Congratulations to the 2023 Leading Innovators for Talent honorees for their efforts across talent acquisition, talent development, and DEI.
As Harver’s Chief People Officer, I am thrilled to announce Harver’s first-ever LIFT Awards, honoring Leading Innovators For Talent. As fellow HR and Talent practitioners, these trailblazing practitioners are solving complex challenges across the talent lifecycle with equitable, technology-driven solutions. Personally, recognizing their contributions and forward-thinking leadership gives me great pleasure to shine the light on outstanding role models in the HR field.
The Harver LIFT Awards honor individuals in the HR community who:
- Recognize hiring and developing talent is truly about people,
- Innovate the HR space by strategically using technology, and
- See talent acquisition and management as a creative and human-centered endeavor.
Congratulations to all the 2023 Harver LIFT Awards winners! Learn more about the recognized HR innovators below, including a preview of the advice that honorees graciously share to inspire all fellow innovators and potential future recipients of LIFT Awards.
For a full profile of each winner, including more advice, download the complete 2023 Harver LIFT Awards guide featuring a full profile of each winner.
LIFT Award Winners for Talent Acquisition
Advice for other HR innovators: “Ensure that the viewpoints and opinions of a variety of stakeholders are sought as part of the ideation and benchmarking stage in a TA/DEI project. This will help ensure you are approaching problems with an inclusive mindset and will help with buy-in of large initiatives.”
Sarah Chouinard
Director of TA Strategy & Innovation, TTEC
Advice for other HR innovators: “Define what successes look like up front. Surround yourself with great people, and then leverage the talent around you. Collaborate, delegate, and most importantly; tap into people’s passions & strengths!”
Advice for other HR innovators: “Start by developing a strategic, actionable, results-driven pilot plan. Identify your goals, and take time to measure, analyze, and test. Harver makes this easy with its business intelligence capabilities – performance data in real-time – driving business success.”
Carly Hazard
Senior Director, Talent Acquisition + New Hire Experience, Abercrombie & Fitch Co.
Advice for other HR innovators: “Don’t be intimidated by a tech project or a global rollout! By surrounding myself with the right partners and vendors to support my team through the implementation, we have been able to drive incredible efficiency and truly modernize our associate and candidate experience.”
Advice for other HR innovators: “Don’t spend time trying to be ready. Manage your project and, if possible, set flexible deadlines.”
Sir Winston Malapad
Talent Acquisition Director for Process Excellence and Analytics, Foundever
Advice for other HR innovators:“Immerse and learn a lot from the people around you. Be bold to embrace change and raise the status quo. Discover what’s outside the box as curiosity begins innovation.”
Advice for other HR innovators: “Overcommunicate.”
Advice for other HR innovators: “Don’t be afraid to try something new! We spent years doing the same thing because that was all we knew and we thought it worked. After exploring what was out there on the market, we’re making even more enhancements to our candidate journey this year and are hopeful we will have the same great outcomes.”
Advice for other HR innovators:“Be confident in your why. Surround yourself with a diverse project team to provide different perspectives and diversity of thought. Define KPIs that are meaningful and can easily be measured. Don’t forget to plan well for change management and capability build – adoption is critical!”
LIFT Award Winners for Talent Management
Advice for other HR innovators: “I would advise others to be open to change! You must be open to constantly changing or tweaking your tools, processes, and programs. At Graybar, we stay on top of metrics to ensure our customers and candidates are happy. That way, we can always know the full extent of the impact of solutions on our business’ engagement, retention, or productivity efforts.”
Advice for other HR innovators: “Lean into curiosity to follow the data. The insights that can be gained from quantifiable data will serve as the foundational elements of process improvements, allowing you to create a positive end user experience and to achieve results.”
LIFT Award Winners for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
Advice for other HR innovators: “Get comfortable with the uncomfortable. Understand the goal, and your ‘why’. Get your leadership buy in – it’s critical to success. Listen to your target market – it’s okay to not have all the answers, but it’s so important to have the awareness and empathy to ask, learn and appreciate others lived experience. Once you have those inputs, make change!”
Tanmay Manohar
Vice President, People Analytics & Workforce Planning, Paramount
Advice for other HR innovators: “What gets measured gets done!”
Advice for other HR innovators: “One piece of advice I would give is collaborating with key stakeholders to feed into and support the project at key milestones. By involving our key business stakeholders when revamping the early careers selection/assessment process, we were able to design an effective recruitment process that met hiring manager needs and subsequently added value to their teams.”
Advice for other HR innovators: “Be authentic! Candidates will see through employers that do not genuinely live by their values.”
