Ariana Claton

Twenty Years on the Floor

Before recruiting, there was retail. More than twenty years of it. Claton spent that career in sales, and along the way she did a version of hiring without ever calling it that: cashiers, door greeters, the steady churn of frontline roles that keep a store running. It was recruiting in the practical sense, though nowhere near the level she operates at now.

Then her store location closed. Looking for work, she took a friend's recommendation and joined a company that, unbeknownst to her, was in the middle of rebuilding its entire recruiting function. One team member was out on maternity leave with her second child and had already privately decided not to return. The director was on maternity leave herself, also with a second child, and preparing to come back. A third recruiter was on his way to another employer. The team was, in every practical sense, being reassembled from the ground up.

Claton knew none of this when she sat down with her lunch. That company is where her recruiting career began. Lydia Home Association is where it sits today.

The Break Room Conversation

The manager who approached her opened with a compliment and a pitch: a role that would put her on the road roughly 322 days a year, traveling to help find business, an obvious fit for someone with a heavy sales background. Claton was direct about why she was not interested. She had spent a career in sales and did not want to spend the rest of her working life there, in part because she had learned firsthand how much resistance a woman, and specifically a Black woman, could meet simply for being the person delivering the pitch. She had earned the right to choose something else.

The manager pivoted. Her team was restructuring. Had Claton ever considered selling positions instead? "Selling positions? Who? What? What are you talking about?" was, by her own account, the honest first reaction. But the manager kept going, drawing a line between recruiting and the marketing Claton had already been doing for years for her own businesses. A meeting was arranged on the spot, and the director came back from maternity leave to sit with her personally.

Five minutes in, the director had made up her mind. Claton pushed back once, pointing out that she had never officially recruited a day in her life. The answer she got became the frame she has carried ever since: it is like selling a position, sales without the weight of a sales quota hanging over it.

Fifteen Requisitions, No Hand Holding

On her first day, she was handed fifteen requisitions. She did not know what a requisition was. She did not know what sourcing meant. The team told her to take her time, that there was no challenge and no expectation, that they would hold her hand as long as she needed. Claton declined the offer with characteristic clarity. Show me the basics, she told them, and I will make my way.

She then did something most newcomers would not attempt in their first month: she built her own interview guide from scratch, because she had no intention of sounding like a traditional interview and never has. When she got on her first screen with a candidate, leadership listened in, braced for a stumble. What they heard instead was someone who sounded as though she had been doing the work for months, if not years.

The trajectory from there was steep. The team restructured around her. The leadership instincts she had built managing retail floors transferred over intact, and she moved into an assistant manager role, then was fast tracked to manager. That promotion came with a caveat she raised herself: she did not want the title if it meant giving up recruiting. She had arrived expecting to be a coordinator. She stayed because the work turned out to be hers.

The Business Owner's Habits

The manager in that break room did not stop at the sales background. What sealed the argument was that Claton runs her own businesses, a couple of them, and has handled her own marketing and her own everything along the way. That track record was the reason she agreed to take the meeting at all.

Those habits still show. The first thing she did on arriving in recruiting was refuse the standard script and write her own guide, the same instinct that had her building her own marketing rather than borrowing someone else's. It is a small detail, but it explains a great deal about how quickly she found her footing.

The Director Who Still Picks Up the Phone

Ask Claton who shaped her and the first name she reaches for is the last director she worked with, the one who returned from maternity leave to meet a candidate with no recruiting experience and knew within five minutes she wanted her on the team. That relationship did not end when the job did. Claton still reaches out to her today, particularly when a hard requisition lands and she wants a second read from someone whose judgment she trusts completely.

The lesson attached to that mentor is not a slogan. It is a way of working: back people on potential rather than resume, then stay available to them long after they no longer report to you. Claton was fast tracked, she led early, and she still asks. Seeking counsel from the person who backed her first is not a soft spot in her method. It is the discipline that keeps it sharp.

Make Your Own Way

Her story carries a quiet instruction for hiring managers. Claton did not apply for a recruiting career. She was noticed, correctly, by someone who paid attention to how she talked to people and understood what that meant she could do with a requisition. The candidate who reshapes a team is not always the one who arrives with the right title on paper.

For anyone stepping into unfamiliar work, her own approach is the better guide. She took fifteen requisitions on day one, turned down the offer of a hand to hold and got to work: "Show me the basics and I'm going to make my way."