Jamie Stacey

Jamie Stacey rises before dawn most days, and she and her 17-month-old son arrive at Abbott Laboratories' headquarters before 7:00 a.m. The toddler joins the other children in Abbott's daycare center, while Stacey heads up to her office to savor "those couple of hours in the morning when you can get a lot of work done before your phone starts to ring."

Stacey, 34, is staffing manager for Abbott's Global Pharmaceutical Research & Development program, charged with setting policies and procedures for the company's talent recruitment. It's a job she loves, but it's not the one she thought she was working toward when she earned her masters degree in organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison nearly a decade ago.

Stacey spent the first five years of her career as an associate chemist in Abbott's cancer program, synthesizing compounds in search of drug-discovery candidates. Because of her alumni connections to two schools with top-tier chemistry programs-the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she received her undergraduate degree-she was approached about helping Abbott recruit young scientists.

"I was part of interview panels here [at Abbott] and part of the on-campus recruiting process, and really enjoyed it," she says. "When an opportunity became available to do it full-time, I threw my hat in the ring."

Stacey earned a position as a full-time recruiter and kept it for three years before being promoted to her current post about a year ago. She believes her science background has been part of her success. "In the beginning, it helped quite a bit because I understood the people we were trying to hire and I understood the managers that I was dealing with," she says. "What I lacked in the recruiting knowledge and the staffing expertise that somebody else might have brought to the table, I could overcome a little bit because I was already of the same mindset with the people I was talking to. And, of course, I can recruit synthetic organic chemists with my eyes closed!"

Now that her career has taken this new turn, Stacey doesn't look back. "I don't ever plan to leave staffing," she says. "It's a fantastic satisfaction when it all works out, when you find the right person for the job, and you can smoothly relocate them to this area if that's necessary and see that their families get settled in-and then you bump into them in the cafeteria and they tell you how much they're enjoying their job."

While her work is demanding, Abbott's family-oriented policies mean that she doesn't have much trouble balancing the demands of being both a manager and a mother, Stacey adds. The company's flextime option means that she can arrive early and leave in time to avoid traffic jams on the way home, and the in-house daycare allows her some extra time with her son. "I eat lunch with the toddlers," she says. "I'm often explaining to people I interview in the afternoon why I have a peach stain on my shirt, or whatever it is, but they're always very forgiving."

-- Kate Fodor