Alva He

From Nonprofit Rooms To Amazon Scale To Startup Zero

Alva He started out supporting a nonprofit organization, and that is where the foundation of everything else was poured: connecting with people one conversation at a time, without a brand name doing the persuading for her. What she also discovered was an appetite for velocity. That pull took her to Amazon, where she spent roughly three and a half years supporting AWS and the Amazon Stores team, learning what recruiting looks like at a scale most practitioners only read about.

In 2023, her entire recruiting team was laid off. She describes the moment as a plain inventory of her own conviction, two questions asked directly: did she still create value in her conversations with candidates, and was talent acquisition still the work she wanted? The answer to both was yes. Her conclusion was characteristically practical. She had spent years hiring builders. Why not become one?

Since 2023 she has operated in the startup world, standing up a recruiting function from the ground up and adding experience supporting government programs along the way. Prevail.ai is the current chapter, and the environment suits her: a lean team, a technical bar, and a mandate broad enough that she treats business acumen as part of the job description rather than a nice extra. She is also part of Seattle SHRM, deliberately staying close to HR leaders as well as recruiting peers, and she has watched talent acquisition leaders in her own network, among them Sandeep, Jay and Michael, earn Talent 100 recognition.

The People Who Shaped The Work

Ask most recruiters to name the people who carried them and you get a list of managers. Alva He names those too, the hiring managers and recruiting managers who helped shape her path through a difficult transition, but she insists on adding a group that rarely makes the credits: the candidates themselves.

Her reasoning is unsentimental. Because she had spent years building real relationships and a real reputation, the network she needed in 2023 already existed, and it was made largely of people she had once guided through a hiring process. She stays in touch long after a search closes, checks in without an agenda, and works from a simple premise: you never know when the opportunity will arise. Reputation, in her telling, is not a soft asset in recruiting. It is the asset.

She is equally quick to promote peers. She points to Malia, who leads talent acquisition at PitchBook, and Roger, a former Amazon colleague whose path has run through Intuit and, more recently, Remitly, as generous operators with deep resources and a habit of showing up for other people in the field.

Where AI Ends And The Recruiter Begins

Alva He calls herself a life learner and adopts new technology readily. She also draws a line, and she draws it in a specific place. AI, in her view, will not replace the recruiter. So she does not lean on heavy AI filtering when she screens, her organization does not hand candidate conversations over to AI, and she still prefers speaking with people directly. Rejections go out as personalized emails rather than templates, a small operational cost she considers a meaningful part of the candidate experience.

Sourcing is where she says yes to the machines without hesitation. That is the repetitive, high volume, top of funnel work where automation earns its keep, and she evaluates tooling with the same rigor she applies to hiring itself. Her team recently renewed its Greenhouse contract, and she remains actively open to adding sourcing tools, in part because LinkedIn Recruiter Lite has not proved efficient enough for the way she works. The philosophy is consistent: automate the search, protect the conversation.

Document, Reflect, Keep Sourcing

Her guidance for other talent leaders is built for the reality many of them are living: a single recruiter, a thin requisition list, and real uncertainty about the next two quarters. Start with positivity, she says, then get disciplined about documentation. Write down your accomplishments. Take genuine time to reflect on which of your skills transfer.

Then answer the harder question. If hiring slows and you are the only talent acquisition person at a startup, what are you actually going to do with the next six months? Her own answer is to operate as though she sits at the C level, thinking like a CEO or CTO about where the company is heading and never letting the funnel go cold. She sources anyway. She builds pipeline for roles 18 months out. She sharpens her business acumen, shows up to talent acquisition events in San Francisco and Seattle, and keeps connecting with HR and talent leaders so that her network is strongest before she needs it.

It is the same logic that carried her out of 2023 and into a recruiting lead seat at an AI company, applied forward. Relationships first, documented value second, and a pipeline that never stops filling.