Dana Dillard

From a Staffing Floor to Charles Schwab

She stayed at that first staffing firm for about a year and a half, long enough to get a real education in the industry and to earn a promotion, and it was as she worked her way through that role that she was introduced to Charles Schwab. The introduction became her entry into corporate recruiting, and, as she puts it, the rest is history.

It is a common arc in talent acquisition, and also a slightly misleading one. Plenty of people fall into recruiting. Far fewer stay long enough, and pay close enough attention, to turn an accident into an expertise. Dillard's early years gave her something that is difficult to acquire later: a ground level view of how the business actually works, formed before she ever had a team, a budget, or a title.

The Leaders Who Made Time

Ask Dillard about influence and she goes straight to the positive examples, though she is candid that the difficult ones taught her plenty too. The first leader she names is one of her managers from Charles Schwab, now a dear friend and a very senior figure in the HR community. What has stayed with Dillard across all the intervening years is not a piece of tactical advice. It is a habit.

"She always made time for me and her team," Dillard says. No matter how busy that leader was, no matter how large her scope grew, no matter what was happening in her own world, she was reachable. Dillard notes that this remains true today: she can call, text, or reach out, and the answer comes. "I think that says a lot."

The second attribute she prizes in the leaders who shaped her is a willingness to stand behind people when things go wrong. Not if. When. "They know things are going to go wrong, but they support me through it and they help me to figure out how we move forward versus blaming," she says. Those, she says, are the attributes she truly values in a leader, and they are the ones that allow a recruiting team to take intelligent risks rather than play defense.

The Environments She Will Not Stay In

Dillard is equally direct about the inverse. She has worked for leaders who preferred to point fingers and who led with fear, and she has drawn a hard line around it. "That is not an environment I thrive in," she says. "Those are environments I don't last in and I leave from because they just don't serve me or my team."

There is a quiet discipline in that position. Fear based leadership is often mistaken for rigor, and Dillard's view is that blame is not a management technique at all. She has been willing to walk rather than work inside one. Her teams inherit the standard she learned early: make time for people, back them when something breaks, then solve the problem together.

Moving at the Speed of AI

On artificial intelligence, Dillard is neither breathless nor skeptical. She is practical, and she is paying close attention to the clock. Asked how quickly the recruiting landscape has shifted, she does not hesitate: quickly, and even more quickly in the last few months. "I feel like it's just moving so fast," she says.

She has embraced the tools personally and pushed her teams to do the same, for a straightforward reason. "You can do so much more so much faster," she says. Work that once consumed hours, compiling data, researching, assembling baseline information, can now be handled in a fraction of the time. Crucially, she treats that output as a starting point rather than a finished product. From there, she says, the job is going deeper, validating what the tools produce, and spending the time to refine it. The machine buys back the hours. The recruiter still owns the judgment.

Where Dillard becomes most emphatic is on the question of responsibility. AI, she believes, has a role to play in the future of everything, not just recruiting but the world in general, and the harder task is figuring out how to use it responsibly, in a way that serves the talent community well. That framing matters coming from someone who leads recruiting teams, because the people on the other side of these systems are candidates.

Her conclusion is unsentimental and, characteristically, forward leaning. Everyone is trying to figure out how to do the next cool thing, and simply keeping up is the challenge. "I think it's here to stay," she says. "So might as well embrace it."

The Through Line

There is a symmetry to Dillard's career that is hard to miss. It began because someone with no obligation to help took an interest in a young person who did not yet know what she wanted to do, and pointed her toward a door. The leaders she has admired most since have done a version of the same thing: made themselves available, taken the call, backed her when the plan came apart.

That is the operating model she has carried into her own leadership, and it is the reason her adoption of AI reads as an extension of her values rather than a departure from them. Automate the compiling and the researching. Reclaim the hours. Then spend them where the work has always actually mattered, which is with people.