Chris Russell

From Job Board Operator to Industry Chronicler

Russell ran that first job board for roughly 13 years before selling it, a full arc from scrappy launch to exit inside a category he helped define locally. He then moved to the other side of the desk and became a corporate recruiter, an experience that gave him something most analysts covering the space do not have: firsthand knowledge of what it actually feels like to fill a requisition.

About a decade ago he left corporate recruiting and started RecTech Media. The mission is simple to state and hard to execute: help the modern recruiter understand what is happening with technology. He runs a set of news websites for the space, produces a podcast in both audio and video, and covers industry events. He describes the work with characteristic understatement, calling himself part analyst, part blogger, part reporter. In practice he functions as a translation layer between a fast moving vendor market and the practitioners who have to live with the tools.

"It's a very tech-heavy profession these days," he says. "You have to know how to use technology to hire talent." That conviction is the through line of his entire career, and it explains why RecTech exists at all.

Self-Made, By Design

Ask Russell who opened the doors for him and he answers plainly: he built the path himself. "No one told me to start a job board. I just went and did it." He learned the internet and HTML on his own in the late 1990s, and he has treated every technology wave since the same way, as something to be taken apart and understood rather than waited out.

He is quick to add that he still reads and still listens to a handful of voices he respects. But after nearly three decades, the direction of influence has largely reversed. Today he is the person other practitioners read to figure out what matters, and he takes that responsibility seriously enough to keep publishing on a relentless cadence.

When asked to name others in the industry worth recognizing, he pointed to two people without hesitation: Joel Cheesman, who runs the Chad and Cheese podcast, which Russell calls probably the biggest podcast in the space, and Kirsten Greggs, a solo recruiter and longtime friend in the Washington, D.C. area. For someone who built his own reputation from scratch, the instinct to redirect the spotlight says something.

Inside the AI War Between Job Seekers and Employers

Russell uses AI every day. As a working writer and publisher, it is his drafting partner: he will take a company press release and shape it into a news article, generate outlines and story ideas, and produce blog imagery. He has not yet moved into vibe coding, though he wants to, and he is candid about wanting to build apps of his own. He has watched others get there first. He interviewed Mike Wolford, an author and recruiter who has used vibe coding to build his own sourcing tools, and he cites it as an example of what the savviest recruiters are already doing with the technology.

His larger read on the industry is sharper, and it is the kind of framing that gets quoted back at conferences. "Right now we're in the middle of an AI war between job seekers and employers," he says. Candidates are using AI to strengthen resumes and to mass apply. Employers, buried under the resulting surge in applications, cannot physically read them all, so they are deploying AI to sort, filter, and rank. Both sides keep escalating. "Now resumes all look the same essentially," he notes, relaying what recruiters tell him.

Where does that lead? To AI as a top of funnel screener, and, in his view, to the AI interview as the single biggest change the industry is seeing. Instead of applying and hoping to hear back, every candidate can be interviewed and given a chance to add context to their skills beyond a document that AI helped write. Russell is not certain who wins the arms race. "I'm not sure who's going to win, but it's interesting to watch for sure."

The Case Against the Resume Black Hole

For all his analytical distance, Russell holds one clear position on what this technology owes candidates. After 27 years in the business, he says, the resume black hole is still alive and well and applicants still get ghosted by employers. AI, he argues, has a genuine chance to end that, because it can literally talk to everyone who applies and then move them forward or reject them.

His conclusion is blunt and worth pinning to a wall in every talent function: with AI, there should be no excuse for failing to move a candidate forward or reject them. It is a rare thing in this debate, an argument for automation grounded not in cost savings but in basic respect for the person on the other end of the application.

Always Be Learning

Russell's advice to recruiting leaders and newcomers alike follows directly from how he built his own career. Because the profession is changing, he says, you have to embrace technology rather than fear it. That means learning what is out there, keeping pace with the change, and experimenting. Play with Claude or a similar tool. Build an app for yourself. Stay curious.

"Be curious about technology and I think you'll always be employed," he says. Alongside it sits the mantra he has carried for years, which he shortens to ABL: always be learning. Do that, in his view, and you are constantly growing as a recruiter and constantly adding value to whichever employer has you.

It is fitting counsel from a man who runs a media operation as a company of one, still interviewing vendors on his RecTech show, still offering founders 20 or 30 minutes on his YouTube channel to demonstrate what they have built. Nearly three decades after launching a job board that almost no one asked him to launch, Chris Russell is still doing the same thing: looking at whatever is new, figuring out how it works, and telling the rest of the industry what he found.