Candidate in the Crowd: Elissa Strell

Today's Candidate in the Crowd is Elissa S.

As The #ShuftanJobReport roars with OVER 12,400 subscribers!!!!!!, I am rolling out my second phase to help people. I post the report on M/W/F and want to use T/Th to feature excellent candidates. I built this community as a way of bringing together job searchers and those who are hiring. As an homage to Sports Illustrated's "Faces in the Crowd," I titled "Candidates in the Crowd."

This is a white space for candidates to discuss their previous work, hopes, and dreams and show off anything to the network. The Candidate will capture a hiring manager's attention, and good things will happen.

Make sure you are following The Shuftan Job Report for all prior Candidates in the Crowd posts and job postings.https://lnkd.in/gRP2KKsd

Meet Elissa: a Creative Operations Leader who’s equal parts operational wizard, creative advocate, and chaos-tamer extraordinaire. She doesn’t just keep the creative trains running - she builds the tracks, fuels the engines, and ensures everyone enjoys the ride. From solving complex problems to delivering results, she’s the go-to leader for marketers and creatives alike.

Elissa’s journey began in television, where she worked as a production assistant, surviving three weeks of consecutive overnight shifts. From there, she dove into producing immersive video content for clients across industries - automotive, healthcare, telecom - you name it. With a knack for bridging the gap between creative teams and marketers, she transforms challenges into opportunities, creating scalable solutions that deliver thoughtful, on-brand, high-performing content.

Her resume reads like a greatest hits album: leading Shiseido Americas’ creative transformation, managing 1,600+ assets for MetLife’s global rebrand, overseeing TikTok virality with Martha Stewart, and launching Omnicom’s NY office for eg+ Worldwide. Whether it’s reimagining workflows, stretching budgets, or fostering collaboration, Elissa makes it happen with expertise and empathy.

Elissa’s superpower? Making creative teams feel supported while keeping stakeholders aligned and happy. She’s a natural relationship-builder, a problem-solver at heart, and the person you want in your corner when the stakes are high and the deadlines are tighter.

Beyond her day job, she’s a force for good, empowering small, minority, and women-owned businesses through TAP (The Acceleration Project). Elissa isn’t just a leader; she’s a builder of ideas, teams, and brands, and she does it all with a unique blend of strategy, creativity, and heart.

In short? Elissa gets results and ensures the journey is just as impactful as the destination.

Enjoy her entry...

Operational ninja. Creative advocate. Client whisperer. Process engineer. Game changer.

Throughout her career (and in real life) Elissa has had many titles, but the one that resonates most with marketers and creative teams across categories is Creative Operations Leader.

Elissa doesn’t just keep the creative trains running on time—she builds the tracks, fuels the engines, and makes sure everyone’s enjoying the ride. Equal parts operational ninja and creative advocate, she’s the go-to person when big ideas need structure, budgets need stretching, and teams need a champion who can turn chaos into clarity.Elissa’s career began in television as a production assistant for a top 10 local news station in Washington, DC. (Ask her about her experience working 3 weeks of consecutive overnight shifts!).

She returned to the NYC Metro area to produce video content for experiential and immersive environments at a boutique agency serving a wide range of clients from automotive to telecom to healthcare. Elissa’s holistic understanding of the creative and marketing ecosystems bridges the gap between stakeholders at all levels to provide scalable solutions that drive efficiency in process and delivery of on-brand, on-budget marketing initiatives.

A champion of both marketers and creative teams, she transforms complex challenges into opportunities, ensuring that thoughtful, on-brand creative content performs, disrupts, and resonates. She helps creative teams understand the brief, interpret it, and bring it to life with thoughtful, thumb-stopping creative content. She helps marketers understand and appreciate the creative process while helping them achieve their goals.

Elissa’s knack for running creative teams like a business has powered success across diverse clients, including Goldman Sachs, Clinique, General Mills, Bacardi, and Shiseido. Whether managing global creative rebrands, launching new agency hubs, or driving operational transformations,

Elissa’s expertise lies in building agile workflows, maximizing budgets, and fostering collaboration that gets results.Career Highlights Include: • Leading the operational transformation of Shiseido Americas’ internal creative team, implementing tools and processes that improved efficiency across the creative ecosystem. • Bringing Clé de Peau Beauté’s first viral TikTok collaboration with Martha Stewart to life. • Launching the NY office for eg+ Worldwide, Omnicom’s global production and transcreation agency. • Managing the production and distribution of 1,600+ assets during MetLife’s global creative rebrand. • Overseeing 24/7 global operational planning for Goldman Sachs’ critical annual publication, Outlook, assembling creative units in Chennai, London, NY and Melbourne.Elissa’s superpower is making creative teams feel supported and understood while keeping stakeholders aligned and happy.

She’s a natural relationship-builder, a problem-solver at heart, and the person you want in your corner when the stakes are high and the deadlines are tighter.Outside of her professional roles, Elissa channels her strategic expertise into TAP (The Acceleration Project), empowering small, minority, and women-owned businesses, entrepreneurs and municipalities with high-caliber business advice.If you’ve read this far and need more validation about Elissa’s expertise, read what a former colleague had to say:“

Elissa is a unicorn. She is as strategic as she is conceptual, a champion of creative, an operations wizard, and a valued marketing executive. She’s never met a piece of project management software she couldn’t master or a budget she couldn’t maximize. As an operations professional, she doesn’t just “keep the trains on time” - she builds the tracks they run on. She’s highly skilled at putting exactly the right combinations of people together to accomplish a job. In an industry that is anything but stable, her kind of collaborative problem-solving and steady leadership are highly valued. In short, Elissa makes it happen.”