After 15 years at Adidas, with stints in recruiting and social impact, Tauna Dean launched Kind World Collective earlier this year to match mission-driven companies with executive recruits who share their goals.
She’s teamed up with two other recruiting vets for the new business: Andy Shearer, who is also out of the footwear and apparel world with time at Adidas, Nike, Chrome Industries and Keen, and Regan DeKoning who has stints with Nike, Apple and Wieden+Kennedy.
Dean’s last role at Adidas was vice president of global purpose. She helped to create a program in North America to build social impact programs and community engagement within the company. That work was eventually spread globally.
“What I really felt is there is a growing movement of people who wanted more meaning in their work and more impact in their work and be really rooted in their purpose,” she said, noting the rise of B Corp designations, mission-driven startups or companies joining 1% For the Planet.
Kind World Collective joins a growing number of companies centered on mission and business owners looking for new ways to operate and engage with community.
Dean launched this new business quietly in January and has an active client list of more than a dozen companies ranging in size from startups like Unless Collective to enterprises like Nordstrom. Kind World typically recruits for director level and above, she said.
Kind World Collective was selected as one of the 50 founding recruiters for a new career website called Forbes.jobs, which is majority-owned by media company Forbes. She noted that partnership has been helpful for visibility.
The company aims to be a strategic partner with clients and understand their business and their goals, vision and mission. It also allows the group to ensure that people looking for purpose will be more likely to find that with these organizations.
“One of the added benefits of working with me and my team, we are not only skilled recruiters but we have worked in industry. We understand how to build a social impact and sustainability function (within and organization). I have done that work,” she said.
For Dean, the time was right to create a recruiter like Kind World Collective. Over the last 10 years, she said she has watched a change in how people relate to their work brought on by the new generations entering the workforce. That shift was accelerated by the onset of Covid-19 and the social reckoning that followed in 2020.
“The urgency that the world has felt socially, environmentally, culturally, people have been very introspective about what matters to them and what they want to do with their lives,” she said.
Kind World is in the process of obtaining B Corp status and it is a member of the 1% for the Planet, an international organization whose members donate 1% of revenue to environmental causes. Dean said she is building the business based on the fundamental idea that business can be a force for good.
Dean said her collective is a partner to a number of diversity, equity and inclusion firms in town and her work is a complement of DEI.
The Kind World Collective team is rounded out with Sarah Ko heading operations, and Riddhi Jhunjhunwala heading communications and partnerships. A strategic advisory board consists of: Eunique Jones Gibson, Afdhel Aziz and Kathleen Tullie.
