AVA KUHLEN

Envisioned, built and led Indeed's company-wide strategy to break down bias and barriers in hiring.

• Strategic Vision: Designed and led Indeed's equitable hiring vision, strategy and metrics. Launched first-ever company-wide KR and a shared goal with parent company Recruit to help 30M job seekers facing barriers get jobs by 2030.
• Problem and User Research: Led market & user research, identifying needs, pain-points and challenges of a newly defined user segment: job seekers facing barriers. Built and directly managed a global team of 4 researchers and oversaw dotted-line research projects across 8 employer industry verticals.
• Effective Influence: Secured commitments for product development that aligned with Indeed’s equitable hiring vision. Delivered insights across 4 main business units and >20 product teams and worked with data scientists to analyze results. Grew measurable hires of job seekers facing barriers from 0 to +4M.
• Special Initiatives: Oversaw the design and cross-functional launch of a portfolio of strategic initiatives including collecting job seeker demographic data. Launched 0 to 1 demographic data collection at Indeed, resulting in 100% of users in the US now having the opportunity to provide their data to Indeed.
• Go-to-market: Served as lead advocate and subject matter expert for job seekers facing barriers and promoted equitable hiring to our clients. Supported go-to-market activities across global sales enablement, marketing, brand, legal and customer support. Grew jobs on Indeed willing to hire job seekers with a criminal record by 30%.
• People Leadership: Grew the larger social impact team to 40 professionals globally.

Oversaw western region corporate consulting practice to connect employee expertise to build nonprofit capacity

• Designed a new social innovation program to address food insecurity and build future-of-work competencies through skills-based volunteering.
• Led market strategy, executive oversight and team management overseeing service delivery for clients such as Adobe, Autodesk, Blue Shield, Genentech, HPE and Microsoft resulting in a 90% renewal rate for the region.

• Managed a portfolio of 10-15 individual, corporate and foundation clients delivering over $1M in annual grantmaking. Clients included Google and Zynga.
• Analyzed donor behavior and giving trends and made product and service recommendations to increase client engagement and retention. Maintained 75% client renewal rates.
• Drove membership orientation, onboarding and engagement strategy for a private foundation supporting high-net worth individuals’ charitable giving. Grew YoY membership by 20% for 3 consecutive years.