Fabio Massei

An Unusual Front Door Into Recruiting

Massei describes his entry into the profession as unusual, and it was. His first employer was a consulting firm specialized in executive assessment centers, where the work was the rigorous evaluation of senior leadership skill through behavioral observation: role plays, behavioral business interviews, and validated psychometric testing. He arrived expecting a job in selection. What he found was a framework that has organized his thinking ever since.

"This basically opened a world for me," he says, "because I realized that assessing the skills is the starting point for any other activity that you do." That includes development. In his view, growth is impossible without an honest measurement of the baseline: you need to know where you are before you can decide where you are going. It is a conviction that separates him from practitioners who treat evaluation as intuition, and it explains why, when he later moved in house, the first thing he built was not a pipeline but an instrument.

Within a few months of taking his first internal role, he was leading an international talent acquisition team. The mandate was foundational. He and his team had to build the basics from the ground up: the tools for behavioral based interviewing, and then the full recruiting process around them. Assessment expertise, applied at scale, in multiple countries, at once.

Three Leaders Who Shaped the Method

Asked who shaped him, Massei answers with unusual precision, naming both the person and the specific craft they handed him.

The first is Massimo Posarelli, his very first manager, who led PDI Italy, the assessment center specialist that no longer exists today after being acquired, as Massei recalls, by Korn Ferry. From Posarelli he learned the mechanics that most people never get taught: how to conduct an assessment center, and, harder, how to design one. He calls the experience one of the stepping stones of his career.

The second is Roger Oswald, whom Massei credits as the founder of SHL and who passed away a few years ago. Having sold SHL when it was already a multi billion dollar company, Oswald started a new venture, Talent Q, and Massei partnered with him on the validation of assessment instruments from English into Italian. It was demanding technical work, and it was also his first taste of working internationally, a door that has stayed open for the rest of his career. Being trusted with validation work alongside one of the field's most consequential figures says something about the standard he was already holding himself to.

The third is the manager who gave him his first internal role and, shortly after, an international talent acquisition team to lead. What she offered was not a curriculum but confidence: she trusted him and she trusted his skills, at a point in his career when the promotion was a bet. Massei has clearly not forgotten what that bet was worth, and it shows in how he talks about the people he has since developed himself.

Building Talent Leaders, Not Just Filling Roles

At AUTODOC, one of the clearest markers of Massei's leadership was the people who had grown under it. He points to Marta, who was a team leader on his talent acquisition team, built her own team from scratch, and carried responsibility across two very different hiring worlds: desk employees on one side, and off desk hiring, including the full warehouse population, on the other. He describes her as thorough and unusually strong in stakeholder management, and says what impressed him most was the speed at which she grew into the role.

It is a telling emphasis. The metric he reaches for when describing a colleague is not requisitions closed but capability built. Massei is also scrupulous about other people's names and reputations, the kind of care that tends to explain why strong operators keep choosing to work for the same leader twice.

AI: Efficiency on One Side, Integrity on the Other

Few talent leaders are better positioned to judge what AI actually changes about assessment, because few have done the manual version of the work. Massei is direct about the upside. Designing role plays and business cases used to take days. Now, he says, it can be done in hours. Writing up assessment center reports, historically one of the most time consuming tasks in the discipline, can be done dramatically faster. In more conventional recruiting operations he sees the same efficiency curve, from chatbots that handle candidate questions, to faster and more efficient screening, to virtual interviewing that gives recruiters back real hours.

He is equally clear about the cost. The exercises that once revealed the most about a candidate are the easiest ones to outsource to a model. Hand someone a business case and ask for a SWOT analysis and the tool will produce it in seconds. "It becomes more difficult to observe them in an unbiased way," he says. He also flags the newer category of live assistance tools, plugins that can be added to Teams and similar platforms so that a model supplies answers in real time while a question is still being put to the candidate, naming Interview Copilot and Final Round AI among them. And he warns that automated screening carries the same bias exposure as any other screening method, only faster and at greater volume, which means it needs to be watched carefully rather than trusted by default.

His conclusion is neither evangelism nor alarm. "We are just at the beginning," he says. "There are a lot of potential but also a lot of risk that we need to be aware of." For talent leaders, the advice embedded in that sentence is practical: adopt the efficiency, but redesign your assessment methods to survive the fact that candidates now hold the same tools you do.

That, ultimately, is the thread running through Massei's career. Tools change. Testing formats change. Continents and titles change. The underlying question he learned to ask in an Italian assessment center has not: what can this person actually do, and how do we know?