Dom Farnan

Following the People, Not the Logo

When that team moved on to a different company, Farnan went with them, spending a couple of years in biotech. It is a pattern that repeats across her career: she has consistently followed people rather than logos. In biotech she met a woman working as a vendor at an embedded recruiting and consulting firm, and wanted to work with her badly enough to leave a stable industry role to do it.

Consulting cracked the world open. Suddenly she was inside many companies at once, seeing what different industries hired for and how differently they behaved. The bulk of her career grew out of that exposure: a portfolio of client companies she built herself, and then DotConnect, the firm she founded and still leads, with recruiters working client engagements under her standard. It was through DotConnect that she landed Groq as a client. What began as a recruiting engagement turned into something larger, and before long she was inside Groq leading talent rather than serving it from the outside. Today she is at a stealth startup, owning both talent and people.

The People Who Set the Standard

Farnan is precise about who shaped her. Rodney, the first boss, remains a defining influence simply for making the offer and then backing it with real teaching. James, a mentor who died a few years ago, is someone she still consults in her own way. "He's often someone that when I'm meditating or saying prayers, I'm kind of contemplating, what would James do." James also worked directly with her team while she was scaling her recruiting company, training them in neuro-linguistic programming and influence long before LLMs made the mechanics of persuasion a mainstream subject.

Then there is Iris, her boss at the consulting firm, whom Farnan describes as the hardest boss she ever worked for and, in the same breath, as amazing. A "gnarly, gnarly perfectionist," in her Californian phrasing. That perfectionism became a transferable asset. "That also just set a standard for me that I was able to then translate into leading my team and building my company and really holding a high level of quality and delivery for our customers and clients."

She is equally candid that not every formative figure was a mentor. There was Greg, an engineering leader at a client, difficult and nearly impossible to partner with, and the source of one of her most repeated observations: "There's a Greg at every company that you go to." The lesson is not avoidance but fluency. Her own approach was assembled from both sides of that ledger. "I've seen my fair share of what I feel good looks like. I've seen what not good looks like," she says, and then built something that borrows from neither wholesale.

Business Partners First

Ask Farnan what she is proudest of building and she describes the team she assembled at Groq, not in terms of headcount or fill rates but in terms of standing. "We were business partners first before we were high-performance delivering recruiters," she says. That position was earned and then visible: the team was trusted, held a seat at the table, and was invited to sales kickoffs and engineering offsites because it was adding value there. Her line for the alternative is unsparing. "We weren't just like a warm body filling reqs."

That distinction shapes how she hires. She looks for people who are real, gritty and self-aware, and above all insatiably curious, the kind who will go down rabbit holes and get creative when they do not know an answer. In her experience that profile produces the best sourcers and the best recruiters, because it produces problem solvers.

Twenty Years of Being Told the Robots Are Coming

"For 20 years they've been telling me AI's going to take my job," Farnan says, and she laughs about it, mostly because of what she sees in the room. In contentious debriefs, with emotions flying and biases running amok, she doubts any model could mediate those personalities or read "the notes behind the music."

What she offers instead is precision about where the technology actually pays. She uses AI as a brainstorming and thought partner, for organization, for the grind of getting meetings on the books, and to a degree for sourcing. She watches her own people push much further. One recruiter on a client engagement built an MCP integration with the ATS and layered custom work on top of it, getting, in her words, super nerdy about it. Another recruiter on her Groq team built internal tools for the function. "I think that there's something here that's exciting," she says, while noting the field still has a long way to go, because the work remains nuanced and human.

She has evidence on the other side too. Recently someone told her they had been sent a link to be screened by a machine rather than a person and were so turned off that they simply refused. They wanted to talk to a human. Farnan's own calendar makes the same argument: a convention floor in Chicago to meet people face to face, and a tech talk the week before at a friend's company, where she caught up with interns she had once hired. AI can be leveraged for good, she says, but it is not going to replace the best parts of the role.

Stay Curious

Her advice for anyone entering the profession or weighing whether to stay is two words: stay curious. It is also, she believes, the thing most likely to keep someone in the work. Curiosity is what made consulting so satisfying for her, because she cannot get enough of learning how different industries actually function.

She offers a recent example. Screening for a client, she spoke with a candidate who designs the brains of submarine turbine wind something something. She freely admits she could not follow a word of it. "Whatever you just said sounds like the coolest job. How do you even get into that?"

That instinct, she argues, is the whole discipline in miniature: lean into the conversation with the person in front of you and you learn an enormous amount about the world. It is also the throughline from the 17-year-old in the bullpen office to the leader she has become, one who studied every model available to her and then declined to copy any of them. "The way that I show up and lead is not like anybody else that I've reported to or seen," she says. "I've kind of just did my own thing."