He Came for the Credential and Left With a Mindset: Spotlight on Sumeet Malik

Speaker: Sumeet Malik

Meta is one aspect of my career. There's actually a few other journeys I've also partaken, so I'll touch upon a few of those as well. But at Meta, I'm part of what's known as our specialized leadership team. And our specialized leadership team is the top 5% of required hires which take place at Meta. So I'm part of their engineering talent team. I've been in the talent acquisition space for the last 13 years. My primary role is I partner with directors on hiring executive level leadership across engineering management within the AI space. So some of the teams which I support are going to be our Reality Labs. We also recently had an acquisition within a gaming company known as BigBox VR, which also ties to AI. And then I'm sure you're more than familiar with Meta's Superintelligence Lab, which is also a team that I support when it comes to hiring top-tier individuals who are involved in the AI space.

[0:01:02]

A lot of that has to do with wearing very much of a consultant manner, also being able to use data to kind of drive direction, understanding what the market insights look like to understanding where you can find top talent or companies that are doing really impressive work. So it's a lot of research, programs, and then naturally consulting between both executive leaders as well as with candidates and finding... Making sure that there's a good match between company's needs and candidate's motivations.

So I've been a realtor for the last almost, I want to say 11 years now, primarily supporting residential realty here in the Bay, helping buyers and sellers. I work with first-time homeowners. I also work with veterans, work directly with a lot of lenders around the Bay Area as well, really just naturally trying to help homeowners or sellers meet their needs. I find there's a lot of crossover between talent acquisition as well as helping buyers and sellers when it comes to how it impacts their families, or how does it improve their lifestyle, or how it changes their life over one year over the next 20 years. So a lot of passion between just guiding people, buyers and sellers in that direction. More recently, I've acquired my own broker's license, so I'm venturing off from working underneath Side Real Estate, which has been my current and most recent brokerage I've been working under, and I'm branching off to doing my own brokerage as well.

So that's going to allow me to have a little bit more flexibility. I've learned a lot through just the skills that I've attained from my MBA from a marketing perspective as well as how to gain additional clients and be able to sell myself. So I decided to kind of invest into myself as well in that sense. Outside of real estate, I also am a career coach. So I did career coaching during my time at Santa Clara University through Leavey School of Business Career Center. From there, I've joined another career coaching company where I help engineers who are looking to pivot into the AI space. So these are, again, engineering managers or directors, but also some individual contributors who are looking to pivot from your more outdated technologies into what's being utilized today to bring a brand and a name to themselves with how AI is improving. So I do help candidates with their elevator pitch. I help them with rebranding their resume and their LinkedIn. Help them on be... How they conduct themselves through behavioral interviews. And then once they get towards the end of their job search, I also help with offer negotiations.

So let me be a little bit transparent about my journey coming into Santa Clara University. When I was planning on doing my MBA, I didn't have any goals behind that. I didn't want to do an MBA to uplevel myself in my career. It was really, this is gonna sound kind of bad, but my own ego. I just wasn't happy with having a bachelor's degree. I wanted to have a master's. My dad has a master's. My best friends have all been dentists and doctors who went off to grad school after doing their bachelor's as well. So for that, it was bugging me for not doing my master's. So I had no real driver motivation on what I was going to do with it. Now that being said, I learned a lot and built a lot of really great connections. And being a little bit later in my years, I had gone back to school 15, yeah, 15 years later after finishing my bachelor's degree. I wanted to be really intentional with what I was going to do.

So I wanted to build the connections. I wanted to be a part of the community. I wanted to know all that I could know about what it feels to be a student again, but being intentional about that. So with that, I took the intentions of being concentrated on what I want to learn, which is why I did three concentrations. I did marketing, I did new venture and entrepreneurship, and then I also did…leading innovative organizations. And coming into my first semester, my first quarter, I recognized that I wanted to grow as a leader, which means I wanted to be able to understand how do I present myself when it comes to working with executives. And then through those conversations, I met so many different connections through the network that allowed me to understand the importance of AI. The only person telling me about AI was in recruiting and then my dad saying, "Sumeet, you need to do this."

[0:05:31]

So having additional conversations and throughout the network is what really enticed me to go a little bit further into understanding how AI and ML is going to impact not just the tech industry, but all realms and all spaces, right? Finance, healthcare, commerce, you name it, AI is playing a part into it. And I'd say that the program helped me from definitely programs and coursework, but more so just the common connections I was able to make, the networking opportunities, the conversations I had with the associate dean, with my professors, and then going into the program and meeting folks who come from all realms. I naturally assumed that people being in Santa Clara were all going to come from a tech background, which was so untrue. There were folks who came from tech, but a lot of folks from finance, some from retail, some who were just building their own startups from restaurants or applications on selling baked goods. And that's what really drove me to understand there's so much importance on understanding the importance around technology, but also what people are doing with it.

