Quartz has appointed Anna Oakes as our new head of people. In this role, Anna will be responsible for all aspects of the employee experience, including recruitment, diversity, internal communication, benefits, learning and development, fostering an inclusive culture, and distributed work.
Anna joins Quartz with an extensive background in leading people. She was the senior director of talent solutions for Baird, a financial services company where she helped transform the culture and bring more humanity to their work. She has experience building all-remote teams, running effective diversity-and-inclusion programs, and managing everything from recruitment to HR systems and executive transitions. For the past five years, she has also been a consultant, executive coach, and podcaster through her own company, Oakes Co.
“This is an extremely critical role for us as we adjust to being a fully distributed and independent company,” said Zach Seward, Co-founder and CEO of Quartz. “Anna is here to help us build the kind of empathetic workplace that we champion in our journalism and as a company, too.”
Anna will be a vice president and part of Quartz’s executive team, reporting into Seward. She started at Quartz on November 1, and is based in Brookfield, Wisconsin.
