A little more information about Aja, our Principal Human Solutions Consultant and People Team Builder

How she got into HR:

“I owe my HR career largely to a Craigslist posting and a really bad phone interview! I was studying abroad in Madrid and needed to land a summer internship. I applied to everything HR related (I was majoring in IO Psych and knew that's what I wanted to do) and within a day had a phone screen scheduled with Razorfish. I had no idea what the company did and could barely hear the questions but somehow landed the job (mostly because the head of recruiting and I had gone to the same college). I started that summer and ended up staying for almost five years. It may be the most influential phone call of my life and I only heard half of it!”

Aja’s role at Gray Scalable:  

Aja specializes in building HR functions for our clients, which includes everything from strategy, program and policy development, and hands-on execution to building out people teams for our clients. As manager of our HR services team, Aja is responsible for continually developing and improving our client HR offerings . Personally, her focus is creating and delivering customized training programs, including: management training, interview skills, coaching and building high-performance teams.

Aja is both People Artist and People Scientist. Her organizational intuition is always reliably perceptive, yet she knows better than to act from gut instinct; she understands how to quantify and structure people challenges and how to develop solutions to fit the facts. She’s also the definition of “cool, calm, collected”, with an understated style of handling the biggest curveballs, always responding with a thoughtful, engaging ease. She’s a sought-after coach and mentor, both at our clients and internally at Gray Scalable.

Her favorite projects:

“One of my first, Betterment, I developed a manager training series that we completed over about 6 months so I was really able to see the positive impact on the managers in the organization.

[Also] Bark & Co., I helped an HR-less org make some incredible progress, I helped to make a key talent hire, implemented a career development roadmap and trained their managers on what it means to be a successful manager at Bark (the puppies didn't hurt either).

At Intersection, I helped to build out their awesome People team, with a few integral hires, it was so nice to see the impact of those hires and help set them up to do some really amazing work.”

What else is new?

Aja had her second daughter a few months ago - we love seeing their adventures on Instagram. She and her family also just made the move to the NJ suburbs. Aja recently returned from maternity leave with lots of ideas for new workshops, new clients, and building up our HR services team.