Laura Oliver-Suos

The Question That Redirected a Career

Oliver-Suos did not set out to work in talent. She was majoring in education as an undergraduate with a clear ambition: kindergarten teacher. A class project that asked students to map out what their chosen career would actually look like, salaries included, prompted a harder look at the math. Teachers, she notes plainly, are very much underpaid, and she wanted to be able to support herself.

The pivot came in a conversation with her grandmother, a businesswoman who served as a second mother and her first mentor. "I never really saw you as a teacher," her grandmother told her. "I actually think you'd do really well in business." Oliver-Suos pushed back with a question of her own: what is the people side of business? She wanted to work with people, help people, influence people's lives. Her grandmother asked whether she had heard of something called human resources. She had not. She looked it up, changed her major, and graduated with a degree in business and human resources.

During that program she joined INROADS, which helps high achieving students from underrepresented communities explore business and industry through summer internships. She rotated through performance management, training and development, and spent the whole time watching the recruiters across the aisle: leaving for career fairs, on the phone with candidates, hosting them in the office. It looked, she thought, like the most fun job in the building. When it came time for her final summer internship at Best Buy Corporation, she asked her program coordinator to place her in talent acquisition. The answer was that recruiting had never taken an intern. She asked her to please just ask anyway. Recruiting said yes, and she became the first.

Talent First, Requisition Second

She began her full time career at Best Buy Corporation in a sourcing role on a brand new team, doing what she calls old fashioned recruiting. This was before LinkedIn, and before the internet did much of the heavy lifting at all. The craft she learned in those years still shapes her philosophy.

The person who taught it to her was a director, mentor, and advocate who led global talent acquisition at a major retailer. When Oliver-Suos received an early and, in her own assessment, probably premature promotion to talent acquisition manager, she joined his team as by far its most junior leader. He took her under his wing. What he gave her was less a playbook than a stance: recruiting is about the hunt and the matchmaking, not about a requisition first approach. Get to know great people, then figure out where they belong. Maybe it is the role you are working on. Maybe it is somewhere else in your network, or a company you used to work for, and you make the introduction anyway. "A talent first approach, before we called it that," she says. What made him stand out, in her telling, was a natural ability to influence and inspire, a nuanced charisma that pulls people along, and the fact that he has changed countless lives, including hers.

A Global Brand, a Team of Two

Today Oliver-Suos owns recruitment marketing and employer brand strategy and execution for Capital Group at enterprise scale, across a global footprint, with a team of two. The leverage comes from partnership: she works cross functionally and draws on resources across the organization to operate far beyond the headcount on her own org chart. It is, notably, the third time in her career she has been handed a function that needed building rather than maintaining.

She is also generous about saying so publicly. Last year, on Global Talent Acquisition Day, she used her own LinkedIn profile to thank the leaders who shaped her. For someone who once wanted to spend her life influencing people at the start of theirs, it is a fitting habit. The kindergarten classroom was traded for a career fair, then for a global employer brand, but the assignment never really changed.