High-Volume Hiring Reimagined in the Age of Covid-19

Jennifer is an accomplished, dynamic Talent Acquisition senior executive with 20+ years of experience in Talent Acquisition innovation, strategy, and execution on a global scale. She is a passionate advocate of disruptive innovation and diversity, and is a firm believer that a global mindset, a strong digital ecosystem, and authentic leadership hold the key to sustainable success for organizations in the next decade

Jennifer has hands-on experience cultivating strategy, under-pinned by innovation, to build competitive advantage in attracting top talent via programs, social media, and activities purposed to establish companies as a destination point for exceptional talent. Jennifer thrives on moving fast, creating value, and making an impact - tackling complex talent attraction, sourcing, and hiring challenges with innovative pilots and short-term, intelligent experiments where creative license is needed, anchored in process rigor and informative analytics to measure outcomes and success.

In her tenure at Accenture, Jennifer was the Global Director of Technology Recruiting, accountable for global delivery of 53,000 Technology professionals annually, across 600 recruiters, hiring for all levels and skillsets including Artificial Intelligence, Cyber Security, Cloud, Digital, Robotics, SAP and Oracle. She was responsible for helping Accenture serve its clients by discovering and attracting exceptional high-tech talent in 120 countries and over 40 industries in which Accenture operates. In this role, she conceptualized, designed, and launched “high touch for high-tech” digitized Candidate Attraction and AI-infused sourcing solutions on a global scale, layered with outcome-based analytics to measure success which positioned Accenture Technology to welcome 50,000 new hires, on average, each year, into Accenture’s Technology business.

At Accenture, Jennifer was selected to be part of Accenture’s Global Talent Innovation Lab - a high performance, elite team (by invitation only), focused on applied research, invention, and rapid prototyping of ideas purposed to disrupt how Accenture attracts, excites and retains the best people for everything Accenture does. Her mantra is positive deviance to enable organizations to push the boundaries on how leaders think about talent and the vast array of talent options in the Gig-Economy where every Millennial and Gen Z’er has a side-hustle and is armed with a micro-computer in their back-pocket, requiring organizations to respond with high-velocity, high-quality, and high-speed decisioning and solutions to captivate the attention of these Neo-Digital Natives who, in the Digital Age, have the attention span of a fruit fly. 

While at Accenture, Jennifer initiated and launched a 1^st-ever Accenture Movie Trailer purposed to excite and engage Accenture Technology professionals in a visual, digital “movie-like” experience featuring Accenture’s own Technology professionals to authentically represent Accenture’s Technology brand in an inspiring digital format intended to motivate Techies to pursue an Accenture career.

Jennifer also devised and implemented Accenture’s 1^st-ever Global Early Talent Identification Program in 25 countries to attract diverse undergraduate STEM students in 1^st year of undergraduate studies, leveraging Accenture’s brand, global campus footprint, professional development curriculum, and mentoring programs to bring this program to life – this program earned media attention, including a Business Wire article  featured in Bloomberg’s Business Week (Jan 24, 2014).

Jennifer pioneered Digital Job Descriptions at Accenture in 10 countries (9,000+ “views”), increasing Joiner yield by 35%. At the same time period, Jennifer launched a 1^st-ever Global Google+ Hangout featuring Accenture Tech Labs visionaries to attract highly sought-after tech-savvy candidates to priority Accenture Technology positions.

Jennifer also had the privilege of being selected for the Accenture HR Leadership Excellence Program – a 2-year Leadership Development Program for high-performing HR leaders.

Currently, Jennifer is EXL’s Vice President of Talent Acquisition, accountable for all aspects of Talent Acquisition Execution as well as transforming EXL’s strategy for discovering and attracting high performing, exceptional talent. Jennifer is specifically on-point for both recruiting execution as well as identifying opportunities for innovation and driving intelligent process, systems, and people improvements. She recently launched EXL’s first-ever Digital Evangelism strategy and ancillary Brand Ambassador campaign as well as a full-suite Talent Acquisition Analytics Dashboard and Metrics program to measure outcomes of the TA function, monthly. She launched EXL’s first-ever Digitized Candidate Experience Survey as well in her first 3 months.

Jennifer blends culture, data, content, and cutting-edge technology to create alluring candidate propaganda and captivating candidate experiences to drive targeted business outcomes - This requires a passion for innovation, a strong understanding of process and analytics, and influential facilitation / project management / change management skills, as well as exceptional leadership abilities across cross-functional teams.

Jennifer works with talented people in a culture that values openness, creativity and long-term relationships where individual contributions matter.  Jennifer’s transparency and proactive communication underpin her leadership style and are a significant linchpin and success factor on every project and team Jennifer leads.

Sheila Crosby Powell has over 35 years of experience in Human Resources, with the majority of her career focused on talent acquisition. For the past 25 years she has held global roles either as part of a Global CoE or as the Global Talent Acquisition Leader.

She has extensive experience defining, driving and implementing market-leading global programs and strategies across many areas of the human resources lifecycle, but primarily in talent acquisition and talent development. She spent the majority of her career at Accenture, starting as a business and technology consultant for two years, before starting her HR career as the University Recruiting Lead for Northern California. She spent four years in human resources roles in the Financial Services industry, and most recently, became the Global Talent Acquisition and Mobility Leader at GHD Inc. (www.ghd.com), a global engineering consulting company. She has travelled extensively to many countries, and is well known for her role teaching behavioral interviewing to thousands of hiring managers across 18 countries. She was instrumental to the development of the Internal Careers Marketplace at Accenture, which won the Brandon Hall gold award in Talent Development. Sheila graduated from Santa Clara University, has two grown daughters, and currently resides in Scottsdale, AZ with her husband.

Chris Gould has over 20 years of experience in RPO, global talent acquisition leadership and consulting. He has proven success driving talent strategies and operations; building and developing global, diverse teams; and working with business leaders developing cost and availability strategies in mature and emerging markets. Prior to PeopleScout, Chris was formally the Global Head of Talent Acquisition for Black & Veatch and the Aon Corporation and held senior leadership roles with Accenture, Hewitt Associates, and Aon Hewitt. His global teams have been responsible for permanent and contingent hires in over 100 countries. He is a requested speaker on topics related to global talent acquisition, leadership, social networking, and human resources and his work has resulted in press interest including The Wall Street Journal, The Kansas City Star and the SHRM HR Magazine. Chris graduated from the University of Central Missouri and currently resides in Dallas, TX with his family.