Written by The Talent Collective
Despite significant advancements by women in the tech industry, one trend remains: the upper echelons of recruiting technology are still predominantly male. Yet, women like Jayne Kettles and Diane Smith continue to trailblaze, breaking barriers and proving that women can reshape this landscape. They have been revolutionizing the industry for the last two decades, demonstrating that women not only belong at the top but excel there.
Kettles, with her extensive background in software engineering and product development, and Smith, a recruiter herself for nine years, crossed paths and immediately bonded over their shared frustrations with recruiting technology. Together, they started VirtualEdge, which became a world-leading provider of recruiting software and was successfully acquired by ADP in 2006.
A few years later, they saw a need to replace the industry’s antiquated, siloed recruiting solutions with one platform enabling the full lifecycle of global talent acquisition and started GR8 People. The company has racked up accolade after accolade, from both Kettles and Smith making the list of TAtech’s 100 Most Influential Talent Acquisition Thought Leaders to GR8 People being named a high performer for Enterprise Candidate Relationship Management software on G2, the world’s largest and most trusted software marketplace. However, to uncover the reason behind their success, we have to go further back and look at where it all started for these women: their love of sports.
It’s been said that a business is like a team: your employees are the players, and your leaders have to be excellent coaches. If that’s the case, Kettles and Smith are bringing the metaphor to life. Kettles was an academic Scholar Athlete at Ohio State, where she played for the women’s field hockey program, earning All-Big Ten honors. Smith was a 4-year All-American Field Hockey player, a two-time Broderick Cup nominee, and a Women’s Olympic Field Hockey Team member. She followed up her time on the field as a coach of Division I Women’s Basketball Programs at Princeton and Towson Universities. So, you cross Kettle’s innovative mind with Smith’s coaching experience, and it’s a win-win that’s fully on display in how they run their company, GR8 People, and what they offer the recruiting community.
Taking care of their team physically and mentally is a cornerstone for Kettles and Smith. GR8 People takes steps to make sure that their people are empowered to do their jobs to the best of their ability with the equipment and training they need, offering the option to take an unplanned day off (something they refer to as a “mulligan”), and the introduction of a 4-day work week. Smith has said that the most important thing to them, and something other companies should pick up on, is remembering that they have to look at individuals as individuals — moms, dads, caretakers, and people just trying to put the “life” in “work-life balance.” And the better Kettles and Smith can recognize and offer that to them, the better their work will be.
Kettles and Smith also always have their eyes on the prize, as they always keep their “Why” close at hand and maintain an unwavering commitment to why they do what they do. It all comes back to what drove them together: giving talent acquisition professionals a seamless platform to manage end-to-end hiring needs. Additionally, as women in the field, they encourage other women to try to make their mark. The two offer support and access to resources for women entrepreneurs like Ellevate—the largest community of women at work—and the Female Entrepreneur Association to determine how best to grow their businesses. This kind of firm commitment allows them to see the bigger picture and ask with every choice, “Is this serving our overall vision?”
This industry comes with plenty of upsets, something Smith is no stranger to. She tried out for the Women’s Olympic Field Hockey Team as an athlete. She made it through all of the training and was one of the final twenty players. After hours of agony, they brought her and a few others into a room, and she immediately knew she hadn’t made the team. Being a competitive person, she was devastated, but giving up wasn’t an option. She returned the following year and crushed it, making the US Team. To see how these same principles apply to business creation and upkeep is a pretty easy line to draw — but Smith said it in her interview with TA Tech’s Peter Weddle better than we ever could: “Your beginning is not your end.”
It’s these kinds of attributes that allow for good tech to flourish, and it shines when you look at something like GR8 People’s Everyone Platform. It uses multi-channel sourcing and AI to find top candidates quickly, uses a CRM to nurture your future hires, builds a custom career site to attract the best people for the job, and fast-track hiring with an ATS, taking the hiring process from zero to sixty, all while keeping it seamless. The best part? It’s right there in the name; it’s for everyone. Multiple sectors have used the platform to hire for multiple positions — part-time, full-time, hourly, and executive positions in retail, healthcare, tech, finance, and more. Their Everyone Platform helped hire one-third of the World Wide Clinical Trials’ workforce in 2021, and they’ve reduced the average fill time for companies like Teradata by 25 percent. But at the end of the day, these great strides don’t happen without great leaders, and it’s safe to say that Kettles and Smith are in that category. As they continue to push the boundaries of what they and GR8 People can offer the recruiting community, coaching their staff to adapt as the world changes, we can only say one thing: consider us fans.