Bijal Pathak

“Getting a job for someone who needs it is a good deed in my eyes.”

In 2004, Bijal Pathak sat down at a firm specializing in PeopleSoft, then a leading ERP platform, holding a fresh Master of Science in Computer Engineering and expecting to leave with a job in IT. She left instead with an offer to become a recruiter, extended by an owner who recognized a people person in her before she had fully recognized it in herself.

Twenty-two years later, Bijal is Vice President, Talent Strategy & Operations at Tech Observer, the staffing services and clinical research organization headquartered in Paramus, New Jersey. Bijal, based in South Brunswick, has been there since 2014, rising from Associate Director, IT Staffing to Director of Staffing and, in September 2025, to her current role. The thread running through all of it is the lesson of that first offer: the most revealing thing about a candidate is often not the job they came in asking for.

On paper, the offer was an unlikely fit. Bijal had trained as an engineer, and as an immigrant she needed a visa to keep working in the country. When the owner asked whether she would like to be a recruiter, she asked him what recruiters actually do. His answer sounded interesting, and her reasoning was practical. If the work did not suit her within a couple of months, she could return to what she had studied for.

It suited her. Bijal has never liked doing the same thing two days in a row, and recruiting delivered a new day every day: new people, ethnicities, locations, languages and skill sets. Always eager to learn, she found the role balanced both halves of her. Recruiting in the technical industry demanded the engineering grounding to understand what clients truly needed, and it rewarded the instinct to hear people's journeys and help them land.

Then came the gratitude. Candidates she placed sent flowers and cards and took her out for coffee or dinner. "That sealed the deal for me," she says. She is careful not to overstate the work, and would not put it alongside firefighting or medicine. Still, she says, "Getting a job for someone who needs it is a good deed in my eyes." A job with a two-hour commute, weak pay or daily misery is not the same as a job someone loves, and helping people find the second kind is, in her view, a blessing. She has held to that through a soft market in 2003 and 2004, through 2008 and through COVID.

Her path has included six and a half years at that first firm, a three-year maternity break after her son was born, a year and a half easing back into the workforce, and then Tech Observer. Today she meets clients, travels, and talks with new people every day about positions and needs, conversations that drift to hometowns, studies, families and kids. "No two of my days are similar, which is exactly what I wanted in my life."

Bijal still looks up to the owner who hired her. He had charisma and personality, but what stayed with her was his refusal to act like the owner. There was no sense that people had to behave a certain way around him. Everyone in the company loved him, and that, she says, is what made her admire him.

He also taught her the principle she has recruited by ever since. Do not judge a person only against the role they are applying for. Look at who they are and what they bring to the table, then decide where to place them. People often apply for the only work they know how to do, just as she once applied for engineering jobs. By looking at who she really was, she says, he changed her destiny.

She has repaid that many times. Candidates have come to her sensing they had something better suited to a different need, and she has placed them there. Many have ended up very happy, and some have later returned to say they were ready to change teams because their first role was not the right one.

Her current boss and mentor, Amit Krishnatry, CEO of Tech Observer, was her senior in college during her master's and a friend long before he opened his company and offered her a job. Like her first mentor, he is universally liked inside the company, with a gift for connecting with people and a natural pull toward business development over operations.

From Amit, Bijal learned how to talk to people, how to be present and what service really means. If a client says there is an issue, you can be there within 10 hours, anywhere in the world. If a candidate needs you at 8:00 on a Saturday evening, you answer. For a company that is not a giant, she argues, service is the best thing it can offer candidates and clients alike. Their friendship matters, but it is not why she has stayed 12 years. She stays because he is someone she has always wanted to be associated with.

Bijal holds deliberately contrasting views on AI, shaped partly by her husband, an AI data architect whose work exposed her to the technology before it went mainstream. The benefits are real. Tools from JobDiva, Indeed and LinkedIn cut her teams' time to recruit and get better candidates to clients faster. When three or four resumes all look qualified, AI helps her spot what her own eye misses. It speeds contract review and presentations and frees her time for higher-value work. Firms that fail to adopt new technology, she says, get left behind.

Yet she worries it is eroding people's thinking. Always strong with language, she notices the temptation to stop drafting her own emails at all. Clients are pushing back too, wanting recruiters to use AI while rejecting resumes that AI wrote. Trust has declined as authenticity grows harder to verify. Her answer is balance, much like the work-life balance people have pursued for a century. If the industry can pair AI with the human touch, she says, nothing can beat that combination.

Her advice is aimed at leaders at larger firms: widen your thinking about smaller ones. In competitive bids, the bigger company usually wins on size, headcount and track record. But a smaller firm often delivers more, because it has more at risk. For a large company an engagement is one project. For a small one it can be a major stake in revenue.

That same breadth defines her own job. Bijal resists being categorized as simply a recruiting or talent acquisition leader, because at a firm like Tech Observer, the role always means wearing multiple hats.