Word finds passion with Vaco, Women’s Alliance
Memphis Standout profile for The Memphis Daily News
May 17, 2013
In her six years as a CPA, Ginna Word has seen the industry from both sides of a spreadsheet, as an auditor for Deloitte & Touche, and as a corporate, in-house accountant for The ServiceMaster Co.
The disparate views, she said, have given her a distinct advantage in her current position as recruiter for the Memphis office of Vaco, an upper-level placement and consulting firm.
The Clarksdale, Miss., native and University of Mississippi graduate came to Memphis after receiving a master’s in accounting from Ole Miss to work for Deloitte & Touche, where she’d interned during college.
“I tell people all the time that, graduating from accounting, there is no better way to start a career; you get exposure to so many things,” she said of her tenure at Deloitte & Touche. “What other job can you say that within a year you can be sitting down in the office of a CFO of a public company interviewing them and asking them about their processes and talking with them about their financial statements?”
Word worked at Deloitte & Touche for four years before leaving for ServiceMaster, where she spent a year. When an opening became available at Vaco, she jumped, and it was there that she said she had an epiphany.
“I realized after six years in accounting that, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy it – and I learned a lot from it and I wouldn’t trade the experience I had – but I just didn’t love it,” she said. “I wanted that feeling of really having a passion for what I do every day.”
That passion was found at Vaco where, at first, she was “scared to death,” she said, working in the people business to “match very talented people with great companies.”
There has been a shift in the past few years in the recruitment and staffing game. First, as people were laid off in the recession and frantic for work, and now, as things have calmed and evened out, more people are beginning to look around, not for just anything that might come along, but for a career advancement or change … (read more)