Eric Hudson

Ten Interviews in One Day

Nobody, as Hudson likes to point out, goes to school to become a recruiter. He was working in the athletic department at Alabama, waiting tables at Red Lobster, and headed for graduate school when a friend who had joined TEKsystems told him to at least have a conversation. "I'll have a conversation with anybody," Hudson figured. That conversation, with the director of business operations at Aerotek, TEKsystems' sister company, led to an invitation to come back for the full Aerotek gauntlet: ten interviews in a single day, in and out of meeting rooms, designed to see how a candidate holds up under pressure. He was exhausted by the end of it. Then the phone rang with an offer, and a decision that had seemed settled suddenly was not.

He chose recruiting, and it took. Hudson became a contest winner at Aerotek, the internal marker reserved for the top one percent of producers, and he still describes that stretch as where he learned the most about himself, about goals, and about drive. Two years in, Amazon called.

Building the Program That Didn't Exist

The Amazon pitch in 2013 was unusual: help launch a fulfillment center from scratch, in house, something the company had never done. Until then, that hiring had run through staffing agencies. Amazon knew what was coming over the next decade and wanted to own the process. Hudson was the very first hire for the program, and he staffed the first fulfillment center from zero employees to 6,000 in a single year. The project was deemed a success and then replicated everywhere. Every Amazon fulfillment center today has a workforce staffing function. Hudson was the first person to lead and do that work.

What followed was nearly a decade of range. He moved into technical recruiting focused on software development, worked across compliance and trade compliance hiring, then led the talent launches of Amazon Singapore and Amazon Australia, hiring the first office for Singapore's first e-commerce store within Amazon and eventually managing all of APAC for that division as a recruiting manager. At AWS he led recruiting management for engineers and network engineers holding the highest security clearances available, roles requiring a top secret clearance and a polygraph to handle data managed by organizations such as the CIA and Homeland Security. He calls it finding needles in haystacks.

The macro view was just as instructive. Hudson joined when Amazon had roughly 50,000-plus employees and a valuation near $100 billion, a number skeptics at the time called overvalued. He left a company of more than 1.5 million employees on its way to nearly $3 trillion. "It was the equivalent of me being at a company going IPO," he says. From there he took over technology and G&A hiring at DocuSign as a senior manager, was promoted to director, and reported directly to the chief diversity officer. When a mentor from his Amazon years moved to Nutanix and had an opening, Hudson followed someone he trusted.

Reading the Inflection Point

Hudson has watched the profession cycle through job boards, LinkedIn, and remote work, and he is unsentimental about the current moment. "We're all in this moment of inflection with AI," he says. Nobody, in his view, fully understands where it lands, but everyone can see that it is already reshaping how the work gets done and that it will take off in some direction. His advice to talent leaders is to embrace it rather than wait it out. It is not going away, and the level of investment the technology companies have made in it settles the argument.

That posture is consistent with the rest of his career: say yes to the conversation, take the assignment nobody has run before, and build the thing that does not exist yet. He is glad he made the call he did that week in Alabama. "You never know which direction you're going to take in life," he says. "But it worked out for me very well."