Sirena Arnaout - Nominee for Rising Star Award - 2022 Campus Recruiting Choice Awards

Sirena Arnaout is a University Recruiting Team Lead at Zurich North America. In their role at Zurich, Sirena is responsible for hiring interns and recent grads, but more importantly, elevating the candidate experience with transparency, building trust and supporting diversity efforts beyond the interview process. Prior to their role at Zurich, Sirena held an HR Specialist role and took on a recruiting role at Sears Holdings, where she discovered a passion for DIEB efforts and in the last 7 years has supported transitioning veterans advance their skills in the interview process, resume support and job search -- a skill that translated to students' needs, thus leading to the University Recruiting opportunity.

Career Highlight

Sirena took on this role to make a difference in the candidate experience. One memorable highlight was when a female with an impressive resume applied to a Risk Engineering role, and Sirena was looking forward to speaking with the candidate based on their background. During the call, Sirena could sense the candidate was nervous from how her voice was shaking. Sirena stopped the interview and talked her through her nerves for ten minutes before resuming. After that, the candidate had a fantastic second-round interview. The hiring manager's feedback was that it was nice to not hear the same answers regurgitated and to be able to connect. At the end of the process and following her interactions with Sirena, the candidate received multiple offers. Although she ultimately did not choose the offer from Zurich, she did land her dream job, and thanked Sirena for her support which made such a difference in her job search and overall candidate experience.