Being Heard Is Part of Retention: Maisha Gray-Diggs on Sourcing and Keeping Talent Today
by Jomayra Herrera
For our latest People Matters interview, we chatted with Maisha Gray-Diggs, VP of Global Talent Acquisition, Inclusion, and Experience at Eventbrite. Before Eventbrite, she was a talent acquisition leader at Twitter and Microsoft, and started her career as a PhD engineer at Procter & Gamble.
In this interview, Maisha discusses how the talent market is still a candidate’s market, what types of technology solutions her team is looking for, and what it takes to retain top talent.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Can you share a bit about your journey into recruiting and talent acquisition?
Most folks know I’m an engineer turned HR professional. And I always tell folks I’m fake HR because I spent so much time trained as an engineer. I have a BS from MIT and a PhD from Northwestern in Material Sciences and Engineering.
As I think about it, I’ve always done recruiting even if I didn’t know it at the time. In high school, for example, I did tours for my predominantly white high school. I always had underrepresented students shadowing me and my job was to convince them that they could come to our high school and feel safe. So when I think about when my recruiting career started, it was probably in trying to increase the representation at my high school.
But really I was trying to get more faces that looked like me in that space. And so that is the thread that defines me as a talent acquisition professional. It’s really about creating equity and access to different spaces.
