Meet Melissa Mounce. Melissa believes that talent acquisition is “not just nice motherhood and apple pie initiatives.” It’s a critical business function.
Melissa is the managing director of leadership talent and diversity at GTCR, a Chicago-based private equity firm. No stranger to tough environments, Melissa started her career at Motorola Solutions as a global business strategy “road warrior” before moving to a business-process consulting role with EY/Capgemini.
The beginning of her TA career, however, was at PNC Bank, where she applied her business skills to large0scale hiring challenges. Later, she joined Aon Hewitt’s RPO, where she oversaw and innovated the logistics of hiring 70,000 people annually. And afterward, Melissa led recruitment for Abbott Labs and later Baird Capital, rounding out a career with the widest spectrum of hiring volumes, levels, and roles of any leader on the Big Fish podcast to date.
For TA Leaders who wonder what it would be like to “herd the cats” at a private equity firm where basically everyone is a boss, Melissa offers her perspective of the pandemic’s silver lining for GTCR: “The COVID environment has made our leadership very accessible,” she points out. “We’re not on airplanes, so we’re using the time to deepen our pipelines and our network of executives who are ethnically and gender diverse.”
For Melissa, leadership begins and ends with business acumen and measurable results. “TA Leaders,” she says, “who are extremely successful act and speak as business leaders and they know the impact of their team’s efforts on the business.”
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I recently spoke to Melissa about her views on TA and leadership. We discussed topics including:
- Evaluating the “equity value” leaders bring to the table
- The best metrics to measure efficiency and effectiveness
- Creating value as a business leader in the private equity environment
- Using company core values to assess and match talent
- Using “found time” during COVID-19 to deepen the diversity pipeline
Check out my conversation with Melissa by clicking on the embedded conversation below. (And find more interviews with talent leaders here.)
