Laura Fields joined Charter Communications
in 2018 with formal training in I/O psychology. In her
role as Senior Director of Talent
Acquisition, Laura and her team support all of the hiring
for a company with more than 93,000 employees. Laura’s
passion for and impact on candidate selection and assessment
earned her the honor of being named a 2022
Aspiring HR Leader. This article charts her systematic
approach to streamlining the talent acquisition process
and driving results.
In
four short years, Laura has successfully transformed
Charter’s approach to hiring. Her strategy has
focused on leveraging technology to optimize candidate
assessments, reduce unconscious bias in the recruiting
process and streamline project management.
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Questions for Laura Fields
In
addition to sharing insight into her work
life, we asked Laura to get a bit personal.
What’s
your favorite quote? “It’s
another cold night on the side of Everest.”
I heard this statement in a podcast. The
guest explained that her dissertation advisor
told her this when she was in the midst
of her research. Essentially, it’s
saying that what you are doing is really
hard and not everyone is able to do it.
So yeah, it’s hard – but it
should be. I have this posted
in my office so I can remind myself that
when things are challenging, it’s
because I wanted to do something that IS
challenging, so don’t get upset about
it being hard.
What is your
guilty pleasure?
Reality TV. I love watching human
behavior.
What do you
do to relieve stress or self-care?
I walk my dogs (see picture below), Nikki
and Cooper. Nikki is named for Nikki
Sixx (Mötley Crüe) and Cooper
is named for Ray Cooper (touring musician
who has done a lot of tours with Elton John).
A neighborhood walk to wind down for the
day and an easy hike in nature really helps
me decompress.
What’s
the best advice you’ve ever received?
My Uncle Mark, who I lost to ALS, once gave
me advice when I had to make a tough decision.
He said, “Life is long, make the decision
you can live with for a long time.”
This has always led me to consider multiple
perspectives and the long-term implications
of big decisions.
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Upon joining the company, Laura’s
initial focus was to develop a mobile optimized pre-employment
assessment to improve the candidate experience given
that
more than half of Charter’s’ job seekers
apply on a mobile device. During this process, Laura
implemented 10 tailored assessments, improving the completion
rate by nearly a third.
In 2019, Laura and her team took on the development of a companywide interview program, including the creation of a Leadership Competency Model, which was done in partnership with Charter’s Organizational Effectiveness team. As part of this process, Laura worked with a third-party vendor to write digestible and easy to use interview guides to provide recruiters and hiring managers with a more consistent way to evaluate talent without bias. In fact, Laura shared this work with the C2HR community in a webinar titled “Mitigating Bias in the Recruiting Process.” View the Webinar
In 2020, Laura’s responsibilities were further expanded to include Talent Acquisition Operations. In this role, Laura developed a deeper understanding of Charter’s recruiting tools and business unit support model. Laura enhanced Charter’s talent acquisition tools by completing an RFP for a CRM system and implementing the Asana Project Management tool for the Talent Attraction & Acquisition team. She also migrated all of the company’s Talent Acquisition Dashboards from Excel to the Visier Recruiting Module. Through these efforts, Laura improved Charter’s Service Delivery model to nearly 500 recruiters who have access to 10 different recruiting tools.
Laura optimized Charter’s Video Interview Relationship with Modern Hire, allowing the company to successfully operate all recruiting processes in a virtual manner, including on-demand and live video, interview scheduling and text-based assessments. This strategy was of critical importance as it allowed hiring to continue during the pandemic.
Most recently, Laura worked with Modern Hire to develop a Fit Finder assessment that allows applicants to complete a 10-minute online recruitment survey about their skills and interests. Spectrum Fit Finder caters to career changers and job seekers who are new to the workforce by matching them with local opportunities, including positions in retail sales, customer service and technical operations, that may be a good fit based on their skills, preferences and overall career objectives. In just over a year, Charter reported that the tool has positively impacted its application rate, including influencing women to apply at a higher rate for typically male roles, such as field technicians and direct sales representative.
According to Jen Tracy,
Charter’s Vice President of Talent Attraction
and Acquisition, “Laura is an inspiration to those
around her and truly a master of her craft. When Laura
sees an opportunity to streamline, improve or optimize
something to improve the experience and meet our talent
acquisition needs she does it—and she does it
exceptionally well.”
