Essence Dashtaray

A Minor in HR and a Mother's Read on Her Daughter

She knew early that she wanted to work in entertainment and media. What she did not know was which part of the business would claim her. Internships, she says, did the sorting for her, teaching her as much about what she was not passionate about as what she was.

The nudge that shaped the rest came from home. Dashtaray was majoring in communications when her mother offered an observation that was equal parts affectionate and accurate: "You talk a lot, but you're good with people." The suggestion that followed was to go find a major or minor that matched that. Dashtaray picked up a minor in HR, enjoyed the coursework, and then landed the Paramount internship that turned an academic interest into a career.

What made those ten weeks stick was not the brand on the building. It was how much rope her team gave a college student. She was handed real responsibility and genuine ownership over tasks, and the experience convinced her that early career recruiting was where she wanted to build. It is a lesson she has since institutionalized. The programs she oversees are built on the premise that students rise to the level of trust extended to them.

The Two Managers She Still Consults

Ask Dashtaray who shaped her and she names two people, both of whom were in the room at the very start. Suzanne Rosenthal was her intern manager in 2011 and remained her leader until August 2024, a span that means Dashtaray effectively grew up professionally under her. Andrea McCray was also her manager during that first internship and spent a number of years at Paramount before moving on to other work.

The specific gift both gave her was the hardest one to appreciate at the time: honest, constructive feedback. "When you're starting out early in your career, getting constructive feedback is really challenging," she says. Everyone enjoys hearing what they did well. Far fewer people are told, early and clearly, where they could be better. Dashtaray now credits that pressure with everything that followed, and reads it as a form of belief. They pushed her, she says, because they knew what she was capable of handling.

Neither woman is at the company anymore, but both remain in her corner. She saw them recently, and when she hits a genuinely difficult problem she still runs it through a familiar filter: what would Andrea and Suzanne do? That question is now embedded in how she manages her own team, which is arguably the truest measure of a mentor's work.

The Case for Early Career Talent in the Age of AI

Dashtaray is making a strategic bet that runs against a widespread anxiety. As AI absorbs the kind of entry-level work that historically justified junior headcount, many organizations have quietly concluded that early career hiring is the first thing to cut. She argues the opposite, and she is arguing it internally, to a new generation of Paramount leaders, as a business case rather than a nice-to-have.

Her team's stated priority over the next couple of years is increasing intern conversion into full-time hiring. The logic is straightforward. Early career talent is the most adaptable population in any company, quickest to build AI fluency and fastest to absorb new tools, technologies and ways of working. "I think a lot of folks are afraid that AI may take over a lot of those early career jobs, but I think quite the opposite," she says. In her view, these are the people who will normalize AI inside the business and become the leaders who do it well.

That belief shows up in program design. Her team is deliberately weaving AI into intern projects and encouraging interns to use it in their everyday work, with an important boundary: AI supports the work, it does not lead it. The goal is efficiency and better process, not outsourced thinking. Dashtaray is candid that she is still learning how to integrate the technology into her own day-to-day, a rare admission from someone in her seat and a more credible position than pretending otherwise.

Stay on the Pulse, Stay Close to the Business

Her advice to other talent leaders is shaped by the industry she has spent fourteen years inside. Media and entertainment is constantly evolving, and she believes recruiting strategy has to evolve at the same speed rather than trailing it. That means staying on the pulse of new tools and technologies, and staying deliberately open in how and where talent is sourced.

She makes a direct argument for range: there is real benefit, she says, in hiring people from different walks of life, different industries, different backgrounds, and different colleges and universities. Homogeneous pipelines produce homogeneous thinking, which is a liability in a business being redefined every quarter.

The other half of her method is unglamorous and specific. She tunes into the business's town halls, listens in, and reads the trades. The point is to understand what is actually happening to the industry so her team can go back and build recruiting strategies that are strategic rather than reactive. It is also how she stays connected to the leaders she serves, a discipline that has clearly served her across a long tenure and multiple eras of the company.

Dashtaray extends that same instinct outward. She attended the university recruiting conference in Las Vegas recently, where the conversation was heavily AI driven and where heads of emerging talent from across industries compared notes. She left it having built a genuine peer connection, which is the version of networking most people claim and few actually do.

Paramount is in a period of visible transition, and Dashtaray is unbothered by the noise. She is, in her words, excited about the new leaders coming in to reinvigorate the company and about how emerging talent will continue to evolve over the next few years. Fourteen years in, she is still most animated by the same thing that hooked her as an intern: sitting with college students, figuring out what they are passionate about, and exposing them to opportunities they never knew existed at a company like this one.