SAMARRA ABUHOURAN

Equativ — $200M Independent AdTech Platform

• Lead executive and go-to-market recruitment across the Americas, hiring for CRO, VP, Sales, Product, Technical, and operational teams while managing sensitive internal mobility and succession conversations with confidentiality and strategic oversight.
• Built and launched Equativ’s first Talent Acquisition training program, delivering interview training, competency alignment, and unconscious bias modules to all hiring managers.
• Designed and optimized end-to-end recruitment processes, improving hiring manager alignment, reducing time-to-hire, and increasing candidate experience satisfaction across Sales, Technical, and Product organizations.
• Partnered closely with the CFO, CHRO, and EVP People & Culture on headcount planning, job leveling, compensation alignment, and re-budgeting during mergers and global organizational changes.
• Strengthened TA + HRBP collaboration, creating efficiencies across onboarding, internal transfers, and performance-related hiring needs.
• Mentored and upskilled an inherited direct reports, elevating the team into a more senior-level scope by coaching on ownership, stakeholder management, and process leadership.
• Cross-functional trainings in recruitment excellence, interview calibration, and equitable hiring practices.

Co-led major People & Culture initiatives, including:

• Full Management Career Leveling Framework (Team Lead → EVP) aligned to leadership competencies.
• Benefits analysis & recommendations for U.S. workforce (market benchmarking, PTO updates, wellness perk review).
• Drove DEIB strategy—spearheaded the DEIB Committee relaunch, created annual programming (Women’s Month, Pride, Mental Health, Neurodiversity), and partnered with leadership to integrate DEIB into hiring and performance conversations.

• Collaborated with tech startups to refine hiring strategies for attracting key talent.
• Partnered with senior leadership to establish HR policies supporting strategic business growth.
• Developed people strategies to assess and enhance organizational effectiveness and employee retention.
• Educated leaders on compensation practices, performance feedback, and career transitions.

• Oversaw global recruiting roadmap, aligning talent acquisition strategies with organizational goals.
• Set measurable objectives and monitored recruitment metrics to ensure strategic alignment.
• Collaborated with global leadership to identify hiring needs and manage talent gaps.
• Implemented succession planning and talent review processes to promote long-term growth.
• Standardized global recruiting practices, enhancing job descriptions and evaluation methods for consistency.
• Developed inclusive recruitment strategies to increase workforce diversity and provided training on best practices.
• Directed U.S. recruitment activities while leading executive level recruitment in India, Ethiopia, and Kenya.
• Conducted compensation benchmarking and partnered with finance to maintain equitable salary structures.
• Conducted training sessions for hiring managers on best practices in recruitment.
• Streamlined onboarding processes to improve candidate experience and retention.
• Assisted HR team members in resolving complex issues related to employee relations matters arising from global recruitment activities.

(Laid off due to restructuring)

$41M Cloud-based (SaaS/PaaS) workforce management platform designed to support hourly, gig, and temporary labor

• Executive leader and business partner focused on developing people and talent strategies to drive organizational effectiveness and transformational change, building the entire talent and HR function from the ground up to support 2 offices and global hiring throughout the US, Canada, South America, Europe, and South Africa.
• Directed a team of talent acquisition and operations professionals supporting the implementation strategy to grow employee organization while guiding top leadership on strategies for growth and consulting on sensitive talent management and acquisition priorities.
• Led all Workplace People functions, including Talent Management Strategies, ATS program management and implementation, and staffing/recruitment.
• Managed various people strategy functions including, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Talent Metrics, People Operations, Culture & Community, including leading the transformation of recruiting, performance management, onboarding, and other processes, policies and training for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
• Facilitated people and talent development, spearheading the organizational design and overseeing change management processes to ensure teams aligned optimally for efficiency, results, communication, and innovation.
• Spearheaded the deployment and enhancement of technology and software systems, including Greenhouse (ATS) and Lattice (LMS) systems.
• Built the guiding principles while reviewing the span of control/ layers and developed various productivity metrics (including duplication of roles, 1:1 reporting relationship, and same-level reporting).
• Benchmarked the compensation for each talent group to map the Compensation range and set up salary ranges and a tax-friendly, compliant salary structure.
• Established new end-to-end staffing processes, including sourcing strategy, selection criteria and testing, offer process, and onboarding process.
• Improved the selection skills of hiring managers by developing and delivering core interviewing skills workshops to all hiring managers.
• Established SLAs and consolidated the interview process to expedite the hiring process.
• Provided coaching to leaders on the hiring process to ensure a great candidate experience and successful hires and established a transparent reporting and communication process to keep leaders informed of candidate feedback.
• Guided team on best practices in identifying, selecting and hiring key talent and worked with the team to deliver compelling content on various social media platforms to increase candidate interest.

