Ben Blundell

An Apex Start, Twenty Years On

The origin story is the one plenty of recruiters share, but Blundell tells it without any retroactive polish. He came out of college with a business degree and a handful of friends who had graduated a year or two ahead of him and landed at Apex Systems. They told him he would be great at it. Apex was among the first offers he received, and he ran with it.

He turned out to be right for the work, and the work turned out to be right for him. What began as a first job became a career that has since carried him through agency leadership, through Google, and into the high velocity world of venture backed technology companies. Twenty years later, he still sounds slightly surprised by the arithmetic. "I can't believe it's been 20 years," he says.

The Leaders Who Set the Standard

Ask Blundell who shaped him and the list starts at the very beginning. Lane Gerritsen, his first manager at Apex Systems, remains a touchstone two decades on. Blundell describes him as an amazing person, an amazing father and an amazing leader, and the fact that the two have stayed in touch for roughly twenty years says more than the adjectives do. Gerritsen taught him that the job is not separable from the character of the person doing it.

Greg Garrison, whom Blundell worked with at Google, taught a different lesson and taught it by example. Joining Google meant a deliberate step backward for Blundell, who had been leading teams and chose to return to an individual contributor role for the chance to get inside the company. Garrison made a set of promises to him during that transition. "He kept every single one," Blundell says. In an industry that runs on commitments made to candidates, a leader who honors his own is the kind of model that sticks.

The third name on his list is the one he is proudest of, and it is not a boss. Ryan Peterson had no recruiting experience when Blundell hired him for his first recruiting job at Google. Peterson has since gone on to lead executive recruiting at OpenAI, where he also served as interim head of recruiting. "He's doing things that most recruiters could never imagine being able to do," Blundell says, crediting Peterson with helping shape modern tech recruiting. Calder Zwerling, who was on Blundell's team at Google, went on to a long run as a recruiting manager at Meta and now leads talent at Gamma. For Blundell, that pattern is the point. Watching the people he brought into the industry become successful is, in his words, one of the things he enjoys most about being a leader in it.

Governance Before Acceleration

Blundell calls himself a believer in responsible use of new technology, and the emphasis belongs on both halves of that phrase. He was an early adopter of Juicebox and credits its founders, David and Ishan, with genuinely building for the industry rather than around it. At Meter, his team currently runs on Juicebox and LinkedIn's agents.

But his advice to other leaders begins with restraint rather than enthusiasm. Put strict governance around how AI is used. Build the process first. "If you rely on it too much and you don't have solid process and you don't have a structured environment that already works, then you can end up missing a lot of the human interaction that's needed in this industry," he says. Do it the other way, with defined human touchpoints and disciplined review of whatever the models produce, and the productivity of every individual on the team goes up.

He is especially direct about the fashionable promise of the moment. "You can't take a bad process or a poor performing recruiter and give them AI and expect them to 10x themselves," he says. "You have to start with something that's good from the human standpoint and then add on top of it." His practical counsel for teams beginning the journey: do not overwhelm yourself or your people. Start with one or two solutions. AI note taking is his favorite entry point, a tool like Granola running quietly in the background so a recruiter can stop transcribing and start actually listening. Add slowly, and put governance in place for every tool that comes through the door.

The Case for Staying Human

Underneath the tooling philosophy sits something simpler, drawn from what Blundell has observed in every successful recruiter he has worked alongside. Stay human. Have empathy. Listen.

He wants recruiters to remember what the process feels like from the other side of the screen. Finding a job, he points out, is one of the most annoying, nerve wracking and stressful experiences a person goes through, and the candidate on the call is living it. No model is going to feel that on a recruiter's behalf. What a great recruiter offers instead is a real relationship and an honest belief that the opportunity will improve someone's career or their life.

That belief has to be earned, which is why his advice to anyone entering the field is to find a recruiting job where the mission and the company are worth believing in. He has found that in his most recent roles. And when the pitch has been made and the information delivered, he is clear about where authority actually sits. It is the candidate's choice. The recruiter's job is to give them what they need to make the best decision for themselves, and then to respect the answer.