John likes to apply systems thinking to recruiting. His specialty is taking the time to deeply understand business, people, technology, and data in concert, which ultimately helps him build world-class, well-oiled recruiting processes.
Highlights
The bootstrapped start
John figured out he wanted to be a recruiter when he was still a student at UC Berkeley, where he was a first-generation university graduate. From there, he navigated the waters of bootstrapping his own recruiting firm with a business partner and got it off the ground.
Uber
John joined Uber in its hyper-growth rollercoaster ride, and was initially hired to recruit senior software engineers for the company’s maps organization and later work on centralized leadership recruiting. In his role, simply funneling candidates through wouldn’t have been enough. John read through materials to understand maps technology in order to tie that back to Uber’s mission, which ultimately helped him sell the impact and story to candidates. He also built pipeline trackers and generated data insights that gave visibility to underlying issues and created opportunities to remediate them.
John greatly exceeded expectations by overdelivering on recruiting goals and for having a highly targeted approach. He worked on difficult senior leadership searches spanning across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. While there, John was also a Diversity & Inclusion team lead, working closely with major stakeholders to foster an ecosystem that attracted and retained diverse talent.
For John, the work he enjoys most as a builder is creating from the ground up and fixing things that are broken, whether that’s an old computer that doesn’t work anymore or a fragmented recruiting process.
Superpowers
Thinking like a founder
John works with many of our founders directly, creating and building out their recruiting plans. From there, he executes on candidate searches and hires for very difficult-to-hire roles, which includes everything from founding engineers to functional leads.
Finding the right people
John always has the best interest of the companies he works with at heart. He’s always thinking about how to make the absolute right hire, not the easy hire. Often, this requires deep listening, with a direct and candid approach to feedback.
Education
Over the years, John has built out onboarding plans, decks, workshops, and classes to help educate managers and peers alike.
