Stephen Parris

1. What is your educational background?
Stephen studied music composition at Cornish College of the Arts.

2. What is your professional background?
“I worked at Microsoft and as a private instructor for guitar, music composition, and base. I also worked as a performing musician. And I worked as an event coordinator for Town Hall in Seattle. I was a mover. I did a bunch of random jobs.”

3. What do you do in Human Resources?
“At Human Resources here, I am a recruiter...And basically, I bring people to ISB. I put out the ads and organize résumés. I will sit on interviews. And I offer resources for interviewing.”

4. Does HR play a different role in a non-profit research institute vs. corporate setting?
“As a recruiter, and meeting other recruiters over the three years or so, I noticed that bigger corporations have bigger budgets for recruiting than I do.” One thing Stephen also mentioned was the difference between direct vs. indirect recruiting. Bigger corporations do mostly direct recruiting. This is where recruiters get in touch with all of their contacts and look at employees that work for similar companies. “We have pretty popular scientists and faculty here, so it helps with recruiting. It makes my job really easy.”

5. What is the most interesting aspect of your job?
Stephen thinks that the most interesting aspect of his job is being associated with scientists. He feels that it’s very interesting what the work researchers are doing and the science that they are making.

6. How does being a non-scientist in a scientific background, affect your work here?
“There are certain challenges in communication. But you do your best to work it out. In general it doesn’t faze me too much. I like science, I grew up in science…It’s just not something I’ve ever focused on.”

7. What is the most challenging aspect of your job?
“Maybe just keeping everything organized and on track…That’s probably the trickiest thing when it gets busy… The hardest thing for me to adjust to is that it’s not consistent. When September and October comes around, it’s like hire, hire, hire like crazy, then nothing for like a month.”

8. If you could go back in time, would you have done anything differently?
“I would have started college sooner. Besides that, I am happy with the choices I made.”

9. What are the skill sets a person needs in order to work in HR?
“They need to be relatively personable, but need to keep a distance. Because in HR, you cannot be buddy-buddy with people, they start to confide in you about things that…throw the HR red flag.”