A Conversation with nicolette carroll ON human resources

Human Resources (HR)’s mission is to foster the recruitment, retention, and development of exceptional and diverse scientific, engineering, and operational talent.

Nicolette Carroll is a recruitment coordinator with the talent management team in the Human Resources Division. She stresses the importance of optimizing and leveraging communications and metrics – technology and the human touch – to help recruit the talent of the future.

What is your area of work?

As a Recruitment Coordinator, I work closely with our Talent Acquisition and HR Teams, facilitating high-volume recruitment activities to support and maximize efficiency of the recruitment process. Our team works in close collaboration with all of the Divisions across the Lab to attract and hire talented candidates for a variety of scientific, engineering, and professional roles for the Lab. The Talent Acquisition Team is also committed to our Lab-wide IDEA initiative by focusing on attracting and recruiting diverse talent.

What big challenge(s) are you hoping to solve with your work in the next 20 years?

Just as the workforce continues to evolve, we need to adapt our hiring process to meet the changing landscape. We have to look in the right places to fill our talent pipelines and be able to communicate quickly externally with candidates and each other internally. We need to leverage and learn from recruitment metrics to make more informed decisions and adapt our applicant tracking systems to be intuitive.

The candidate experience is also important for the Lab’s branding and reputation as a world-class institution and place to work. Although technology will continue to play a critical role in recruiting, we also acknowledge the importance of the human touch in relationship-building.

What steps are you taking today to accomplish this vision?

We have developed a talent acquisition playbook to help align recruiters and hiring managers with the Lab’s hiring strategy and best practices. The playbook has helped foster communication lines between recruiters and hiring managers so that recruiters can understand the skills each position requires as well as the strategy behind filling these roles. We are also partnering with our HR information systems team to streamline, optimize, and scale processes and tools as circumstances change.

Who would you like to partner with at the Lab to bring this vision to life?

Good collaboration within HR and with key partners like hiring managers is essential to identifying and hiring the best talent possible. Recruiters often find themselves at the center of a process that includes multiple stakeholders such as the candidates, hiring managers, and interview panels.

Coordinating the hiring process requires regular communication to ensure everyone is on the same page. Many HR teams are working in collaboration with stakeholders to help streamline communication and improve workflows which includes evaluating the tools we use and how we can make business processes more seamless.

Who from the past, present, or future would you like to collaborate with? And on what?

I attended the virtual UC System Wide Human Resources Institute this year and had the opportunity to attend a talk hosted by Melissa Thomas-Hunt, Airbnb’s Head of Global Diversity and Belonging. I would love the opportunity to pick her brain and get a deeper understanding of how to further embed conversations about diversity, inclusion, and belonging throughout our organization. I believe it is important for all employees to feel seen, valued, and supported.