Omaha, 2014. I walked into a Whole Foods Market for the first time as an employee, and the first thing that got me was the smell of the food. Then the Team Members, who actually seemed glad to be there, and customers smiling at people they knew by name. I had spent years recruiting for companies I admired from a distance. That was the first time I walked into one and thought, I want to be part of whatever this is.
I inherited a team of one. Me. Twelve years later it was fifteen people, and I had placed more than a hundred and twenty leaders at vice president and above, including the CFO, the CMO, the CTO, the General Counsel, two EVPs of Operations, two Presidents, and eleven SVPs. After the Amazon acquisition I placed the CTO and a run of VP Engineering and VP Technology leaders, and built an in house cohort of a hundred and fifty software, data, and machine learning engineers in eight months without going to an agency once.
The work started earlier than that. My first recruiting job was bringing tennis players to the University of Nebraska, which is where I learned you're never selling a program. You're asking somebody to change their life and trust you about it. Later I led a team of six to open Talent Plus's first Latin America office in Bogota, the city I grew up in, with a client list that ran Ritz-Carlton, JW Marriott, HSBC, Scotiabank, and Microsoft Retail.
Thirty years doing this work and the thing I keep coming back to is small. A calling is identity. A job is a transaction. I've sat with people running billion dollar companies and with twenty two year olds walking into their first real interview, and the conversations are not as different as you'd think.
I run People ATX in Austin with Jami Adkins. I'm on the board of GoodCitizen. My dog Darwin comes to the office and has opinions about the meetings.
Every interview is a human library.
