Andre Boulais

The Story He Still Tells

Ask Boulais for a favorite moment from his agency years and he does not reach for a revenue figure. He reaches for a family. An executive search for a large healthcare customer's revenue cycle division led him to a candidate in Florida with a son, then seven or eight years old, who was one of the best young divers in the country. The boy needed to be training and qualifying in the Indianapolis natatorium. Boulais relocated the whole family to Indiana. A few years ago, that son dove in the Olympics.

It is a story about sacrifice, patience, and the long tail of a single placement, and it explains a lot about how Boulais has approached every role since. Recruiting, in his telling, is rarely about the transaction in front of you. It is about what the transaction makes possible a decade later.

Building at the Intersection

Boulais was recruited to ExactTarget in Indianapolis when it was the fastest growing digital marketing SaaS company around, and was asked to build out a sourcing function, something he had never formally done. Executive recruiting, he reasoned, is mostly sourcing anyway. He built a global sourcing team that supported a 45 person talent acquisition organization, rode the company through its IPO and three acquisitions, and stayed through the Salesforce acquisition, where he credited the leadership with teaching him an enormous amount.

After roughly ten years inside talent acquisition, he crossed to the technology side, leaving Salesforce as the first employee in Indiana at Jobvite. There he worked with CEO Dan Finnegan to build the professional services division for the CRM, and later the website and SMS products. The team grew exponentially and spawned a managed services business in which companies paid consulting fees for Boulais's teams to embed and build recruiting strategy directly with them. That work spanned six continents. One engagement with a cybersecurity client helped accelerate global hiring and, by his account, got the company to IPO two years earlier than planned.

He went on to build professional services and customer success for Entelo, then the leading DEI software, which had early AI capability for predictive analytics on next role fit, and later joined an AI startup where he saw firsthand what automation could do for healthcare and hospitality employers. He has since become Senior Vice President of Revenue and Customer Success at Betterleap. Across all of it, the through line is consistent: transformation, talent acquisition, and technology, sitting on top of one another.

Three People, Three Lessons

Boulais is reluctant to name only three mentors because the list is long, but he starts with LaDonna Tucker. She taught him to address the problem in the room, up front, rather than letting it fester. When his team's software rollout at Schneider Electric was not landing well, she gave them the grace to listen and build an alternative rather than writing them off, then opened doors for the product across other global regions. The lesson stuck: "You've got to earn the trust to really have validation, and then once you have that trust, make sure that you keep it." His closet full of Schneider Electric polos and fleeces from visits to England is a physical record of the principle he took from her, that a good partner is not a software vendor but an extension of the customer's team.

MT Ray, his director at ExactTarget and then at Salesforce, taught him accountability. She led by example, demanded the best from everyone, put people on growth paths, and was not afraid to call someone to task. Boulais learned what candid advice actually sounds like from her. She now coaches leaders in the Indianapolis area.

Craig Fisher he calls one of the biggest influences in his life. A global speaker on recruitment marketing and employer branding, Fisher was first a customer at CA Technologies, where he led global talent acquisition and brand, and where Boulais's team spent four days on Long Island with colleagues who had flown in from around the world, listening to pain points and goals before rolling out a single line of software. Everyone had buy-in, and the transformation followed. Fisher's lesson was that listening to the customer's strategy is essential, but so is having the voice to push back when something will not work. That, Boulais says, is what a real partner does. Fisher also runs TalentNet Live, the longest running talent conference in the Southwest, which Boulais has attended and spoken at, and has built a free chatbot for early career professionals to explore what roles fit them. From that, Boulais took a broader lesson about generosity: always give back as much as you take.

He describes having had "a council of elders" guiding his career, and now finds himself on the other side of that exchange. "I think as a leader the best thing that we can do is to make sure that we pay it forward and help cultivate that next generation of leaders."

AI as a Tool, Not a Verdict

Boulais has worked alongside AI for far longer than most talent leaders, and his central observation is about velocity. "It's gotten here a lot faster than everybody thought," he says. He spoke on the subject at a conference a year and a half ago, at TalentNet Live last year, and to a room of CHROs and CEOs roughly a year ago, and the acceleration between those appearances has been, in his words, extremely fascinating.

His framing is deliberately unglamorous. AI is a tool like any other, and what matters is how humans wield it. One of his favorite presentation slides makes the point sideways: he asks a room who is using AI for everything, and a handful of hands go up. Then he asks who has a smartphone. Every hand goes up. Twenty years ago, he points out, telling people they would carry all of those capabilities in one pocket device would have sounded absurd.

The proof he offers is a large restaurant group that was seeing 90 percent no-shows for interviews using traditional methods, a genuine threat to a short staffed operation. After deploying an AI recruiting platform, the number inverted: 90 percent showing up, with half of those candidates receiving offers. What Boulais highlights is not the automation but the division of labor. The software generated a fit score. The human still made the decision. For him, that is the whole point, and the best AI implementations he has seen do not remove people from the process so much as give them back the time to be present in it.