Nahal Yousefian

Two paths diverged in a career, and Nahal took the one less traveled by. Along with a few extra detours, adventures, and misadventures. If it sounds haphazard, it’s not; it’s the intentionality of always looking to opportunity and asking ‘how can I help?’. It’s finding yourself, a refugee from Iran, in a new country and building a new life. It’s being an early childhood educator, looking at how the education system impacts your students, and wanting better. It’s googling HR on the way to an interview as an HR assistant because you think there’s a path forward and you’re going for it. It’s starting out as an HR analyst at startups like Fresh & Easy and becoming so invested as the company grows you end up heading employee relations and HR operations. It’s about remembering at one point you were managing birthday cakes for office parties before you were CHRO for a national retail chain like MEC.

It’s about realizing when you have an important sounding job title that even you don’t understand at a multi-national company like Tesco, you can still run with it to drive tangible strategic change, or that you can pick up your life and apply your wealth of accumulated learning to a non-profit like E4E in New York. It’s about knowing when to let go, and when to shamelessly steal as much as you can from Netflix’s culture memo, only to one day end up a VP of HR amongst their ranks. And most of all, it’s about remembering that the ‘V’ in ‘CV’ stands for vitae—life. And that’s what a work history is: not a mechanical record of perfunctory performances relegated to the past, but rather perpetually amassed learning careening forward like a snowball down a hill from a career lived and felt.