Some of the professors that I... Some of the courses I went into, the professors made such an impact on me where I wanted to work with them. There was many professors who I reached out to afterwards and was like, "Can I be an associate to you? Can I be a part-time professor? Can I play any part in helping upleveling the next cohort?" because of the impact it had on me. And I can't say this was only focused on technology, but it was really just communication, importance of structure, how to create marketing plans, how to understand and dial into data, how to utilize various tools within Excel, and how to drive R to do a data analysis and regression. And I think those are things that really help drive efficiency to understand how I can create those next moves. So I just talked to you about three ventures, right? Meta, real estate, and career coaching.

But I didn't talk to you about my fourth one as well, which also has an alignment between moving into staffing for dental care and providing education and career coaching in that sense. So there's been so many great takeaways from these courses that has made me think about where do I invest my time, 'cause I have so many great ideas having learned from the courses I've taken and the professors who have given me that knowledge.

My marketing class for sure. Because one of the part of that marketing class, we had to work with a company that needed help marketing themselves. So we ended up working... I ended up working with a company that was based in India that was an elevator company that was doing really well financially, but was very siloed in who their marketplace was. And I created a 30-page marketing plan considering all their competitors, their current marketing strategy, and what marketing strategy they can use, and then utilizing that to help them uplevel on how to promote their company. So understanding how to create that actual playbook was something that I did for that company that I was then ultimately like, "I know exactly what I need to do for my own business." Marketing being one. Regression analysis. My data analysis course allowed me to understand how to be better in my job with Meta.

I now can take candidates in the pipeline to candidates who are in interviews to those who are at the hire stage and run the regression to understand where our bottlenecks are and how we can improve our conversion rates. And I've been able to take that information to our leaders to say, "This is where we have our bottlenecks. This is where we can create efficiencies, and this is the data that backs up our decision."

I think that a master's... I think you have to come in with a right... With a certain perspective, right. If the intention is to do a master's because you're looking for a promotion or you're looking to change titles from an IC to a people manager, that may not come immediately. But I can guarantee it will come because you are now being provided with additional tools in your toolbox that's going to help you become an outlier in your teams or your organization, which then naturally will help you stand out amongst the crowd. Master's degree today, I can't say will help you, especially being in the recruiting space. A master's degree doesn't naturally determine that you're going to get a higher pay or that you're going to have a specific title, depending on the industry, of course. Right? There's always going to be nuances.

[0:10:01]

But what it can do is provide you with the ability to exercise your skills in a manner that is now being understood by organizational leaders that recognize you as somebody who has additional skills that are something that you can't learn just on the job or you can't just learn with having a bachelor's. It takes experience plus education at an executive level to be able to perform and to be able to show yourself in the light to the right people to be able to get that growth.

When I decided to do Leading Innovative Organizations, that was more for myself because I was like, "I want to be better from an executive standpoint." When I did New Venture and Entrepreneurship, that was more so because I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My dad's been an entrepreneur since he graduated from his master's. He's had probably about 10 businesses at this point throughout his career. All my extended family are entrepreneurs. We actually don't... I actually don't have too many people aside from my brother-in-law who actually works in tech. Everybody else has their own business. So I wanted to understand how do you just get into it, right? They went in, they bought a business, and they figured it out. I'm like, we have programs today that now create that structure for you understanding how to start a business.

I was more focused on the Leading Innovative Organizations. And I took a course with a professor that was how to... Exactly... I think it was executive coaching or executive leadership or so. I can't remember the exact terminology of it. But I took that course and that concentration because I wanted to uplevel my presence and how I communicate both verbally as well as through email. And one thing that kind of sticks in my mind is my older sister. So just to gonna give you a little background, I was... I grew up in the Bay Area, born and raised here. I went through to a uni... Sorry... Middle school, high school, elementary school that had 2 out of 10 ratings. Out of a 700-person graduating class at my high school, about 600 of them did not go to college afterwards. Some of them joined the military, some of them remained in retail. There was a very small percentage of people who went to university.

Many of them had no direction into what to do afterwards. I myself didn't know what to do afterwards. I went to community college beforehand. My parents are immigrants here. They came in the '80s. They didn't have any idea on how to give us direction as well. So for that reason, I grew up in the wrong crowd. I didn't speak well. I had a lot of slang. And I remember I sent a text message to my sister once. She texted me on something. I sent her a text back, and instead of spelling like Y-O-U-R for "your," I was like, "U R," and I just remember speaking all this possible slang. And she was like, "You're never gonna get a job. You're never gonna get married. Nobody's gonna like you. You need to get your shit together." Excuse my language. But I was like, that was a real eye-opener for me to be like, "Yeah, I do need to polish up how I present myself," because my... How I present myself is my brand and how people will welcome me into certain circles.

