Over the last 20 years, Cristyn Girolami has been a key contributor in helping organizations to recruit, train, and retain top talent.
Her focus has been on overseeing people operations, upgrading talent and managing performance for optimal results.
Cristyn led the Human Resource function at online technology retailer Bluefly. As VP of HR she worked closely with Bluefly’s CEO, and management team regarding the overall people strategy for the business. Her focus was spent on recruiting, talent management, compensation & benefits, culture, and employee relations.
Prior to Bluefly, Cristyn held the role of Director of Human Resources for Victorinox Swiss Army overseeing Human Resources for several divisions including: Apparel, Retail, Merchandising, Cutlery, Wenger, and Canada operations.
She also led the HR function for luxury bath retailer Waterworks, which included the corporate office and 40 retail stores across the country. Cristyn has also worked for sports and entertainment organizations such as the NY Giants and Madison Square Garden.
Cristyn has an MA in Psychology and is a Certified Personal Trainer and Yoga Instructor.
More from Cristyn…
Cristyn knows that the job search process can be difficult, especially for underrepresented groups. When it comes to finding the right role, Cristyn says a bit of research can go a long way.
“For people that are in underrepresented groups, I always recommend that they do research. I helped someone recently on doing research and walked them through how to pull the research from a bunch of different places and then pull together an average. It was a bunch of different data, it’s not super cut and dry. You can’t just plug a job title in and say, ‘Okay, now I should be making 100 grand.’ It doesn’t really work like that.
There’s a lot of different things: how many years experience? What size of the company? Where are you located? I mean, that’s huge, right? New York, and LA are going to be different than Iowa. What’s really nice about this market now, where people are remote and a lot of companies are going remote, is I think some of that stuff’s gonna get chewed up a little bit because it doesn’t really matter which location you’re in. I think that’s sort of an antiquated way of looking at it like, well, you’re base there, so you should make less. I think there should be more equality across the board on that someone’s doing the job, they should get paid to do the job. So, I think that’s one I think doing the research is really key.
Then, I think talking to people who do the role out there and understanding what are some of those ranges. Every company is different. Every role is a little bit different sometimes in that company. Sometimes there’s a higher supply, you know, there’s a higher demand in a company for x experience. So I think the research is big. There’s a lot of articles on this stuff.
There’s a lot of articles on negotiating. I don’t really love the idea. When I say negotiating, I say it in a more of a collaborative sense. I don’t like the idea of having to go back and forth on salary with someone and having someone do that. It should be straightforward. It should be like, ‘What are you looking for in your next role?’ and someone says ‘X,’ and it’s like, ‘Great. X is in our range,’ or ‘You know what? X is a little bit higher than our range, but it doesn’t knock you out of the running for this.’
That’s one of the first conversations I have with people. I don’t want there to be some weird back and forth like, well, you asked for this, you know? Who needs that? That doesn’t feel collaborative, right off, right out of the gate. So, I think it’s about understanding what the person’s expectations are and making sure you have that dialogue upfront.”
