Alexi Raymond

The Military of Recruitment

Her first stop was Aerotek, the Allegis staffing company, and she describes that chapter with affection and no illusions. She refers to the agency world, affectionately, as the military of recruitment. It is where the fundamentals get drilled in: traditional Boolean searches, volume, follow through, and the discipline to keep working the phones. She saw a lot of success there. She also saw its limits.

What pulled her in house was the candidate. In agency work, she says, you are doing many different things at once, and the experience is not truly built around the person on the other end of the line. So she moved internal, and the move paid off quickly. A promotion became her first management role, leading hiring across B2B sales: SDRs, BDRs, account executives, VPs of sales, and recruiters.

Then Shopify came knocking. Who says no to Shopify, she asks, and the question answers itself. The value of that stretch was less about any single requisition than about calibration. She got to see how a well oiled machine really works, what mature process looks like at scale, and what a genuinely resourced talent function can accomplish. A cybersecurity company followed. By then she had collected the two reference points most talent leaders never get side by side: the grind of the agency and the machinery of a category defining tech brand.

Rebuilding a Function From the Inside

At PAR Technology, Raymond did the thing that separates operators from executors. She arrived as a contractor and, before changing anything, she listened. She wanted to understand why the company was doing things the way it was doing them, a discipline that is easy to describe and rare to practice when a new recruiter shows up with opinions and a mandate.

What followed was a full rebuild of the talent acquisition practice from start to finish. She ran RFPs, including a background check RFP, and reset the process end to end. She implemented AI across the TA workflow rather than bolting it onto the edges. And she hired what she describes as some really great recruiters, which is its own quiet measure of a talent leader: the ability to run the process on herself and get it right.

It is worth noting the scale at which much of this happened. For long stretches of her career, she says, it is usually just her by herself. The rebuilds, the vendor evaluations, the process design, the hiring of the team that would carry it forward: much of that has been done as a function of one, which makes the throughput more impressive, not less.

From Tactical to Strategic

Ask Raymond what is actually reshaping talent acquisition and she does not lead with tools. She leads with posture. The most important shift, she argues, is TA moving "away from being a tactical practice to being more of a strategic lens," which means genuinely advising stakeholders on the profiles they are hiring rather than simply filling what lands in the queue.

She was early to the tooling. Raymond began using AI back in 2022 to build structured hiring guides, at a point when the alternative was digging through a question bank. The gain was not only speed. It was definition. Generating those guides let her articulate the repeatable skill set a role actually required, which sharpened how talent was defined before anyone ever met a candidate. Her position on this is unambiguous: there is no excuse now for skipping standardized hiring best practice.

She sees the same forces reshaping roles further down the org chart, and she sees it as an upgrade. With the right AI tools, she says, recruitment coordinators are turning into recruitment ops. The work becomes understanding data and telling a story with it: recruitment funnels, conversion rates, quality of hire, and vacancy to start, which she singles out as a particularly powerful metric.

Her clearest illustration of the strategic lens is a sales hire. Rather than accepting a requisition and running it, she will look at the KPI funnels of the company's best salesperson, then work with the hiring leader to mirror those signals inside the evaluation process so the profile can be replicated deliberately. Telling a stakeholder that a role has been filled is the old job. Designing a process that hires that caliber of talent over and over again is the new one. And she is direct that the payoff is not only efficiency. Used well, she says, these tools produce a more fair process.

The People Who Set the Standard

Raymond credits a short list of leaders with specific, traceable lessons. Sarah Knopfler managed her when she first moved into internal recruitment, an unusual arrangement in which Raymond reported into the head of learning and development. Not normative for anyone in TA, she notes, but formative: it taught her to set expectations, to deliver inside a smaller business, and to position herself as the subject matter expert in the room rather than the order taker.

Sophie Taylor, who referred her, modeled something Raymond considers badly underrated. She advocated for the talent acquisition team. "I think that really is a world of difference when people advocate for TA," Raymond says, in a profession she believes is too often overlooked despite the value it adds by getting the right people into the business.

Henry Chung, her manager at Aerotek, supplied the standard. He held an unusually high bar for what good looked like, and under him excuses were never an option. The role got closed. That expectation, Raymond says, gave her the grit she has carried forward, along with a comfort most recruiters never fully build: sustaining real outreach volume, and never being scared to ask a person to commit to a role. She sums up his defining quality in two words. Intense rigor. If anyone is going to teach you to be a solid recruiter with phenomenal follow through, she says, it is Henry.

Greg Thorpe, her manager at Shopify, offered the counterweight. He came into talent acquisition without a traditional TA background, which Raymond finds genuinely interesting, and he proved the two things are not in tension: he makes talent acquisition fun while driving really great results and making sure his team is taken care of. Between Chung's rigor and Thorpe's culture, the lineage of Raymond's own leadership philosophy is easy to trace.