Carrie Corbin is a distinguished HR and Talent Acquisition leader who is widely known for her expertise in developing effective and high-performance talent acquisition programs, strategies, and teams in global Fortune businesses relating to employer branding, recruitment marketing, and technology.
Carrie co-founded Hope Leigh Marketing Group and Corbin Global Consultants to capitalize on her years of expertise leading and developing HR departments for small to mid-sized businesses as well as strategic centers of excellence for larger Fortune 100 firms. She has overseen the Talent Attraction and Employer Brand teams for organizations such as Dell, American Airlines, and AT&T.
Carrie was a practitioner for over 20 years before launching HLMG, with the last 15 spent in Fortune 100 businesses. She has also taught adjunct and professional development courses in business management and human resources for numerous years and is a sought-after speaker and subject matter expert in the human capital arena.
Her approach has always been to drive strategy, innovation, execution, and optimization at a large scale. She has frequently been labeled as someone who “thinks differently” by adopting a genuine problem-solving approach, which naturally spurred creativity and early success (and turbulence, at times). Her sector is fairly specialized, with her teams in charge of promoting HR and the firm as an employer. And because she was an early adopter and pioneer in this domain, there were few options for her to advance without leaving this new field she loved. Instead, she leveraged her experience to make strategic moves as opportunities arose at key brands like American Airlines and, most recently, Dell Technologies.
Further, Carrie has always been a proponent of having great partners to assist her teams, particularly through the smart use of advertising / recruitment marketing firms. However, for many in HR and recruitment who have never worked in marketing or as marketers, this is still an alien idea, which was a primary driver in her making a move away from a practitioner to help other corporate teams.
Hope Leigh Marketing Group
At its heart, Hope Leigh Marketing Group is a recruiting advertising firm. However, for the unfamiliar, HLMG is sometimes mistaken for staffing agencies even though HLMG does not actually recruit. HLMG develops hiring advertising strategies to assist companies in telling the right story to represent their employer brand identity to job seekers and employees. Therefore, it is similar to any other advertising firm in that regard-simply with a concentration on recruitment and HR.
Partnership of Proficiency
Carrie adds that as managing partner and co-founder, she has a shared responsibility to ensure the firm’s success. Many pieces of entrepreneurial advice underestimate the importance of partnerships, but the best thing she and her partner did in establishing this firm was to ensure they had a strong relationship with complementary expertise.
She asserts, “The two of us together have been very purposeful in how we set this company up in a few ways. One, we take the responsibility of being a very visible, women owned company very seriously and want to ensure that diversity isn’t something we just consult on, but that we model in how we set-up and manage this business.”
Carrie has also established several teams from the ground up and has previously worked in start-ups and small enterprises. So, from the beginning, the pair have kept in mind the adage, “If you don’t have time to do it well the first time, when will you have time to do it again?” “We’ve developed the infrastructure to guarantee we can expand quickly and aren’t in a situation where we have to turn away business,” she says. In less than two years, Carrie has built a team of eight to service their clients, and the team is continuing to expand as the business scales..
A True Team Player
“Inclusive, supportive, and empathetic leadership builds great teams,” says Carrie. Good leaders must be self-aware, which begins with treating people how they want to be treated, not how you want to be treated (# PlatinumRule). Carrie believes that one thing most people have in common is the need to be treated with decency and respect, as well as the need to be heard and understood. She says, “My opinion is this is how we should treat everyone, but sadly, that’s just not the case, particularly in many work environments and with supervisor dynamics.”
Carrie has always been a great believer in making sure her people understand the “why” behind the “what,” as this is the simplest method to build an ownership attitude. And she offers people permission to fail quickly, abandons the blame culture in favor of accountability and learning, and assures an open platform for conversation (that goes beyond a generic open door policy statement). She genuinely cares about the individuals she hires, and she makes it a point to show that in the way the team operates. She states, “The result is that I still maintain relationships with a majority of my former employees because we rarely had issues with bad team dynamics and everyone was invested in all of us being successful.”
Balancing Professional & Personal Life
Carrie has always been purposeful about balancing her personal and professional lives. But, she waited until her daughter was in her twenties before taking the risk associated with starting her own business. She had been a single mother the majority of her life, and focused on pursuing degrees and certifications and forging a solid career path. This enabled her to solve for the right now and build a solid foundation for a career to ensure she could provide for her daughter, as well as to plan for the long-term by building the foundation of a solid network, expertise and credibility when she finally did go out on her own. Based on the early success of HLMG, her strategy appears to have paid off.
Overcoming Stereotypes
According to Carrie, women are frequently forced to juggle competing expectations, prejudices, and out-of-date societal conventions. While frustrating, she feels that acknowledgement and awareness is necessary in order to effectively and purposefully manage your own journey.
She sees far too many women who choose to ignore such facts in the hope that they will change, or who do the reverse and attempt to mow down everyone who is an impediment, but she feels neither is really helpful in the long term. Carrie opines, “We can be aware of and acknowledge bias without giving power to bias. If we aren’t aware, ignore, or refuse to acknowledge, then we never give ourselves a fighting chance to be purposeful in overcoming those obstacles.” She further adds, “Reflection is powerful; it’s how we learn, it’s how we gain the knowledge to be that much more intentional in our path.”
Ensuring Client Success
HLMG has yet to conduct any paid promotion for the company, aside from the first PR blitz to promote the launch of HLMG. The company is rapidly hiring and increasing its staff to meet the demands of an equally fast rising customer base.
Carrie attributes much of her success to also having an excellent business partner who brings years of agency experience, as well as a very good portfolio and client list throughout the years, and the two of them have developed a terrific team, producing great things for great customers.
Carrie states, “We’ve also realized we don’t have to take on every prospective client. We want to ensure we’re setting both ourselves and any clients we work with, up for success, and if we don’t have the bandwidth or resources to appropriately support an ask, we’re transparent about that as well.”
Website: www.hopeleighmarketing.com / www.carriecorbin.com
