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Hanna Root
IT Career Coach - Candidate Advocate I Virtual Educator
Professional Background
Hanna Root is an innovative IT Career Coach dedicated to empowering non-tech professionals to transition effectively into the vibrant tech industry. Her unique approach combines her personal experiences and professional insights, allowing her to resonate deeply with individuals seeking to forge new paths in their careers. Raised in an environment where higher education wasn't guaranteed, Hanna became a first-generation college graduate, navigating the complexities of the professional world with a desire to inspire others, much like her inspirational high school teacher did for her.
Hanna’s career journey may seem unconventional; however, it is marked by a series of career explorations that ultimately led her to discover her passion for helping others. Initially, she found herself in the world of Technical Recruiting, where her skill set began to shine. While she excelled in recruiting, burnout set in after four years, prompting her to seek a role that would provide more fulfillment. It was this quest that brought her to the position of Career Services Advisor at Grand Circus, a move that would mark the beginning of a significant impact in the tech community.
At Grand Circus, Hanna’s role transcends traditional career counseling; her mission is to provide the guidance and resources necessary for individuals to successfully navigate their transition into Michigan's technology market. Through a combination of personalized support and strategic programming, she empowers both current students and alumni to develop the skills necessary to thrive in competitive job landscapes.
Education and Achievements
Hanna Root earned her Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Communication from the prestigious Michigan State University, a foundation that has undoubtedly bolstered her skills in interpersonal communication and helped her foster relationships within the tech industry. Her education laid the groundwork for her future career endeavors and shaped her understanding of effective communication strategies - essential tools in career coaching and recruitment.
Hanna has held several notable positions throughout her career, including:
- Lead Manager of Talent Solutions at Grand Circus: In her current role, she leads initiatives to enhance the career readiness of tech professionals, focusing on aligning their skills with industry needs.
- Career Services Specialist at Grand Circus: Previously, Hanna played a crucial role in providing career services to students, leveraging her firsthand experience in recruitment to mentor job seekers.
- Technical Recruiting Consultant at Qualigence International: Here, she honed her recruitment skills by identifying and attracting technical talent for various organizations.
- Senior Technical Recruiter at OtterBase: In this role, Hanna utilized her deep understanding of the tech industry to engage with candidates and employers alike.
- Account Manager and IT Recruiter at RMC (Recruitment Management Consultants): These roles provided her with a solid foundation in managing client relationships and understanding the recruitment process from multiple angles.
- Volunteer at SMART: Her commitment to community service reflects her passion for helping others achieve their goals.
- Management Assistant at Enterprise Rent-A-Car: This early role contributed to her broad understanding of management principles and operational efficiency.
Key Achievements
Hanna’s work is marked by numerous achievements that speak volumes about her contributions to the career development of tech professionals in Michigan. Some of her key achievements include:
- 1:1 Career Coaching: Hanna offers personalized coaching sessions, empowering individuals to identify their strengths and create actionable plans for their career transitions.
- Technical Resume Review and Editing: She has mastered the art of creating compelling technical resumes that effectively showcase candidates' skills and experiences to potential employers.
- Behavioral Interview Preparation: Hanna conducts insightful sessions to prepare candidates for behavioral interviews, helping them articulate their experiences and demonstrate their fit for roles.
- Soft Skills Presentations: Understanding the importance of soft skills in tech, Hanna leads engaging presentations that highlight essential competencies needed for success in the industry.
- Goal Setting Workshops: She facilitates workshops focused on goal setting, aiding individuals in formulating strategic career objectives that align with their personal and professional aspirations.
- Building Relationships with Michigan Companies: By fostering relationships with local employers, Hanna enhances opportunities for Grand Circus graduates, directly impacting their career trajectories.
- Candidate Advocacy: She passionately advocates for candidates, ensuring that their needs are represented and supported throughout the hiring process.
Personal Interests
Outside of her professional pursuits, Hanna leads a vibrant life filled with diverse interests. She is an enthusiastic hula hooper, finding joy and creativity in this fun and engaging activity. Hanna enjoys camping, embracing the beauty of nature and the peacefulness it brings. Additionally, her passion for food is evident in her love for vegan donuts and coffee, which she often shares with friends and colleagues. Last but certainly not least, Hanna is the proud caretaker of a golden doodle, who undoubtedly brings her daily joy and companionship.
If you're interested in learning more about Hanna Root and her work at Grand Circus, or if you want to find out how to connect with the program she supports, feel free to reach out directly at hanna.root@grandcircus.co. Her door is always open to those eager to embark on a tech career journey!
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Clay works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Clay offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
- Network Strength: Visualizes the strength of your relationships relative to others in your network
- Timeline: Shows your relationship history with each contact
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- Reminders and Notes: Helps you remember important details about contacts
- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
- Groups: Organizes contacts into meaningful categories
- Nexus AI: An AI navigator that helps you derive insights from your network, such as finding contacts who have been to specific places or work at particular companies
Clay is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Clay is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Clay as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Clay offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Clay takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Clay encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Clay work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Clay is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Clay is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Clay is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Clay offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Clay offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Clay for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Clay accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Clay offers extensive integration capabilities. Clay introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Clay supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Clay also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
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Clay makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Clay's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Clay is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Clay stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Clay excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Clay is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Clay offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Clay's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Clay has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Clay is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Clay beneficial.
Clay offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Clay offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Clay's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Clay offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Clay focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Clay also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Clay offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Clay isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Clay instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Clay is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Clay can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Clay is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Clay helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Clay's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Clay has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Clay a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Clay's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Clay's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Clay has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Clay's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Clay as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Clay eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.