$1.2B Advertising technology company providing a platform enabling scalability for native, branded content and OTT

• Managed the talent management and acquisition strategy, securing 170+ employees, including 17 leaders across the globe, for a fast-paced tech start-up in support of the aggressive growth strategy of the company going from $10.2M in 2021 to $50M in 2022 after the $1.4B acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2021.
• Designed the foundation of all talent acquisition processes, including recruiting and hiring process, onboarding, data reporting and analysis, quality of hire, compensation analysis, and system/software implementations in support of 8 Offices in the US, Canada, India, Europe, UK, South America, Singapore, and Australia.
• Led a team of 5 direct (Director, Talent - Sales, Director, Talent - Tech, Lead TA, Operations and Strategy, 2 TA Coordinator Ops, and 1 Sr. TA/HR Partner) and 15 indirect team members through the implementation of the global recruiting process and strategy, and on-going development of tools and systems for the recruitment function.
• Coached people managers, executive leadership, and global centers of excellence on employee relations, engagement, and retention matters.
• Accountable for the technology (systems and software) budget, constantly researching software to ensure the team had the best programs to enhance and transform the startup environment into a performance-driven and enhanced employee experience process.
• Reworked our entire interview process by creating interview playbooks, sourcing strategies and tooling to increase efficiency.
• Partnered with the executive team to define hiring goals aligned with their business objectives and drive recruiting efforts.
• Aligned People Operations with strategic plans, including growing the global workforce and providing professional HR support while collaborating with HR to ensure onboarding dates and information was updated for all new hires.
• Implemented and trained department leaders on the applicant tracking system and configured the interview training process in tandem with the HR team.
• Drove DE&I recruitment strategies resulting in an overall 20% increase in tech diverse hiring and a 33% increase across the organization.

• Built, led, and managed a team of 3 Talent Acquisition Partners dedicated to filling open roles across the Engineering, Product & Design, Sales, and Operations departments.
• Scaled the recruiting function within a hyper-growth mode, training hiring teams on prospecting, onboarding, and stakeholder management.
• Created weekly reports on hiring goals, hiring activity, and industry trends during weekly alignment meetings with Hiring Managers.
• Partnered with People Operations and Talent Development to improve learning content, design, frameworks, and processes.
• Provided web-based career development resources for managers and employees supporting internal mobility program.
• Directed the preparation and distribution of written and verbal information to inform employees of benefits, compensation and policies.
• Crafted hiring and interview processes from scratch with Hiring Managers and interviewing teams and constructed processes for onboarding new clients, including training materials, best practices and key success metrics.

• Partnered with hiring managers to develop sourcing strategies for open positions across the engineering and product management functions, securing 78 new hire employees across the US, Canada, and the UK.
• Worked and supported hiring managers by understanding their recruitment needs, developed and implemented sourcing strategies to identify the best candidates, and acted as the primary point of contact for incoming candidates during all phases of the recruitment process.
• Supported technical teams to facilitate all logistics of candidate interviewing, including phone screens, scheduling on-site and video interviews.
• Created and implemented recruiting strategies to source and engage both active and passive candidates through LinkedIn Recruiter, job boards, Boolean searches, social media (Facebook), networking, user groups, and employee referrals.
• Initiated social networking and email campaigns as new sourcing channel strategies generating interest in the organization's vacancies while maintaining the company's talent pool for various roles.
• Removed the organization's dependency on agency supplementation in 2018 and 2019 and reduced spending by over 70% saving the organization nearly $1M on agency fees.
• Created and led TripleLift's global referral program, increasing our current internal referral capacity by 28%.
• Led a DE&I recruitment strategy increasing our diverse workforce of 51% women employees at a company level and 27% representation of under-represented groups.

• $5.2B recruiting company connecting employers with skilled IT technology and engineering professionals