Catherine McClure

A Portfolio of Founders

McClure's remit at Audacious is unusual in shape. Rather than filling one company's org chart, she works across a portfolio of companies, running searches and sending candidates on to different founders. Her specialty is go-to-market, the sales and revenue roles that decide whether a young company scales, and her day is spent moving between candidates, hiring managers and founders rather than between a single set of requisitions.

That structure puts a premium on knowing exactly what a strong seller looks like before a founder ever meets one. It is the part of the craft she credits most directly to the people who trained her.

The People Who Taught Her

The first name McClure reaches for is Justine Songey, the sales leader she reported to directly at Verkada. Songey gave her the foundation for what she knows today about go-to-market hiring: what great actually looks like in a salesperson, and which profiles are worth building a search around. It is the kind of pattern recognition that is difficult to learn from a job description and easy to learn from someone who has hired and managed the people in question.

The second is Sam Price at Audacious, the talent partner McClure now works under and her first recruiting manager. Price has helped her up-level in ways she had not encountered before, bringing new ideas and a fresh perspective to parts of the job McClure had only learned by doing. Between the two of them, she says, is most of the reason she is where she is.

Automate the Admin, Protect the Human Part

The tooling around McClure's job has changed faster than the job itself. A year or so ago, she notes, the AI stack for most recruiters amounted to one thing: ChatGPT, used for messaging. Today her workflow runs on purpose-built software. She sources with Juicebox. She uses Granola for notes, which lets conversations be transcribed and routed to founders almost automatically, collapsing what used to be a long write-up into something close to instant.

The point, for her, is not the tools but what they return. "So much of the admin work of recruiting has been automated," she says, which frees her for the work that actually requires her: talking to candidates, walking them through the process, partnering with hiring managers and founders. She gets meaningfully more done in the same amount of time than she did before, and she is candid about enjoying the moment. Recruiting, she says, has become a well served market within AI.

She is equally candid about the risk of standing still. If a recruiter is still using ChatGPT alone and believes that counts as fluency in AI, she warns, they will be left behind. Her read on why people stall is practical. The scariest part of AI, she says, is the first time you use it and have to work out how it works. Getting over that hump and staying open to the next tool is, in her view, what will change the game for recruiters generally.

Authenticity as Technique

Asked what advice she would give other talent leaders, McClure lands somewhere unexpected for someone so fluent in automation. Do not be afraid to make mistakes in recruiting. Do not be afraid to offer your opinion and your advice. Be truly authentic to who you are.

She is aware of the pull toward the transactional, which she says varies with the type of company a recruiter works for, and she treats resisting it as part of the discipline. "There's always a human on the other side," she says. Candidates make mistakes. Recruiters make mistakes. Everyone in the process is a person, whether AI sits in the workflow or not, and that holds for the people being hired as much as the people doing the hiring.

She extends the same generosity to her peers in the recruiting community. It is consistent with how she describes her own path: built alongside other people, and better for it.