Locking Arms to Build a Market: How Emily Corish Leads Gravity’s Tampa Office
A career in staffing is built one relationship at a time, with the clients who trust you, the consultants who count on you, and the leaders willing to teach you what they know. For Emily Corish, Director of Business Operations in Tampa, that is exactly how the last six years have gone.
How It All Started
Emily’s path to Gravity started at the Florida State University career fair in 2019, when Co-Founder Steve
Dettor pulled her aside, from an aisle away, as she tells it, for a conversation that turned into an interview with Co-Founder Rick Connolly the very next day.
“The rest is history,” Emily says of that meeting, six years and a market of her own later.
It still catches her off guard how much time has passed. “It feels crazy to say that it was that long ago,” she says with a laugh. That single conversation at a career fair set the course for everything that followed.
From Recruiter to Market Leader
Like everyone who joins Gravity out of college, Emily started as a recruiter. She quickly found herself drawn to the client-facing side of the business and moved into account management. From there, Rick and Steve gave her the opportunity to open a brand-new market in Tampa.
The timing lined up with a personal goal. Emily had wanted to move to Tampa, and leadership supported it. Four and a half years later, she has built the office from the ground up, with a strong focus on healthcare clients. Today she leads a lean team, and her goal is to keep growing it alongside Tampa’s expanding market.
“We have this core team of people that are really bought in to be partners in the business,” Emily says. “It’s exciting right now to lock arms and grow with them.”
Working Alongside High Achievers
Ask Emily what motivates her day to day, and she points to the people around her.
“Everyone here is incredibly high achieving and pushes each other to be their best,” she says. “Everyone is striving to be their best every day.”
That environment is also what she points to when asked what makes Gravity different: early responsibility, real growth, and a culture that rewards effort. “You truly get out what you put in,” she says. “Gravity is a great example of an organization that rewards hard-working, high achievers with the opportunity to grow professionally and personally.”
A Six-Week Reminder That Gravity Means It
Ask Emily her favorite benefit, and the answer comes without hesitation: the sabbatical. After five years of service, Gravity employees earn six weeks of fully paid time off, a policy Emily calls “unheard of in corporate America.”
She took hers this summer, traveling through Greece, Croatia, and Montenegro, with stops in Athens, Santorini, Mykonos, Crete, and Corfu. Croatia won her over.
What made it work was not just the paid time off. It was watching her team and leadership rally to cover the business while she was gone. “It reinforces the genuine care that each of our leaders and team members have for one another,” she says.
Learning From a Mentor
When asked who shaped her leadership style, Emily points to Mike Mendella, who was an account manager when she joined and worked alongside her closely from the start. As Mike grew into leadership, he brought Emily with him, mentoring her along the way.
“He’s been a wonderful partner to help me grow personally and professionally,” Emily says. “Definitely a huge stamp on my BD ability and my leadership.”
Leading as a Partner, Not Just a Boss
That mentorship shows up in how Emily runs her own office. Rather than positioning herself as the sole authority in the room, she leans on relationship building to create trust, accountability, and shared ownership across her team.
“I like my team to look at all of us as partners growing this business, not just one leader in an office,” she says. “I try to be pretty collaborative.” That shows up in the small details too. Her team sits right across the hall, always within easy reach for a quick conversation.
What’s Next
Looking ahead, Emily is focused on what got her here: growing Tampa’s healthcare client base and developing the recruiters and account managers already on her team. It is the same formula that built the office in the first place. Invest in people, show up consistently, and let the results follow.
Six years in, and one office later, Emily’s story is a reminder of what happens when Gravity’s culture works exactly as intended. Someone gets pulled into a conversation at a career fair, and eventually starts pulling others into their own.
About Gravity IT Resources
Gravity is a Human Capital Management company headquartered in Fort Lauderdale with offices across the country including Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbus, Cincinnati, Nashville, DC, Salt Lake City, San Diego and Tampa. Our company has been recognized by Inc. Magazine as an “Inc. 5000” award winner and one of the fastest growing privately held companies in the United States for the last 7 consecutive years (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025). Additionally, Gravity is proud to be Great Place to Work certified for the 5th year in a row (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025) and was also recognized on the SIA’s Fastest-Growing Staffing Firms in the US list the last two years (2024, 2025).
Gravity helps prominent clients like Salesforce, Chewy, Carnival Cruise Lines, AutoNation, Mosaic and hundreds of other enterprise and SMB companies to identify, recruit and hire IT professionals for their most critical projects and jobs. Our recruitment spans across various roles, including artificial intelligence (AI) specialists, software engineers, cloud engineers, project managers, data engineers, business analysts, security engineers, CXO leaders and more.
Gravity provides a variety of delivery models and services designed to meet client needs efficiently and effectively.
- Contract, Contract-to-Hire & Direct Hire of US-based Resources
- Nearshore Staff Augmentation
- Managed Team Services
- Executive Search
- ERP Program Leadership
- Workday Certified Staffing Partner
To learn more about Gravity IT Resources practices, career opportunities and culture, visit gravityitresources.com
