Deitrick Franklin

The Engineer Who Got Tapped

Franklin's route into the field followed a pattern he can now name from the other side of the table. Companies routinely tap engineers to come to campus, stand in front of students and speak the language of the work. Most engineers do it once or twice and go back to their day jobs. Franklin was the engineer being tapped, and something in it caught.

The credentials behind the invitation were unusually specific. He had done four separate internships at Chevron before joining as a full time engineer, which meant that when the company sent him out to interview students, it was sending someone who genuinely understood what succeeding in a Chevron internship required. He was not assessing candidates against a rubric handed to him. He was assessing them against a path he had personally walked, four times.

That is the quiet advantage he carries into emerging talent work today. Franklin came to recruiting through the act of evaluation rather than through process administration, and he came to it having been, not long before, exactly the kind of student he was now sizing up. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, went into engineering, and then found himself building the pipeline he had recently traveled.

A Board of Advisors, Named

Franklin discusses mentorship in structural terms. He keeps what he calls a board of advisors, and unlike most people who use the phrase, he can name who occupies each seat and what each one is for.

His mother holds the first. She is his standing sounding board on life and career alike, the person who hears the reasoning first. When something shifts, when he is weighing a direction, when he has identified a potential blocker and is testing his own ideas for getting around it and advancing, he runs it past her before anyone else.

The second belongs to Yvette Moore, current director of Pitt EXCEL, an organization at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering focused on ensuring underrepresented minority students matriculate through college. Franklin went to Moore with the question that arrives after the diploma. He had matriculated. He had landed a good engineering job. What he still needed was help learning to navigate corporate America, and that is the counsel she has provided ever since.

The third seat is held by Corey Twitty, a former supervisor, manager and people leader of Franklin's, whose career he has followed with something closer to study than admiration. Twitty built an emerging talent program from complete scratch at Netflix, a company students actively organize their ambitions around. Franklin is direct about why the example lands so hard: you do not often see underrepresented leaders in the emerging talent space, and you see them build a program from nothing at a company that well known even less often. He calls it inspiring and encouraging in the same breath, and he still leans on Twitty as an advisor as he navigates his own path through talent acquisition.

Beyond individuals, Franklin credits a collective mentor: the URX community, the university recruiting community, which he describes as central to his growth. It is where he sharpened his read on the emerging talent landscape, learned how to build programs and make them efficient, and worked through one industry shock after another with people facing the same ones. He lists them in order. COVID. Layoffs. AI.

AI on Both Sides of Recruiting

Ask Franklin how the landscape has moved and he does not hedge. Recruiting has shifted drastically, he says, and the reason it has shifted so completely is a symmetry most commentary misses. "AI has impacts on both sides of recruiting," he says. It is not a tool that one party holds while the other stands still.

On the practitioner side, whether the person doing the work is a recruiter or a program manager, he sees AI reshaping the most basic act of the job: how teams actually engage with candidates. It can be pointed at an inbound application pool to identify who is likeliest to succeed through an interview process and, in his framing, the more important question, who is likeliest to succeed long term at the company. It can read resumes. It can read the responses candidates give in an application. It can sit in a meeting and take the notes. The list is long, and it is not finished growing.

What is striking is that Franklin, an engineer by training and instinct, is among the least breathless voices on the subject. He is openly amused by how quickly any business will ship a small bot, attach a few sparkles to it and declare itself an AI company. His own position is unfashionably plain. "I don't think it needs to be in everything," he says. Coming from someone who spends his days evaluating tools rather than admiring them, that reads less like resistance than like discipline.

The Value of Having Been the Candidate

The thread running through Franklin's career is proximity. He recruits engineers as someone who was one. He builds early career programs as someone who moved through four internships before he moved through a full time offer. He counts among his advisors the woman who helped underrepresented engineering students matriculate at his own alma mater and the leader who proved an emerging talent program could be built from scratch by someone who looked like him.

None of that is decoration on a resume. It is the working method. Franklin assembles the people he learns from as deliberately as he assembles a hiring process, then runs his thinking through them before he commits. For a field that talks constantly about identifying potential in others, there is something instructive in a leader who has been that carefully intentional about developing his own.