From the Community: Why this Nominee Stands Out

“Khalia O’Dea brings strong expertise and commitment to recruiting within the Emerging Careers and early talent spaces, consistently demonstrating thought leadership in balancing Yahoo’s intern hiring with the evolving needs of Gen Z candidates.

This season, Khalia has proactively managed and refined the Candidate Experience Ambassadors program, which connects current Yahoo employees with active technical intern candidates during the interview process. By facilitating authentic conversations between candidates and Yahoo employees from similar fields (but outside the immediate hiring team), she has enhanced the candidate journey—offering students a meaningful “buddy” experience and providing real-time insights into life at Yahoo while they await next steps. This initiative has led to a more engaging, well-supported, and consistent candidate experience.

Khalia has also driven improvements in refining the intern hiring process. With her previous background as a technical recruiter for experienced hiring, she quickly submitted recommendations on how our team can modernize based on updated best practices, and mentored another recruiter on our team to create consistency between them both on the full-cycle recruiting process. 

In addition, Khalia leads engagement on Yahoo’s Handshake platform. Within the Handshake feed, a new feature for the platform, she’s championed a monthly posting cadence to showcase Yahoo and meaningful content for students. This has supported providing visibility on where Yahoo is activating at universities and major conferences. Additionally, her sourcing efforts on Handshake have shown the highest open and engagement rates with students - likely due to her continuously playing with different communication strategies to see what resonates best with students. These efforts have dramatically improved our brand visibility with students in current relevant majors that we hire for, which translated over to a high volume of applicants. 

Khalia O’Dea has been instrumental in enhancing candidate experience, brand presence, and operational efficiency. She is someone who loves her craft, and is passionate about how we continue to show up thoughtfully and authentically with Gen Z talent. Her creative strategies and flawless execution has been deeply impactful for our team, her partnering managers, and the candidates.”