06Jun

Welcome to #WeAreGreenKey, where we shine a spotlight on the people behind our powerhouse recruiting team.

We recently caught up with Green Key’s very own Brooke Stemen, Director of Internal Recruiting. She joined Green Key this past September and has already made such a difference with her relevant expertise and passion for recruiting.

Stemen shared her recruitment journey with us, including her college experience, how she landed at Green Key, and what her goals for the future entail.

What inspired you to pursue a career in recruitment?

While in college, I was in a sorority. Recruitment was my favorite time of year. I loved it and was pretty good at it. Additionally, I was very involved at my university; I was an orientation leader one summer, an intern in the Student Affairs office, and held multiple leadership position with my sorority. During senior year, I was the VP of Panhellenic Council and orchestrated recruitment for the entire university with great success.

At the time, I was strongly debating going to grad school for student affairs to pursue a career in Greek life or university recruitment – or something in that vein. But due to financial constraints of my life circumstances, it wasn’t the most feasible option. After all, I was raised by a single mom, a first generation college student, and putting myself through undergrad. So I expanded my search. I was an Advertising & Public Relations major and minored in Marketing and Management. I knew I liked being creative, helping people, and sales.

I started Googling and came across agency recruiting. I quickly realized that I could do all the things I am passionate about and naturally good at, I didn’t need a masters degree, and if I worked hard enough I could single handedly make more money than my family even knew was possible. Since starting my career in 2016, I haven’t looked back and love what I do every day.

What sets Green Key apart from other recruiting firms?

There are a lot of differentiating factors that go into creating the Green Key difference, but what I think it boils back to is: we treat others the way we would like to be treated. We are an organization created by recruiters for recruiters. Some ways we do this are that we compensate people fairly based on production and aggressively by industry standards.

We also offer a work life balance and encourage people to disconnect sometimes and use their PTO. We allow a lot of autonomy and flexibility on how people run their desk, but also have strong training programs and mentorship opportunities. You don’t have to fit in a specific box to be successful here, and I think that is pretty special.

Where has your team provided service that would be hard to match by an internal hiring team?

Prior to Green Key, I had spent my entire career on the agency production recruiting side. The majority of my production recruiting experience was in the engineering space, but I always loved helping out and recruiting for my own team. Over the years, I trained many new recruiters starting in the industry. I know what works and what doesn’t in the agency world and can relate really well to candidates.

I genuinely believe what we do here at Green Key is special, and it is the absolute best place in the industry to be a recruiter and I am passionate about finding the best people for our team.

What are the next steps for candidates interested in expanding their recruiting job search? 

Connect with me on LinkedIn and check out our Internal Jobs board for latest openings!

More Vulnerable, Women CEOs Negotiate More Severance

When it comes to severance agreements for CEOs, the gender gap works against men. Women who lead publicly held companies negotiate severance packages more than half as rich as their male counterparts.

Good news? Not really, say researchers, who not only studied the size of these agreements, but also the reasons for the disparity.

“Pre-employment severance agreements reflect the heightened concern of prospective female CEOs that they are more vulnerable to being dismissed,” says Pierre Chaigneau, one of the three researchers whose study was published in November in the Journal of Management.

Writing about their findings, Chaigneau notes the statistics support women’s fears of being terminated.

“Female CEOs are 45% more likely to be fired than their male counterparts,” he says. “Previous research has shown that a man’s competence is often assumed in leadership roles while a woman’s competence is generally questioned. And female CEOs are more likely to be blamed when their organizations struggle, and are much more likely to be targeted by activist investors.”

To protect themselves, women negotiate higher severance agreements. For struggling organizations, their severance payout is higher still. Men got no premium for taking on a company with flagging performance.

The researchers found one exception: The severance gap was smaller in industries where women CEOs were more numerous or where there were women on the board.

“The takeaway for boards is that if they really want to bring women into the executive suite, they can use the severance agreement as a recruiting tool to compensate women for the obstacles that they will inevitably face,” Chaigneau says.

Photo by Dane Deaner on Unsplash

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