I started my career in consulting, wide-eyed, hungry, and honestly a little lucky. That's where I learned technical recruiting, working with big names like Microsoft and Amazon as clients, and I was lucky to get the kind of exposure that shaped the professional I am today. Across a few firms during those early years, I learned to recruit for almost any skill and in any industry, and how to earn and maintain a client's trust from the first call to the last.

It was a wonderful learning experience. And yet, something kept tapping on the glass. I was good at the work, but quietly searching for the part that would give it meaning. I hadn't found it yet.

Those years taught me a lot, but they also helped me understand where I truly belong. I've realized that I'm happiest in startups, where things move quickly, nothing is perfectly figured out, and there's always something new to build. I love that energy. I love building great teams, solving messy problems, and helping companies grow without losing the heart behind the work.

Then I joined a fashion-tech AI startup as their very first talent hire. No process, no playbook, just a fast-moving company and one exhilarating instruction: build the team. So I did, across engineering, product, sales, marketing, quality, and editorial, six wildly different teams at once. We'd made over 150 hires, and I'd trained someone to run the whole thing so I could move to what was next.

Somewhere in all that chaos, I found the thing that had been missing. Purpose. A kind of joy I still struggle to put into words. Startups don't treat hiring as a transaction; every hire is the company's future walking through the door. That mattered to me. It still does.

Then came a Canadian AI company, where I joined as the first talent partner and built the function entirely remotely.

This one tested me. No local presence, no brand anyone knew, a team spread across time zones who'd never heard of us. The hard part was never the recruiting; it was earning trust from a screen, one honest conversation at a time. So I built a hiring process that was simple, consistent, and could grow with us. Over a few years, we grew the team past 100 people across three continents, and held a 95 percent offer-acceptance rate the whole way.

It's still one of the proudest stretches of my career. Not for the numbers, though I'm human, and I'm proud of them, but for what it proved: trust travels, if you're willing to be real.

The hardest searches aren't the people you can't find. They're the ones everyone has already found. For years I ran CTO, VP Engineering, and Principal searches in markets so thin that the few people who could do the job were already known, usually already holding another offer by the time I reached them.

At that level, you cannot sell your way to a yes. The people who won these candidates were the ones who simply told the truth. So I stopped pitching and started listening, really listening, to what each person wanted next.