Victor Arias
Senior Client Partner | Korn Ferry International
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
For more than fifteen years, Victor Arias sat on the board of directors for Popeyes. It was a prestigious position that carried a lot of responsibility, but Arias sees it as being much more significant.
“It’s very difficult to get elected, and many executives would like to get on corporate boards,” he says. “It’s really a hot area, but to be truthful, the playing field has not been level in terms of having the appropriate representation. The representation on corporate boards in the past ten years has slightly improved, but not much.”
It’s for that reason that Arias has built his career on networking and advocating for Latino inclusion at the highest levels of corporate America. That led to his involvement as a cofounder of both the Latino Corporate Directors Association, and the National Society of Hispanic MBAs (NSHMBA), now Prospanica.
When NSHMBA was founded, Arias was working in Chicago, and he recognized the need for a network of Hispanic professionals.
“At the time, if I found anybody who looked Hispanic and professional with a suit on, I’d go grab them off the street, essentially,” he says. “Anyway, that’s how we built and grew NSHMBA.”
Since then, Prospanica has grown to include more than 29,000 members, and Arias has built his career on reaching out to people. In fact, his specialty is executive recruitment, and his network is invaluable in his role at Korn Ferry.
“I’ve been blessed to be a really good networker, and I really value those relationships,” he says. “That’s really worked well for me as I transitioned to executive recruiting because it’s about relationships.”
El Paso Roots
Victor Arias was born in and grew up in El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Mexico. And being a second generation Mexican American, that experience was foundational for Arias.
“The border was very transparent,” he says. “We used to go across a lot. It was just very bicultural.”
During Arias’s childhood, his father worked at a furniture store on pure commission and also moonlighted at the railroad during graveyard shifts. He says his parents sacrificed a lot to encourage education and pay for him and his siblings to attend Catholic schools.
Following high school, Arias got a scholarship to attend his hometown college, the University of Texas at El Paso. Following graduation, he went on to earn an MBA at Stanford and built the career he has today, never forgetting his formative experiences of living just a stone’s throw away from the US
southern border.
