Lavanya Kettay

The Counselor Who Became a Recruiter

Kettay graduated with an MBA and began her career in human resources, and it did not take long for her to notice which parts of the function actually energized her. Compensation cycles and policy work were not it. What held her attention were the conversations in which she sat with a person and helped them locate the role that genuinely fit.

That instinct led her somewhere most talent leaders never go. Before she ever filled a requisition, Kettay worked as a career counselor across three institutions in Canada, among them Algonquin College and CDI College, along with a community college. Her days were spent with students who were trying to answer one of the largest questions a person faces. "It's a very important life decision," she says, and she treated it that way. Between that work and her own experience, a pattern became impossible to ignore: when people found the opportunity that truly matched them, they shone. Passion, she concluded, is not a soft concept. It is a placement variable.

Recruiting became the logical next step, a way to take her HR foundation and her counseling training and apply both at scale. Like many, she started on the agency side. Unlike many, she arrived already fluent in the human half of the job.

What the Enterprise Unlocked

Agency work taught her speed and volume. It also showed her the ceiling. In an agency, as she describes it, you are largely filling requisitions, and the transaction ends when the seat is filled. Moving in-house changed the frame entirely.

Inside an enterprise, Kettay could finally see downstream. The hires she made shaped the products the company shipped, the direction of the business, and, just as importantly, the culture people showed up to every day. That realization is the hinge in her career story and the reason she pushes back on the idea that recruiting is a support function. "The work that we do on the recruiting side is so important, because it makes a huge impact on the company, but also the culture of the company," she says. She has carried that conviction from Twitter, where she worked before joining Adobe, into her leadership seat today.

Leaders Who Handed Her the Platform

Kettay is deliberate about how she talks about mentorship, and she draws from more than one direction. Some of her sharpest lessons came early, from managers whose example taught her, candidly, how not to lead. She does not dwell on it. She simply filed the lessons away and built the opposite.

At Adobe she found something different, and she credits the culture as much as any individual. Every leader she has worked with there, she says, has reflected a company that empowers its people, makes them feel valued, and hands them a genuine platform to innovate. The most meaningful thing they gave her was not opportunity but confidence in her. "They've given me the trust that I've got it," she says. Her move into leadership itself came because a leader looked at her and identified the potential before she had asked for the title.

She is equally clear that mentorship runs upward. Kettay makes a point of hiring people stronger than she is and counts the team reporting to her among her most consistent teachers. It is an unusually secure position for a leader to take, and it is central to how she builds.

Empower, Then Challenge the Assumption

The leadership philosophy Kettay practices is a direct inheritance from the one she received, with one addition of her own. She empowers her team and works to give them the confidence to do the job well. Then she asks them to argue with her.

"If you don't challenge assumptions, there's no growth for yourself, but also for the company that you support," she says. It is a demanding standard, and a generous one. It assumes the people around her have something worth hearing, which is precisely the assumption she was fortunate enough to have made about her.

Across HR, career counseling, agency recruiting, and enterprise talent leadership, Kettay's job description has changed repeatedly. Her actual work never has. She helps people identify their passion, their strengths, and the place where they could outshine. Whether the person in front of her is a college student weighing a first career or a senior candidate weighing an offer, the question she is asking is the same one she has been asking since her counseling days, and the answer still matters just as much.