Cody Christensen

The Operations Route Into Recruiting

The first couple of years of Cody's career were spent in sales. Operations proved the better fit, and the first stop was a valet and chauffeur company, where the title was operations manager and sourcing new hires was simply one of the hats that came with the role. Recruiting was not the job. It was a condition of the job getting done.

A move to a transportation company followed, this time as regional manager and program manager. Again, no recruiter title, and again plenty of recruiting for the programs under management. Then a recruiter from Adecco made contact, and Cody joined on the operations side rather than in a recruiting seat. The scope since has included dotted line management across recruiters, with a recruiter currently reporting in directly, plus program management work in which the primary service delivered to customers is recruiting itself.

Cody's framing of all three businesses is deliberately unromantic and, for that reason, clarifying. Whatever the service being sold, someone has to be in place to perform it. "Our product is people," as Cody puts it, which means the operational discipline behind sourcing, screening and onboarding is not back office work. It is the supply chain.

A Culture of Trust

Ask Cody about influence and the answer skips past technical instruction. Technical knowledge, Cody notes, can come from almost anyone. What sticks is culture: how a leader interacts with people, and whether the environment they build leaves a team feeling confident in what they are doing and how prepared they are for it. The best managers Cody has worked for shared a knack for making their people believe leadership had them in mind.

One relationship stands above the rest. Cody's most recent manager at Adecco, whom Cody reported to directly for several years after first reporting to one of her direct reports, had the single biggest impact on Cody's career. The lesson was not about process. It was about how far a manager's decisions reach into someone's day-to-day working life.

Cody treats that reach as a responsibility rather than a nicety. Work is harder for some people than for others, and a manager's job includes making it as good as it can reasonably be. There is a business argument underneath the human one: people who like where they are and like the culture around them tend to be more productive, and that productivity is how a company hits its goals.

AI as Table Stakes, Not a Replacement

Cody is candid about being a light personal user of AI. A communication going out to a group of workers might get run through Microsoft Copilot as a check, less for the wording than for the completeness: is everything covered, is there a better way to approach it. Nothing generated that way goes out unexamined. Excel formulas are another occasional use, and Cody sees little practical difference between that and reaching for Google. A friend working on the business intelligence side uses the tools far more extensively, building out considerably more complicated things.

Inside recruiting, the assessment is more pointed. Pre-screening has been sped up. Onboarding is a candidate for the same treatment. Automated scheduling and a wider top of the funnel now qualify, in Cody's words, as table stakes. Efficiency, in other words, is no longer a differentiator.

What Cody will not concede is the human step. Phone or face-to-face contact with candidates remains critical, particularly for certain types of roles, and the hope is that it stays that way. "I hope that we never get to a point where that person-to-person contact is completely taken out of the equation," Cody says. That is a notable position from someone whose daily concern is operational throughput.

The Ask Going Into 2026

Cody stops short of calling the closing thought advice and reframes it as something closer to a request. There is a great deal happening in the world, well beyond AI, and the world at large can feel pretty stressful. For anyone charged with responsibility over a team, the ask is straightforward: do whatever you can to avoid adding to that load.

The ideal, as Cody describes it, is a culture where people at work are not carrying the weight of everything else. That means managers keeping in mind that employees have personal lives running in parallel, with pressures the workplace never sees. It is a modest request on its surface and a demanding one in practice, and it lines up precisely with what Cody absorbed from the managers who left a mark. Not advice, Cody suggests, but an ask: make people's working lives easier, not heavier.