Christina Russo

Disruptive. That’s what Christina Russo wants to be. Her team is “trying to disrupt the industry in any way we can, by utilizing different products and methodologies that may have come from different industries.”

The VP of marketing for Gary D. Nelson and Associates has spent the bulk of her marketing career making sure that she keeps the companies she has been at on the cutting edge. An early adopter of social media strategy as a powerful recruiting tool, she’s focused on using technologies to make recruiting and sales more efficient.

In a similar vein, a recent initiative has been a revamp of Nelson’s salary guide, turning it into an advisory product through which the sales team lands valuable face-time with hard-to-reach people — with the resulting data bringing value to clients. In 2018, the effort garnered $1.8 million in gross profit.

She’s also been able to return to her market research roots, having taken the lead in exploring a possible new market for the company — a project that is many months from completion, but shows great promise. Of the process, she says, “It’s been fun to deep-dive into the HR tech world again and see what’s out there to help us push forward.” Russo is researching “go-to-market strategies, buyer profiles and what it would take to reach the masses without adding more work to the desk of the recruiter.”

When not disrupting the staffing world, she can be found volunteering for after-school and youth sports programs in her home town of Pacifica, Calif.