Stephanie (Step) Fillyaw is a consultant and executive trainer with a background in operations management, talent acquisition, and DEI workplace strategy. Step’s passion for people led her into creating and implementing inclusive strategies in talent acquisition and employee relations with both McMaster-Carr Supply and McKinsey & Company; in the case of the former, helping to build the company’s DEI strategy from the ground up. During her time with McKinsey & Company, Step trained colleagues on affinity recruiting strategies and executed full-cycle recruiting solely focused on attracting talent across minority and traditionally underserved groups. She also cultivated and coached talent, lending to a historic record of Black, Hispanic-Latinx, LGBTQIA+ and women hires.
Step cut her teeth in retail operations, helping to manage multi-million-dollar stores for two major big box companies (Target and Lowe’s). Here she discovered her passion for developing others and creating career pathways for brilliant talent, while gaining a reputation of demonstrating integrity, delivering dynamic presentations and designing creative solutions that drive results. Drawing from over a decade of combined experience across operations, recruiting and people strategy, Step is excited to leverage her skills in service to the clients of DRiWaterstone.
Stephanie is a North Carolina native, proudly from a small town outside of Wilmington, NC, and has called Atlanta home for over 10 years. She attended Queens University of Charlotte, obtaining a BA in Political Science (2009), earned a Masters of International Studies from the University of South Carolina (2011) and holds certifications in both DEI in the Workplace (University of South Florida) and Lean Six Sigma at the Green Belt level (University of Georgia). She leverages her academic and professional excellence, world travels, and lived experiences as a queer, black woman to inform her work and connect with people from all walks of life, empowering them to lead responsible impact from where they serve.