And for me, it was like the one quote that stands in mind is, "You are the average of the five people that you are a part of." And I'm a firm believer in surrounding yourself with the right folks that's gonna help you get to the right places.

Just being in the front row of seeing how candidates are perceived or how employers are perceived, individuals who are able to not just get the job done but are able to communicate in a certain manner are usually the ones that evolve further in their careers. So I work with career coaching and candidates as well who are directors or managers or really top-tier ICs, but their communication level is horrible. And when they reach out, they're like, "I'm feeling stagnant. I don't know why." They can go through interviews and they'll get rejected. And I'm just like, "We need to polish up how we speak. We need to polish up how we present ourselves. We need to polish up our resumes."

Something as simple as formatting or indentation. It's really, really small things, but also how you represent yourself on how you write an email or how you create a resume, and then naturally when you're presented in front of the screen or in person. So I think you can have a master's in analytics, you can have a master's in data science, and it'll give you all the technical chops that you need to be able to do your job well. But how you communicate on a behavioral side is also just as important. And actually, in my perspective, I think it's 80% of the level of importance on how a company decides whether or not you are deserving of a promotion or whether or not you're deserving of even being part of our company. That's why we have behavioral interviews that play a part. And I think a master's degree always ties in some level of behavioral skills.

Which individuals can naturally learn on how to present themselves better and recognizing what their brand is and how to become better polished when it comes to speaking towards their experience or speaking towards the work that they do and being able to present that in front of people that they care to show it.

[0:15:08]

Every course had some expectations behind that. And some courses were definitely more technical or data-driven, but I wanna say most courses that at least I had taken were very much focused on the behavioral side of it or the leadership side. But aside from that, I think it's more of the community and networking events that actually showcased the importance of how to present yourself. I came into all these networking events in a sports coat and slacks because that's how I want to present myself. And I recognize there was also individuals who came in tennis shoes and jeans. And that doesn't mean that they're less or more intelligent, but it does show... I did recognize who were having those conversations with those individuals versus who was having conversations with me.

I was having conversations with CEOs and founders who were presenting at these conferences, whereas those folks were kind of standing on the back wall. And maybe it's introverted personalities, who knows what that could be? But I just recognize the intentions and how communication levels span depend on how you present yourself. So aside from the coursework, I wanna say those networking events when we had companies like HP come or if we had ServiceNow come and you got a chance to speak with executives and leaders, I think that is what kind of bridged the gap in the importance of presentation. And it comes along with how you present yourself, which is why I think those courses I took helped me refine how I present myself and the importance of making sure I'm able to present myself in a manner which is not just physically appealing but also communicative.

One thing that I did when I was making a decision on which school to go to... I had applied to 10 schools. I got into nine out of 10, and I was kneeling down between two schools... It was three schools. It was Rice University, it was UC Davis, and it was Santa Clara University. I recognized I didn't want to go to Rice. Great school, phenomenal school, but it wasn't focused in the industry I wanted to, and I didn't want to move to Texas. I was really defined between Davis and Santa Clara. And the reason I didn't do Davis was because they're more focused on agricultural and... Sorry, not architectural... What is the word? Not architectural, but fields, grass. I can't remember what the word is. It's slipped from my mind. Either way, before I went and made a decision with Santa Clara, I actually spoke with the associate dean and had a meeting with them.

I set up a 30-minute conversation with them, and that 30-minute conversation ended up being a two-hour conversation. And I talked to him about what my goals were, my motivations, clubs. I even talked to him about their real estate club. I even talked to him about postgraduate programs... Is there a Doctorate in Business Administration program?... And how this can help benefit. So my recommendation to prospective students is, yes, do your research into what schools are presenting and who they're networked with, but also take the time to know those leaders within those organizations. Have the conversation, 'cause they're willing to have it with you. And that conversation with the associate dean was the indicator and made me decide to have, to join Santa Clara. And to this date, I have a relationship with that person. Josh, every time I meet Josh, every time I see him, I connect with him.

[0:18:36]

Now we talk not just about work and school, but we talk about families, we talk about vacations, we talk about what's going well and what's not going well. We get more on even a personal level. And I think that's really important as well, not just to be professional in all manners, but you need to connect with people. And connecting with people is very, being humanized. And being humanized means being able to get to know folks on a personal stance as well, because not everything is always gonna be great and working out. You need to know where the bottlenecks are, where people find hardship, because ultimately we're humans and we're all kind of experiencing things, maybe at different phases in our life, but ultimately we experience very similar aspects in life.