David Moore

From a London Training Desk to Silicon Valley

Like most people in the profession, Moore did not set out to become a recruiter. Fresh out of university and hunting for a role in London, he came across an opportunity with an external recruiting agency and joined as a trainee. He did well. That performance opened the door to a technical recruiting firm, which marked the first time he had worked anywhere near tech. Everything after that followed from those two decisions.

He spent roughly nine years on the agency side before moving in-house, where he built a career across the world's leading technology companies. A significant stretch of that came at Apple, first in Asia and then in the United States, before he arrived at Box. Agency work taught him the fundamentals. The in-house years taught him how talent functions actually operate inside demanding, high-stakes organizations.

The Leaders Who Shaped Him

Ask Moore who shaped him and he starts with one of his very first managers, Don Creedy, a South African then living in London. Creedy was tough but fair, and he built a team with what Moore still describes as a tremendous sense of camaraderie. More than technique, what Creedy passed on was a realistic understanding of what the job demands over decades. "It's not rocket science, as they say, but it's a profession that requires hard work, grit, resilience," Moore says, "because you get lots of knocks and lots of positive and negative experiences." That framing has aged well across a career built on both.

The second name he offers is Cindy Nicola, who took over the recruiting organization at Apple shortly after Moore had relocated to the United States. For someone still finding his footing in a new country, a leadership change was unnerving, and the team braced for a leader who would arrive, absorb criticism from powerful business stakeholders and clean house. Nicola did the opposite. She made clear she would assume good intent, that she was glass half full, and that she would seek to understand before she judged. She drove significant, positive change without throwing anyone under the bus.

Moore has carried that lesson into his own leadership. Regardless of how high the stakes are or how demanding the stakeholders, showing a team that you trust them and that you assume they are doing their best with the circumstances they have is often exactly what people need to hear.

A Tool, Not a Replacement

Moore is candid that the industry is still discovering what AI means. What is already clear to him is that the pace of change and the level of sophistication in these tools is growing faster than anyone predicted. He does not share the doomsayer view that recruiters are about to be automated away, and if anything he has grown more confident that they will not be. Regulation and privacy alone guarantee a long stretch of hard work before the profession figures out how to deploy the technology in a way that is fair, consistent and equitable.

What he does expect is a rewrite of the daily job. Recruiters will spend far less time at the top of the funnel, grinding through hundreds of applications, and Moore considers that a straightforwardly good outcome. It frees the best recruiters to do the work that actually distinguishes them: engaging great talent, having genuinely good conversations with candidates, getting people excited about the company they represent, and acting as real consultants and advisors to their hiring stakeholders.

There is a counterweight, and Moore names it plainly. AI has also increased the number of candidates able to try to fake their way through a process. Hiring is not getting easier. In that environment, the human ability to filter through the noise and identify who genuinely belongs in front of the business has, in his view, never been more important.

Advice for Talent Leaders

Moore's counsel to his peers is direct. AI is an incredibly, wildly sophisticated tool, but it is a tool. Leaders should not shy away from it or fear it. They should dig in, understand how it actually works, and figure out how to leverage it for good inside their own organizations.

He points to the obvious target first. A great deal of what recruiters have historically done was, in his words, offloadable: process, bureaucracy, the administration of the funnel. Given how highly paid recruiters are and how valuable their skills are, that was never a good use of their time. Within his team at Box, and among the teams of most of his peers, the current work is systematically identifying every place these tools can drive automation and efficiency and strip away the bureaucratic drag that bogs people down. He has watched enough technology cycles to know that the recruiters who thrive are the ones who adopt early and use the time they win back on the parts of the job only a human can do.

Backing the Next Generation

Moore's instinct to develop people shows up in who he chooses to champion. He points to Jessika Calegari, who leads technical recruiting at Box and has spent eight or nine years with the company. She has worked in the sourcing team and then led it, led the recruiting coordination team, and moved across to run technical recruiting, which Moore calls one of the most demanding jobs in any tech company. "She's talented and thriving," he says. "I love working with her."

He also singles out Claire Kaiser, a leader he came to know through networking with other talent professionals. Kaiser was running all of talent acquisition at a smaller company and made a deliberate move to immerse herself in the AI boom, stepping into a technical recruiting leadership role at the fast growing legal AI startup Harvey. That willingness to trade scope for proximity to where the industry is heading is precisely the kind of judgment Moore admires, and it is a decision that would look familiar to anyone tracing his own path from a London training desk to the front row of every technology wave since.