Gina Guarracino is a capable, empathetic People leader who’s traveled from staffing to unions to media and now excels in high growth technology scale ups. She is a Director of People at late stage commerce startup Mirakl, helping the team expand their U.S. operations including a recent office move from Somerville to Boston’s Financial District.
Gina grew up just to the south of Boston, the third of four siblings. Her dad built his career in operations at the local electricians union, a consummate professional who taught Gina that whatever you do you need to go try and be the best. Gina’s mom managed a busy household as a kind, empathetic listener who was always ready to help her family.
Gina has always been an activist at heart, fighting for the underdog and treating people fairly. Her first work experience was naturally in customer service, waitressing at restaurants. She would probably still be working in the hospitality industry if she didn’t treasure her own nights and weekends so much.
At a restaurant she learned that every table is a little bit different. Because people are..people. You learn to tailor your approach. She loved the ever changing environment and thinks this initially drew her to a career in Human Resources.
Gina went off to study Business Management at Suffolk University before working at a recruiting firm after graduation. After a year post graduation, on nights and weekends, she went back to Suffolk for her MBA. During her graduate studies she took a particular interest in organizational behavior, focusing on org designs and how people operate within companies.
At Daley & Associates, the boutique staffing firm she went to by day, she supported the teams that placed temporary needs and permanent Director to C level execs across IT, Life Sciences, Accounting & Finance, and more. The work gave her invaluable insights into the TA (talent acquisition) space. She had to develop her outbound skills and learn how companies staff and operate. She even helped place her mom for a role doing medical billing! Moms always deliver.
The Electricians Union, I.B.E.W. Local 103, had an opening in human resources and Gina jumped at the opportunity to go “in house”. She helped the union modernize digitally and her responsibilities included running health insurance, retirement, and disbursements for life changing events. She learned the ins and outs of managing an employee base and the project management skills needed to support the function.
Eventually, Gina was ready to make a jump into media. She landed a role at advertising agency Hill Holliday as an HR Analyst, working with each function of their Human Resources operation across talent management, culture, and workplace experience and seeing how it all worked together. Traditional advertising was going through a digital shift and she had a front row seat to those headwinds.
Following a reduction in force, Gina was given the opportunity to step up and prove she was capable with a promotion to Senior HR Business Partner. She managed young, creative talent and the etiquette challenges that come with their assimilation to the workplace alongside senior executives and their cultural expectations for how business is done. Through the various corporate undulations she learned to celebrate onboarding new team members as well as celebrating when sending them out of the company just as warmly and seamlessly.
Through good times and bad, Gina made sure to emphasize that “a strong people function is crucial”. When the pandemic hit, she had to seek out external expertise. She leveraged peers at leading companies like Google to figure out how to craft their approach. The pandemic was a crash course in seeing the cultural push & pull between who wanted to go back to the office, when, and how.
Gina navigated this trying time the best she could. She even supported Hill Holliday during a pandemic office move from the Financial District to the Seaport and, after some time growing in her role, was drawn to startups.
When she met the Mirakl team, including her first manager Amelia Van Camp, she was impressed by the caliber of the product and team. They were working with some big name consumer clients driving big impact in the e-commerce vertical. In Gina’s view, the move to startups was “same mechanics, new bike”. Finding a startup going through hypergrowth and experiencing the HR challenges of moving at high speed was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
After Amelia was promoted, Gina became the Director of the Americas and APAC on the People Team which includes the U.S., Brazil, Australia & Singapore. She’s responsible for all talent in those two regions across attraction & onboarding, development, and offboarding. She helps the company manage benefits, talent management & how they think about growth, career pathing, and promotions in each market.
Gina takes a lot of pride in her career, through the celebratory and challenging times, balancing them both as an even keeled partner. Most recently, she’s proud of her leadership in helping Mirakl execute an office move from Somerville to the Financial District.
Golden Onboarding & Offboarding
Common sense is really important in growing businesses. Especially in the world of startups, there is a tendency and desire to over engineer the problems (and solutions). Gina coaches us that most of the time, if we just slow down a little bit, we can create simple but elegant solutions to drive us forward.
Gina readily admits the hardest part of HR is involuntary offboarding. When someone is exited from a business, regardless of how long or successful their experience was, they’ll remember when something goes wrong at the end. Because it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish!
Gina understands the responsibility and takes pride in making sure this critical piece of the workplace experience is handled professionally. For anyone out there designing an offboarding experience, Gina stresses that you need to continue to treat any departing employee as a human. During exit interviews, she collects data so managers and the organization can better understand the “why” and improve. She takes great care to uncover learnings to better understand overarching themes for more intelligent backfilling.
Most importantly? Gina abides by the golden rule. Treat others as you would want to be treated when exiting a business. She puts empathy into the offboarding experience and makes sure it’s not “one size fits all”. Common sense, indeed.
Departing employees usually go through 3-5 emotions when they’re hit with this career (and life) altering news. Shock, problem solving, sadness, anger, or sympathy. When you recognize those emotions from a departing colleague, be prepared to address them specifically while still maintaining the integrity of the information you need to relay. Gina prepares structured talking points to ensure each employee receives the information they need but also comes ready to pivot. Responding to their body language and off the cuff responses is critical to providing a great experience in a difficult time.
Gina admits that she gets through these difficult conversations knowing she is best served to handle it on behalf of the organization, leading with empathy and humanity, even if her heart is in her throat. Her hands still shake every time and that’s OK. We’re human. Her goal is to provide as soft of a landing as possible.
Last, she’ll offer a way to keep in touch as she closes out any offboarding conversation.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
All of Us Are Developing – “We need to give people space to make mistakes and rebound from those mistakes. When you’re in conversations with executives and they’re showing their humanity, it’s important to understand we’re all human going through life for the first time. The same applies to us. We’re all going to be challenged with new experiences and developing new skills. It can be easy to doubt ourselves and our abilities, and everyone should know that’s a normal step in the process. Adam Grant has a great quote ‘Impostor syndrome isn’t a disease. It’s a normal response to internalizing impossibly high standards. Doubting yourself doesn’t mean you’re going to fail. It usually means you’re facing a new challenge and you’re going to learn. Feeling uncertainty is a precursor to growth.’”
Quickly Recognize & Address Failure – “We don’t have a crystal ball and we shouldn’t let that uncertainty stop us from making decisions. We’re not always going to make the right decision. As you’re making a decision, it’s ok to not have all the information but continue to keep yourself honest and if things aren’t going well be quick to change. Don’t live in that bad decision, be quick to address failure”
Mutual Respect – “No one will respect our personal and professional boundaries if we don’t respect our own. There is no work life balance, it’s a work/life flow at the end of the day that is always a little imbalanced. As we navigate this new hybrid work model, it’s important to draw boundaries for ourselves and others”
Gina is professionally focused on helping Mirakl grow and scale. Personally, she’s focused on leaving things better than she found them. One day she’d love to get in on the ground floor of an early stage startup, helping another business with the characteristics of Mirakl create a solid early foundation from startup to scale up. Because building a balanced business isn’t just confined to people, process, or operations.
If you want to learn more about Gina, you can find her during the week somewhere near Mirakl’s new location in the financial district after their big move, recalling some warm memories from a recent European vacation, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing Gina. Mirakl is lucky to have a caring & thoughtful People leader to help them manage the ups and downs of the startup journey. Hope you had a great trip across the pond!