Coco Lloyd

A Deliberately Non-Traditional Start

Lloyd's first plan was the law. She went to law school, worked out fairly quickly that it was not the life she wanted, and made a full pivot into entertainment to chase a genuine passion. Then the entrepreneurial itch arrived, and she opened her tea cafes. The COVID era closed them, but the experience left her with something more durable than a storefront: a clear sense of which part of running a business actually energized her.

She started over as a corporate recruiter and worked her way up. What kept her interested was not the requisition list. It was the architecture underneath it. "It wasn't just the recruiting that I enjoyed, but mostly the building blocks of how you build a department," she says, "and that's what got me interested in leadership." She gravitated deliberately toward startups, where team building and operational design sit in the same pair of hands, and where the person who designs the process is usually the person running it. Before joining Certa she served as Director of People at Steadily.

The Long Game of Mentorship

Ask Lloyd about the people who shaped her and she does not produce a single origin-story mentor. She produces a philosophy. Every company is different, she points out, which means every new role is effectively starting from scratch, and every role is therefore a learning experience. Her leaders have been, in her word, fantastic. So have her peers. So have the hiring managers she has partnered with over the years, a group she credits as directly as any boss for how she thinks about hiring.

The relationship she prizes most, though, is the one she has built with her own recruiters. As she has stood up teams at company after company, she has brought certain people with her, from one organization to the next, becoming a recurring presence in their careers rather than a single line on their resumes. "I'm enjoying the mentorship side now, just as I enjoyed being mentored earlier in my career," she says. That is not a sentiment most talent leaders can actually back with a track record of people who kept choosing to follow them.

She also built a company around it. A few years ago Lloyd founded Ambitious, a venture dedicated to mentoring women through their careers: interview preparation, resumes, the practical mechanics of getting hired. To make sure the advice was real, she traveled the country and interviewed more than 70 leaders at Fortune 500 companies about what they were actually seeing in the hiring landscape. The internet, she notes dryly, is flooded with information, and not all of it is good. Ambitious was an attempt to move verified wisdom from the people making hiring decisions down to the people starting careers or trying to change them.

Why There Is No One Size Fits All

Lloyd remembers submitting paper resumes and walking business to business to find work. She has watched the entire toolset change, and she is unambiguously enthusiastic about it. She is also unusually disciplined about it, because she has been burned by borrowed playbooks.

"I do think one of the main things that I found in the last few years is that it's not a one size fits all," she says. Tools that peers rave about have failed inside her own companies, and the reason is almost always context. A resume screening tool is a gift when you are hiring thousands of people remotely or globally. Run the same scraping stack against an in-office role in Kansas, where the local talent pool is small, and it will not glean anything like the same result. Reasoning has to sit on top of the technology, not underneath it.

So she experiments constantly and judges honestly. Test the tool, see whether it genuinely serves this company at this stage, and if it does not, put a pin in it. Revisit it at the next company, by which point the technology will very likely have moved on. It is a posture that pairs naturally with the startup environments she prefers, where nothing is settled and everything is worth rebuilding. "I like to try things," she says. "I like to test new technology."

Two Rules for the Next Generation

Asked what she would tell people entering talent acquisition, or leading in it, Lloyd offers two rules and no filler.

The first is to think outside the box. Do not inherit another company's playbook simply because it worked there. Sometimes the strategy nobody has tried yet is the one that fits your specific business, and copying is the fastest way to never find out.

The second is sharper and harder: do not be the bottleneck. "You can be Superman," she says. "You can try and do everything all at once." In a startup, that instinct is rewarded right up until the moment it stops working. Eventually every initiative in the organization is blocked by one person's capacity and one person's calendar. Lloyd learned that early, and it still governs how she operates. She gives everything she can, but she delegates, she leans on her people, and she measures her own contribution partly by how much of the company can scale without her in the room. For a leader who has spent a career building departments from scratch, it may be the most valuable thing she knows.