Thirteen Years of Paying Attention.
Complex hiring isn't just a recruiting problem.
It's an operating problem.
I partner with Design organizations to build the systems, decision support, and shared operating environments that help recruiting teams and hiring leaders make better hiring decisions together.
the short version, at least.Every hiring manager builds real judgment about what "great" looks like. Then the search ends, and that judgment disappears — the next one starts from zero, rebuilding knowledge that already existed somewhere.
A candidate believed she was leaving $250,000 on the table. The real number was closer to $28,000. The gap wasn't in her math — it was in what nobody had told her clearly enough.
A committee doesn't fail because it lacks information. It fails when the same concern is hiding in three different places and the real signal gets lost in the reconstruction.
Every system has two sides:
the one that scales,
and the one people actually have to live with.
I design for both.
Strategic infrastructure — the frameworks, rubrics, tools, and playbooks I design so that great hiring doesn't depend on any one person's memory or availability.
I believe every touchpoint in the hiring process is a design decision. The way I open a call, close a rejection, prep a candidate, and communicate through silence — none of that is personality. It's practice.
I don't manage hiring managers. I earn their trust, learn how they think, and become genuinely invested in their success. The best partnerships I've built weren't assigned — they were designed, conversation by conversation.
I think in systems before I think in tasks. Every search I run has a plan behind it — phased, de-risked, and designed to compress the distance between first screen and confident hire.
One of the questions I ask candidates most often is:
"Are you thriving, or are you surviving?"
It isn't a screening question. It's an invitation. The answer doesn't change whether someone is qualified. It changes how we begin the conversation.
Every system on this site ultimately exists to create better moments between people.
Months after one search concluded, the candidate shared this publicly:
"I had a feeling about this one from the very first question they asked me. Not a screening question, a human one, and it left room for an honest answer. The rest of the process went exactly the same way."
Robert Ritacca·Principal Product Designer
For me, that's the real measure of success. Not that a role closed. Not that a system worked. That the experience remained consistently human from the first conversation to the last.
Outcomes, not projections.
Thirteen years in recruiting — Amazon, Adobe, Twitter, Rakuten, Gusto. Always the most senior, most ambiguous searches. But recruiting was never the throughline.
I walk into environments where something doesn't exist yet, wasn't working, or needed to mature. I build the missing infrastructure. I leave behind systems that continue creating value after I've moved on.
At Gusto, that looked like Hiring Compass — a Claude-native AI system that preserves how hiring managers think. At iTrellis, it looked like rebuilding an entire recruiting function from scratch. At Amazon, it looked like changing how a team approached diverse talent.
The title has always been recruiter. The practice has long been informed by service design — but what I actually build are operating environments: the systems, rhythms, and decision infrastructure that outlast any single hire.
I'm currently exploring senior staff and principal recruiting roles, along with talent strategy and operations roles built around AI-assisted hiring decisions.
"Great hiring doesn't happen because you find exceptional people. It happens because you build exceptional systems for recognizing them."