We are very excited to welcome Alice Hunsberger as PartnerHero's VP, Trust & Safety and Content Moderation. Here are five questions to learn more about her, the work she does, and the things she cares about.
Tell us about yourself—who are you, where are you from, and what have you been up to so far in life?
I was born in Palo Alto, but grew up in England—lived there from age 4 until 13, so basically my whole childhood. After that, I bounced around the States a lot, but for the past 20 years, I've stuck around in the Northeast.
I’ve been working in tech since 2010, when I started as one of the first hires at OKCupid, doing frontline content moderation part-time, and then became their first customer support hire. I built and grew the customer support team and managed the Trust & Safety team through taking the company public when they were acquired by Match Group.
Then, I moved on to Grindr, where I ran the Trust & Safety team and the customer support team during the ramp up to IPO. And now, I'm happy to be at PartnerHero.
When I’m not working, I enjoy cooking, gardening, curling up by the fire and reading a good book (mostly sci-fi and mysteries, depending on my mood), and hanging out with my family.
In previous jobs you’ve worked with BPOs (including PartnerHero) as an outsourcing client. How did you decide to explore working for a BPO this time around?
I'd been in the dating industry for many years and was ready for something new, but didn't know exactly what, so I was exploring options and talking to a bunch of people.
I was chatting to a few companies on the vendor side, and reached out to Mercer (Smith—VP of Managed Operations at PartnerHero) to ask her what it’s like working for a BPO and being on that side of the business.
That's how the conversation started. The timing was right—I was starting to think about what I wanted my next move to be, and PartnerHero was starting to think about where they wanted to expand. We had already worked together for many years, liked each other, had good working relationships—it felt like a natural match.
Something I also really liked is that two of the values that PartnerHero has are “care for others” and “manifest trust”, which is literally trust and safety.
That is what we do as professionals in that space—we care for others and we try to manifest trust.
It was very nice to see that direct connection between the work I do and the things I care about and the overall company values here.
You’re now our VP, Trust & Safety and Content Moderation. What does that mean?
Basically, I'm going to be responsible for and leading the trust and safety and content moderation line of business at PartnerHero.
I’ll be working cross-functionally with business development, sales, marketing, operations, partner success, and onboarding, to make sure that this part of the business is successful and growing. It's one of those roles where I will be responsible for everything and also relying on everybody else to work together and execute.
I think all of us are very open-minded to where and how this is going to grow and evolve over the next few months and years.
What are some things you’re excited to get into or tackle first?
First, I just need to understand the business and the fundamentals of where we are today, how our partners are doing, what they need more (or less) of, and what they need help with. That's the main focus right now—just learning and listening.
I think we're in a really interesting time in the trust and safety content moderation industry—and tech in general.
There's a lot of pressure for companies to do more with less, and also a lot of pressure to keep disinformation at bay during the state of the world right now.
Many people are stuck between a rock and a hard place there. Figuring this out is a big job, but it’s also exciting, and there’s a lot of potential. Especially with a company like PartnerHero, where our job is to help partners do this exact difficult work and think about how we can do it well, efficiently, and in a positive way.
The great thing about people who do trust and safety work is that we all really care about our individual jobs and the users or partners that we serve, but we also care about society at large.
We care about doing good, helping people be healthy and happy—and that extends to helping each other in the industry as well.
I think that's one of the things that I'm most excited about being able to do.
A lot of your work background has been in dating services. Give us your best dating tip!
Just be yourself. Don't be the person you think other people want to see. If you're completely authentic, it's going to turn some people off, but it's better that you get that over with, anyway.
If you trick somebody into going on a date with you because you act like their perfect person, that's not a secret to long-term relationship success. It's just living a lie.
So, you might as well just put yourself out there as much as you feel comfortable with. You may get less people interested initially, but they are going to be the ones that you're most compatible with.
I think it's the same with a lot of things in life—job hunting, for example. It's the same in business. One of the things I like about PartnerHero is that it's not trying to be a neutral company that's palatable to absolutely everybody. It's very values-forward.
These values might not be compatible for every business out there, but for the ones who share our values, it’ll create a stronger partnership.
If you’re passionate and curious about the field, be sure to follow Alice on LinkedIn, peruse some of her curated TSCM resources, and listen to her podcast hosted by the Integrity Institute.
