Trevecca Nazarene University

Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)

Talent & Culture

Axios

Senior Director, Talent Acquisition 

Position is a retained executive search firm focused on seed to late-stage startups. Our business is built around understanding companies and the people who make them succeed.

The “I know a guy” approach of legacy search firms is outdated in a world of ever expanding startups, and most of all, from a D&I perspective. Executives with specialized knowledge are hard to hire and at record low unemployment, they're hard to keep. Additionally, over 50% of executives fail within 18 months according to Harvard Business Review. The cost of a bad hire is not just in the salary, but in lost time, lagging morale, and missed objectives.

We believe that because it’s hard to hire and keep the right execs, the new rule should be to truly learn the company -- how they operate, who is leading, what they value, and where they’re going. We then utilize our market knowledge supported with AI tools to look at the entire labor force and target candidates who have been at our client’s stage of growth and have faced similar problems. The candidates who make it through our vetting process will have a proven track record of taking their companies to the next stage of growth and are excited to do it again. Through seeing and understanding the market of talent, our clients are able to move past gut feelings and make better quality hires through data-informed decisions.

As a team, we’ve placed over 150 executives at startups across the country. We’ve supported a wide array of startups in industries such as consumer goods, enterprise SaaS, fintech, foodtech, crypto, media, healthcare, education, cleantech, entertainment, and more. Similarly, our team hails from diverse industry backgrounds with collective experience in founding startups, sales, learning & development, people operations, business development, and onboarding.

Building the right team is hard work and we don’t give up on difficult searches.

Position

Principal

Axios is a growth-stage startup dedicated to providing trustworthy, award-winning news content in an audience-first format. Axios — the Greek word for worthy — provides only content worthy of people’s time, attention and trust.

Operationally, I led our team of recruiters and set our strategic hiring direction each quarter- checking in on pipelines, setting goals, pouring over data. But in spirit, I spent my days obsessing over hiring the kindest, most talented humans in tech and media, ensuring those team members had a happy and inclusive place to come to work each day, helping my team members grow and succeed, and making sure our executives felt like they had never been better served. Building a team from the early days of a fast-growth start up was the career journey of a lifetime.

Director, Talent Acquisition

As a recruiting and L&D business partner to ABC/EAB's sales and account management team, I served as a recruiter, training manager and sales coach to 4-8 new sales staff per quarter providing rigorous sales training and in-the-moment feedback across a six week onboarding program.  Once team members were onboarded, I supported all sales staff throughout their first six months in the role, creating and delivering curriculum to ensure continued sales skill development.

When I'm wasn't focused on coaching and developing new staff, I planned and facilitated quarterly training events for 45 frontline sales staff and continually supported the division's leadership team in identifying trends across the sales business to determine department-wide skill development needs.  For these sales staff members, I assessed employee engagement on an ongoing basis, planned engagement functions within the department, and made recommendations to the leadership team around engagement challenges and priorities to ensure healthy retention and maximum productivity of our team.

In addition to supporting current team members, I was responsible for outreach to potential candidates in order to maintain an ongoing healthy pipeline of potential talent for the sales director role.  Bi-annually, I was responsible for planning and managing an event to showcase open opportunities and benefits of the department's sales roles to interested candidates.  At the conclusion of this event, I coordinated and conducted  interviews for all top candidates and made hiring recommendations to senior leadership.

The Advisory Board Company

Recruiting and L&D Business Partner

In my role as a sales director for The Advisory Board Company and EAB, I maintained consistent top performance, conducting 18 formal presentations of service offerings from our healthcare and higher education Research and Insights divisions each month.  Consistently exceeding revenue goals, I personally generated an average of $1 million in new revenue for the firm annually with an average contract value of $26,000.  

Directly managing a sales associate responsible for visit acquisition, I provided regular feedback and coaching around territory and outreach strategy to ensure consistency in the strength of the front-end of our business.

Director, Sales and Business Development

As a chapter consultant for Alpha Chi Omega women's fraternity, I traveled nationwide to 17 individual collegiate chapters to assess organizational strengths and recommend and manage  change.  A large part of my role was selling the vision of the need for process improvement to the leaders of each chapter and assisting in the development of action-oriented strategic plans, understanding that the change could not happen if the chapter leaders did not believe it to be necessary.

For each of these chapters, I also assisted in member recruitment strategy, budget management, risk management policy implementation, and leadership development.  With each chapter, my time was split between conducting individual meetings with chapter leaders and facilitating large group presentations to audiences of up to 300 women to gain chapter buy-in  around established chapter priorities and goals.

Alpha Chi Omega Fraternity, Inc.

Chapter Consultant

20|20 Research is a worldwide market research company specializing in traditional and online qualitative research.  In the Project Manager role, I served as the primary point of contact for 6-10 clients at any given time.  I personally oversaw the nationwide recruitment of respondents for all projects, resolved technical and logistical issues as they arose during market research studies, and collaborated with technology team members to build and customize online forum and focus group sites to meet clients' specific needs.

In addition to achieving 100% client satisfaction for all projects under my individual supervision, I collaborated with the senior leadership team to create novel recruiting initiatives to identify study participants with specific demographic traits for projects with high difficulty levels.

Brittney Sceals