handsome Welcomes Talent Management Leader Stephanie Maillet as Head of People

Jul. 13, 2021

Underscoring its commitment to a strong, values-driven company culture, branding and experience design agency handsome has welcomed talent management leader Stephanie Maillet as its new Head of People.

Boasting a varied background in agency and creative resource management as well as people and talent management, Maillet was initially approached for recommendations regarding the role, but quickly realized she was the right person for the job.

Maillet began her career at Arnold Worldwide as the assistant to the Executive Creative Director of Volkswagen. Soon, she found herself to be the confidant and advocate for many of the creatives at the agency, eventually becoming the Creative Manager.

This experience, Maillet says:

“Essentially kicked off my approach to managing and engaging creative people to do their best work in a challenging but nurturing environment.”

 

She moved on to become the global resource manager at EPAM Continuum in Boston, where she focused on forming internal workshops touching on everything from feedback to presentation skills to unconscious bias.

Maillet is also a certified CTI professional coach and draws a tremendous sense of pride from putting together a team and helping others learn valuable skills. She plans to apply those experiences to handsome, where her responsibilities include recruiting and onboarding, team allocation, learning, development and culture.

Entrepreneurial by nature, Maillet prefers pushing the boundaries and providing something new and unexpected in each of her roles, and she found handsome’s progressive nature exciting.

She added:

“handsome is a future-focused agency, so we’re currently re-working our whole model to even better support our team. We already have some benefits and perks in place that can support a distributed team, so there’s a lot to build upon and elevate. handsome is already obsessed with humans, so it’s essential that we amplify inclusion and belonging within remote culture. This requires us to be curious about each other and create space for people to tell stories about themselves, their interests, their work, their passions.”

 

As she takes on her new role, Maillet has identified some key areas that she hopes to tackle first, including building a more diverse talent pool, creating training and development programs for all levels of the organization, and establishing an inclusive, communicative environment for a rapidly expanding distributed team.

Overall, Maillet hopes to bring the magic that handsome provides its clients to the employees themselves.

She concluded:

“This means digging deeply into what motivates people and helps them grow and develop in an organic way on client work and in their craft.”

 

handsome CCO Jennifer Allen furthered:

“First and foremost, Stephanie is a great human being. She is a natural innovator, relentless problem solver and someone who truly loves helping people find their potential — often in ingenious ways. She’s also a seasoned vet in people management within multiple industries and a devoted proponent of creating a diverse team. Diversity and inclusion is critical to handsome, so we wanted to have someone fully dedicated to our efforts who would be responsible for the full experience of every team member from their recruitment through their ongoing learning and professional development. As part of this end-to-end experience, Stephanie is leading the evolution of our culture — especially helping define what brings us together in a distributed environment and how we can elevate our collaboration and share our ambitions.”