Jennifer Swenson

The Admissions Office as Apprenticeship

Before the transition into corporate recruiting and corporate talent acquisition, Swenson worked in admissions long enough to learn the craft in its most human form. She had the opportunity to work with students, with educators, and with a team of great professionals on a few different campuses, walking students and families through the admissions process. Nothing about that work is transactional. A recruiter who learns the trade there learns to earn trust quickly, to coordinate with colleagues who each hold one piece of the answer, and to sit patiently with someone weighing a consequential choice.

What held her in it was the return on both sides of the conversation. She loved the process itself, and she saw the reward it produced for the students and families she was working with as well as for herself. That two way payoff, the conviction that a well run recruiting process leaves everyone better off, became the standard she has carried into every role since.

When she did move into the corporate world, she built herself a bridge rather than leaping. Her first step was college relations, which let her keep working with people at the very start of their careers while she learned how talent acquisition operates inside a business. It was a deliberate sequence, and it gave her a foundation that a straight lateral move into corporate recruiting would not have provided.

A Career Without a Single Vertical

From college relations, Swenson moved into recruiting for professional positions, and the range she has covered is unusual even measured against long careers in the field. Manufacturing. Engineering. Technology. Sales. Asked to name a space she has not worked in, she comes up empty. "I don't know if there's a space that I haven't had the opportunity to work with candidates," she says.

That breadth is not decoration on a resume. It is a diagnostic instrument. Recruiters who spend an entire career inside one function tend to mistake the customs of that function for the laws of the profession. Swenson has run searches across enough disciplines to tell the difference between a real constraint and a habit no one has thought to question, and to carry an approach that works in one corner of a business into a corner that has never tried it.

The Leaders Who Built Her

Ask Swenson how she got from an admissions office to a leadership seat and she answers with names, not titles. The first is Paul Muller, director of admissions at Bemidji State University and the leader on the first campus where she worked. Muller had done the jobs of nearly everyone in the office, and it showed. He could roll up his sleeves and work right next to his team while still leading them and helping them get where they were going. He answered questions. He showed up. He led by great example. He also knew the ins and outs of college admissions cold, and he still gave a young professional room to be creative and to genuinely own her space and her projects, which is the rarest gift a first manager can offer. He was, Swenson adds, a lot of fun.

The second is Lucy Smith, her first manager at Anderson Corporation. Smith brought what Swenson calls phenomenal energy along with real command of the craft. She was magnetic in the way the best recruiters are, and she knew her stuff. More than that, she built an atmosphere: a team where learning felt exciting, where working hard was simply what people did, and where the reward that came with it was visible to everyone in the room. Swenson describes that team as the model for the kind of leadership she wanted to practice herself.

The common thread between the two is instructive. Neither Muller nor Smith led from a distance. Both knew the work intimately, both created space rather than occupying it, and both treated a team's energy as something a leader is personally responsible for generating.

Staying Close to the Work

Swenson credits her move into leadership to time in the profession, good opportunities, and mentors who invested in her. What she does with that seat now is the part she calls fun and exciting: working with her team, building teams, and staying involved in all of the pieces and parts she has played throughout her career.

That last commitment is what separates her from a certain kind of talent leader. Having handled college relations, professional recruiting across manufacturing, engineering, technology and sales, and now leadership, she does not manage recruiting as an abstraction on a dashboard. She manages it as someone who has personally worked the requisition, sat with the candidate, and carried the outcome. It is the Muller model applied to a corporate talent function: know the jobs your people are doing, then work right next to them.

Viewed from her chair, the distance between a college admissions office and a corporate talent acquisition team is far shorter than an outsider would assume. Both are built on the same premise, which is that helping someone find the right next step deserves to be done carefully. Swenson has now been doing that for long enough, in enough different rooms, to make the case convincingly.