspires to race cars one day — that would be the ultimate goal!
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