Emily Gordon

The Late 1900s, and Everything After

Gordon graduated from the University of Michigan with a psychology degree, spent a stretch bartending in London while she traveled, and fully expected to go back for an advanced degree. Then she answered an ad, and recruiting answered back. Placing technology talent in Los Angeles in 1998 and 1999 was, by her own account, a boiler room: intense, relentless, and full of training she would never want to repeat but would never trade either. She is still friends with people from that first floor.

What hooked her was the recognition that recruiting could be what camp counseling had been for her years earlier, a job where the point was helping other people. "I think it gets a bad rap sometimes," she says of the profession. She has spent a career proving the opposite.

From there she went deep on process, taking on Six Sigma work in the early 2000s at Manpower, where she helped streamline how the business worked with offshore sourcing support. She moved into RPO around 2012 and has since done, in her words, pretty much everything RPO offers: implementation, sourcing, and running global accounts. Few leaders in the field have seen the model from that many angles.

Building Something From Zero

Six years ago this month, Gordon began something brand new. Though it started small, it scaled fast. Today it is a functioning organization helping hire skilled trades across transportation, construction and agriculture, known for being some of the hardest talent markets in America.

The scale is significant. Gordon's team runs thousands of calls a week, with most of the group working virtually. But this hasn't prevented the kind of coaching that occurs by listening to colleagues on the phone. She refuses to let that development gap go unaddressed. "I don't want to miss an opportunity to give good coaching," she says, which is why she has put technology to work triaging conversations so that no recruiter's growth depends on luck.

The People Who Turned the Dial

Ask Gordon about mentors and the first word out of her mouth is lucky. Brett, her second manager in the business, still trains recruiters alongside her all these years later. He built structures that lasted, but what mattered more was the reciprocity: if he needed something, she helped, and if she needed something, he returned the favor. Sounding boards, she says, are undervalued.

Gordon's first experience with RPO taught her patience. Her boss at the time could see the skill in her before she could, and he understood that some things only mature on their own schedule. The lesson was that a mentor's real job is sometimes to wait while the person catches up to their own ability.

Chip Holmes, once the interim president of a company she worked for, took the opposite approach. He put her in a role she did not want and could not initially justify. It changed her trajectory. The two now work together again, and by her description they make each other better every time they sit down. Gordon is candid that she has learned from difficult people as well, absorbing just as much about who she does not want to be.

She describes herself as an ADHD, dyslexic, high energy thinker with a million ideas, happiest when someone takes one of them and runs. The best leaders in her life, she says, are the ones who saw past her quirks, pushed her a little, and gave her room to fail or succeed safely. At 51, with a daughter now in her sophomore year at Michigan, she notices how much she wishes she could hand over hard won lessons directly, and how much of the learning has to be earned firsthand.

A Tool, Not a Replacement

Gordon sees the potential in AI and does not fear it. Her prescription is simple: try it, work with it, and stop guessing. But she is equally firm that nobody should hand over wholesale control. She works with the RPOA on governance, helping shape how RPO providers think about the technology and how they bring it to their customers. Guardrails, she argues, are what separate adoption from abdication.

In practice, her team uses AI where it saves time without costing trust: administrative work, repetitive tasks, capturing screens instead of having recruiters type, retype, and re-enter the same notes. She also uses AI to screen calls and discover coaching moments for her recruiters. This creates even more opportunity for human to human coaching that she finds so crucial. And she uses it on her own thinking. When analysis paralysis sets in, throwing the problem into a model and getting three options back is often enough to unstick her and free up time for the deeper work of studying her craft.

The field data keeps her honest. In transportation, AI call agents have proven genuinely useful because truck drivers want to talk when time allows it, not during "business hours". In the mechanic space, candidates have been more skeptical speaking to AI. The takeaway, for Gordon, is persona over technology. Know who you are calling, then decide what tool fits.

Where she draws the hardest line is decision making. She does not believe the industry is ready to let machines screen people out, in part because some of the best recruiting happens with candidates who are wrong for today's role and right for one that has not opened yet. Those conversations build networks, and networks build careers. "You always have to check your work," she says.

Never Forget Why You Do It

Asked what she would tell recruiting leaders heading into the next year, Gordon does not reach for a framework. She says never forget why you do it, then makes the case with the conviction of someone who has watched the alternative play out. This work is about people. Every tool and resource should be aimed at making you better at human connection, not at replacing it.

Efficiency matters, and she is clear that shaving cost per hire is real business that has to get done. But she believes the numbers follow great work rather than the other way around. Focus on being the best at your craft, protect the passion that put you in the chair, and the metrics will come. Her closing counsel is blunt and generous at once: if you don't love it, go do something else, because this profession is not for everybody. For Emily Gordon, nearly thirty years in, it clearly still is.