Meet Action Catalyst Host Stephanie Maas!

Please join us in welcoming the newest host of The Action Catalyst, Stephanie Maas! With over 2 decades of experience in the executive recruiting world, Stephanie believes that her purpose is to improve the lives of others by providing life-altering opportunities for her candidates and clients through talent acquisition. Stephanie is also the host of “The Talent Trade”, the official podcast of ThinkingAhead.

Learn even more about Stephanie in her interview on Episode 420 of The Action Catalyst.

About Stephanie:

With over 20 years of recruiting experience with ThinkingAhead Executive Search and over 400 candidate placements, Stephanie Maas sits at the peak of her career, and year after year, she is one of ThinkingAhead’s top producers.

As a student at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School in 1996 pursuing a BS in Business Administration, Maas found herself engaged in the Southwestern Advantage sales internship, the world’s oldest entrepreneurial program for university students. Throughout Maas’s five years of selling educational books with Southwestern, she sharpened her passion for sales and fell in love with her now-husband, a fellow “book kid.”

When Maas was introduced to ThinkingAhead Executive Search in 2000, she quickly established her reputation as a key recruiting force in the Career Services industry where she utilized her Southwestern experience to place graduating sales interns into sales careers. After six years with the Career Services specialty, Maas transitioned into the ThinkingAhead Banking and Commercial Finance niche seeking to use her selling savvy and her “it’s always the right time to do the right thing” mindset to help other clients connect with the right talent at the right time.

Maas’s pleasantly persistent recruiting style and service-oriented approach can be attributed to her desire to make concrete differences in the lives of those she works with. Throughout her years of executive recruiting, she has sought to represent the qualities that ThinkingAhead so highly values including hard work, teachability, and service. She also helps educate outsiders to the best practices she uses in ThinkingAhead’s “That What She Said” video series on Facebook and Vimeo.

Maas’s desire to serve others refuses to stop at the doors of ThinkingAhead, bleeding into her personal life and the lives of the Nashville community. Maas attributes her love for faith and work ethic to her parents who taught her the all-encompassing truth of “with great power comes great responsibility.” This passion has led her to involvement with organizations purposed to serve the lives of underprivileged children and those suffering from breast cancer, a cause near and dear to Maas’s heart. Maas, along with her husband and children, lives by the purpose to “serve others and give until it hurts.” Stephanie is active in several non-profit organizations, including: Habitat for Humanity, Avon Breast Cancer Foundation, Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, Room at the Inn, YCAP, and the Martha O’Bryan Center.

As a leader within ThinkingAhead, her career in recruiting is a fulfilling way to contribute to the success of the companies she works with, the candidates she places, and the recruiters she influences. Maas’s years of service allow her the capability to provide her candidates with opportunities that often aid in “getting some of their lives back” as they step into new career paths.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Stephanie Maas:

Hi, this is Stephanie Maas and I’m thrilled to be joining the Action Catalyst. Many of you will have no idea who I am or why in the world I could even remotely be qualified to be here, and a really neat story how it came to be.

So for 30 years, I have been with the Southwestern Family of Companies who produces The Action Catalyst. In fact, I first got to know the Southwestern Family of Companies when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was recruited to be a part of their summer Advantage program, and it literally changed my life.

I have three kids, so my hobbies typically consist of football games, getting my oldest off to college and ready for that experience. Spending time with my youngest as she’s trying to figure out if she wants to be a fashion designer, a volleyball player, a race car driver, gymnast, a cheer queen, any of those number of things. We typically tend to bounce around. When I’m not busy with those, my heart also goes to giving back to those less fortunate in the community.

Probably one of my all-time favorite quotes is from Spider-Man, Uncle Ben, if you remember, and it is “with great power comes great responsibility”. And I believe that I have been blessed in extraordinary ways with the gifts that I’ve been given throughout my life and career. So anything that I can do to give back to others is very motivating for me. That sounded really cheesy, but it’s really sincere.

Since my exposure to the Action Catalyst, one of the things I think make it really unique is the ability to have real conversation with folks that have done some amazing things. I think the Action Catalyst really spends time getting beyond the traditional questions of who are you, how’d you get there, so forth and so on. But really peels back the layers of, hey, tell us not just about your wins, but about your failures. It really gets to the people behind the achievements, and I think for executives, leaders, folks who wanna be in those roles, who are on the journey to be in those roles, who are currently in those roles, it gives them a very real look at what it looks like to get there, to stay there, to be there, etc.

Podcasting is a fantastic format for folks who are busy in a time crunch, but looking and yearning for places to get new ideas, share ideas, be exposed to things they maybe didn’t know, to help them further their career, their professional life, whatever the case may be. Podcasting is a fantastic format for those who are on the go, but still have a thirst for knowledge.

My hope is that listeners get a very real look at the folks behind the successes and the achievements. It’s so easy to see something that somebody has done and, in your mind, automatically put them on a certain type of pedestal, and it’s not that we’re trying to take them off of the pedestal, but rather, hey, what does that climb look like? And help understand that even though these folks have incredible achievement, they’re really like you and I and very relatable, which means we can be just as incredible in our achievements as they are.

Super excited to be with you, honored to be a part of it, and hope you will join us every week on the Action Catalyst.