Why We Recruit is a series of interviews with our recruiting partners covering a variety of topics ranging from their experience working with HBS to what they want students to know. New interviews will be released throughout the year to dive into unique perspectives of recruiting.

Name, Title and Organization
Kate Gulliver, Vice President Talent Operations, Wayfair; HBS '09

Describe your organization in three to five sentences.
Wayfair is one of the world's largest online destinations for all things home. Through our e-commerce business model, we offer visually inspired browsing, compelling merchandising, easy product discovery and attractive prices for over 7 million products from over 7,000 suppliers across five distinct brands: Wayfair.com, Joss & Main, AllModern, DwellStudio and Birch Lane. Our cofounders are lifetime tech innovators who have worked together in the commercial internet sector since 1995 and have created a company culture deeply rooted in technology. Tech, data and analytics inform everything we do and are critical to our rapid growth and share gain. We are headquartered in Boston with locations throughout North America and Europe. We’ve previously been named one of America’s Most Promising Companies by Forbes Magazine and selected by the Boston Business Journal and Glassdoor.com as a Top Company to Work For and Top Company for Well Balanced Life.

How long has your organization been recruiting at Harvard Business School and what roles do you hire for?
While we’ve always hired HBS alums, this is only our second year with a formal MBA campus recruiting program. We decided to launch the program based on our increased hiring needs to support the rapid growth of our business and the success we’ve seen recent MBA grads have at our company. We hire for almost all of our non-engineering teams at HBS, including Category Management, Marketing, Product Management, Operations, and more.

What recruiting tactics have you found most successful in engaging with students and/or alumni at HBS?
Leveraging HBS alumni at Wayfair to help with recruiting efforts has been key to our success. We’re lucky to have quite a few of them, and whether it’s a coffee chat, an info session on campus, or a networking event hosted in our offices, we feel the alumni connection makes engaging with students more impactful. We also like to leverage our Boston location and enjoy having students visit our office so they can meet a wide range of employees - from executives, to recent MBA grads, to people right out of college - and experience our culture up close.

Give us your elevator pitch – what is the one thing students should know about working for you?
We are a career rocket ship with constant new challenges and opportunities to make an impact as our business scales. We’re data-driven and transparent, and we move quickly to empower smart people to take ownership to drive action. There really is no cap on your potential at Wayfair.