Driving America Forward with Daniella Sanders

"I'm using AI to make small tweaks to my job every day, but over time, those tweaks add up to something bigger–and I think that's innovation at the day to day scale."

Daniella Sanders
Senior Business Recruiter
Zum

Daniella Sanders is a longtime HR and Recruiting professional. Having started her journey as a volunteer and employee at a youth center in her home town in Long Beach, California, Daniella found her way into HR and Recruiting as a way to help guide and help young individuals. Today, she is Zum’s Senior Business Recruiter.

Question 1:
In your role at Zum, how do you think about innovation?

I don’t think of innovation as big and flashy. Instead, it really can be the small things you do to make things better—and over time, those small things become big things.

I’ll also say that part of innovating and solving a problem is just paying close attention. If you pay attention, the problem can often point you toward the solution.

I’ll give you an example. In my job as recruiter, I’ll record interviews and feed them into Claude, in order to get cleaner, more digestible transcripts. It makes my day to day a lot quicker, and frees me up to do more meaningful, difficult work. Or, when I’m searching for candidates on LinkedIn, I’ll use the job description for a particular role, and use it to form Boolean strings for a search, in order to get more highly targeted leads. I’ll then give feedback to Claude—this candidate wasn’t right, for instance, or they didn’t have enough experience in XYZ field—in order to make the AI model more effective over time.

I’m using AI to make small tweaks to my job every day, but over time, those tweaks add up to something bigger—and I think that’s innovation at the day to day scale.

Question 2:
From your perspective, at a company-wide level, how is Zum driving American innovation forward?

I think Zum, at the company level, is actually innovating in the opposite way, which is incredible—it’s not doing a small incremental change here and there, but instead is totally re-inventing the dated school transportation industry, from the ground up.

It’s everything, from owning a fleet of buses, to deploying electric vehicles, to sending power back to the grid—we’re applying this innovative lens to everything we do.

Innovation truly lives in every decision this company makes.

Question 3:
When you think of the future, what role do children/the next generation play, and how can we set them up for success?

I think children are sponges. Everything we say and do, they witness and absorb, and it changes the way they do things.

So it’s vital that we do things the right way.

To set kids up for success, we of course have to create safe home to school transportation. Period. But we also need to do that the right way—and that means creating equal access to that transportation for children, regardless of what neighborhood they live in or what school they want to attend. Kids are going to learn about equity and access from companies like Zum, so it’s our job to make sure that we’re providing equal access to all families, so that when these students become innovators themselves, they also care about equity and access.