Getting to know what drives my leadership team and marshaling this knowledge towards meeting our collective team goals is challenging, yet, also, the most rewarding part of my job. Some people are motivated by aggressive targets, others by working on different projects, others by private and/or public recognition. The hardest part of my role is managing people and “meeting them where they are”-knowing what motivates each team member and tapping into their differences in a nuanced and respectful way. For example, we have hired policy experts and security, as well as media and entertainment professionals, in areas that the team had never recruited for before.

While that is challenging, we have a team of recruiters who are highly resourceful and able to identify that specialized talent through various tools at their disposal and their own ingenuity. Roles can be niche and, occasionally, we are recruiting for a profile or skill set for the first time. We have aggressive hiring targets at Facebook. What is the hardest part about your job when it comes to specifically hiring non-tech talent?

I joined the company in San Francisco and have advanced my career since that time. The role, head of business recruiting, aligned in a pre-destined way with my fintech and investment banking background. Facebook’s apps, specifically WhatsApp, helped connect my family and friends who are spread out around the world. Facebook is a company I had been following for some time as its mission to build community and bring the world closer together resonated deeply with me. I knew I wanted the next chapter in my career to be in the tech field and preferably in the Bay Area, so when an executive recruiter at Facebook reached out to me near the end of my gap year, I was very happy to take the call. What led you to your job at Facebook?Īfter six years at Bloomberg, I took a year off to travel the world and get more involved with two nonprofits in Africa (African Leadership Network and Ongoza). I spent 15 years in investment banking navigating opportunities across HR before taking on the head of recruiting role at Bloomberg, which gave me the opportunity to be involved in the fintech industry. I got the role and started as an analyst in university recruiting, and eventually moved to diversity recruiting. I saw a newspaper ad in the Times for a recruiting analyst position at Goldman Sachs and, having always been interested in the financial services industry, decided to apply. While in school, I was hired as an HR intern at The New York Times, which sparked my interest in talent management. I was born and raised in Kenya and, after two years of working as a travel consultant in Nairobi, I moved to New York City in 1996 for business school. How did you end up working in recruiting? Here, Wamai-who previously worked in recruiting at Bloomberg, Merrill Lynch, and Credit Suisse, always with a focus on increasing diversity-shares why she thinks resumes are more important than cover letters, how applicants can stand out from the crowd, and what qualities are necessary to succeed at Facebook from a non-tech perspective. Meta LEARN MORE And, with Facebook’s “Diversity First” approach to all recruiting efforts, Liz is at the forefront of building out the entire company’s hiring strategy-for both tech and non-tech talent alike. As the Vice President overseeing diversity recruiting for all of Facebook, as well as recruiting specifically across the company’s business organization, Liz is responsible for hiring talent across a dozen departments, including marketing, sales, policy, recruiting and sourcing, accounting, and media-all of which are just as important to the company as its technical teams. Tech companies are chock-full of engineers and data scientists, but Facebook’s Liz Wamai will be the first to tell you there are plenty of opportunities for non-coders to have long, successful careers in the technology industry.

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