Greg Plum

The Accidental Recruiter

His entry into the field came through a friend already working in the space. Plum joined him, but not as a sourcer. He worked the business development side, identifying companies that needed what a staffing firm could provide, and he did that for about four years before moving to another firm. After that he operated largely as what he calls a hired gun, out on his own, hunting opportunities.

Sourcing, the craft most people associate with recruiting, is the newest part of his repertoire. About a year ago he took a role with a Silicon Valley technology advisory firm, and for the first time the job required him to go find the people himself. The brief is unconventional. He is not filling headcount. He is building a network of highly compensated independent consultants who bring technology solutions to customers. There is no big salary to dangle and no benefits package to negotiate over, which strips the conversation down to something closer to what Plum has always done: making the case for a partnership.

The Two Men Who Shaped Him

Ask Plum about the people who changed his trajectory and two names surface immediately from a 35-year career. The first is John Riggins, an owner of the small communications company Plum joined in 2000, a leap of faith out of banking and into a 15-person team. He was hired as a sales guy and, by his own account, was not really a sales guy. What he found instead was a unique technology, a concierge-level white glove service he genuinely enjoyed, and a mentor who handed him his first real education in what partnerships actually are: building a company around an indirect channel and finding the right people to take a product to market. Plum stayed 12 years, the longest tenure of his career, and he is precise about why. The job kept changing. It stayed hard. He kept growing.

The second is Dave Erickson, the man who recruited him away from Riggins to The Conference Group, an audio conference calling business in the era of dial-in numbers and PIN codes. Erickson gave him the chance to build something from scratch in video and web conferencing, the technology that would eventually become ubiquitous. Plum describes him as a maverick and an innovator who pushed every boundary known to man and built both a name and a company for himself. The two remain friends and collaborators to this day.

Neither man was in recruiting. Plum notes that with a shrug, then immediately corrects the implication. Everything he learned from them is what he now carries into candidate conversations. Two of them, back to back, sat in his calendar just before this one. "It all pulls from my experience doing everything else," he says. "It all feeds into the same."

AI as a Power Saw, Not a Robot

Plum's engagement with artificial intelligence runs deeper than most practitioners'. He chairs the Technology Forum of Delaware, a regional group whose annual event examines how AI is reshaping the area across every discipline and job function. Recruiting, he says flatly, has absolutely been impacted.

His framing of the anxiety is one of the sharpest lines in the debate. People are afraid of what the technology can do. They are, in his view, aiming at the wrong target. "I think they should be more afraid of somebody who knows how to use it effectively at doing your job than you," he says. To the argument that using AI for administrative work makes a person less human, Plum offers an analogy that ends the discussion: handing someone a power saw to cut a board does not turn them into a power saw.

In practice he uses LinkedIn Recruiter, and he is clear-eyed about what it buys him. There are only so many hours in a day. The tool surfaces the right candidates faster and helps him decide where to spend his attention. He is careful, though, not to let efficiency curdle into dismissiveness. "All resumes have value. Everybody has some sort of value," he says. His actual job is to find the highest overlap between the value a person can provide and the requirements of the role. AI helps him find that overlap. It does not decide it.

Eighteen Jobs, Seventeen Referrals

Plum has held roughly 18 jobs in his life. All but one came from a referral or a recommendation, from someone who already knew him. That statistic is the entire foundation of the advice he gives to anyone entering the field, whether they are coming out of university, a trade program, or a coding boot camp. Build your network. Then keep building it.

The single exception proves the rule. It was a software company, and he did submit an application, but he did not stop there. He identified the officers, tracked them down, connected with them, and set up meetings before anyone reviewed his resume. That, he believes, is why he got the job. Applying to a job board and expecting the posting alone to work is, in his blunt assessment, insanity. "The numbers just do not work."

He is candid about what a long search does to a person. Those stretches are dark places, he says, the kind of experience that makes you doubt yourself. His antidote is neither a tool nor a tactic. Connect with people. Stay engaged. Offer value. If someone reaches out, respond. Be a good friend, citizen, coworker, and colleague, because a time will come when you need them. What continues to surprise him after three and a half decades is who shows up. The people you expect to help sometimes do not. The ones you never counted on often do. Technology aside, he says, that is what makes all the difference.