Hope Brick

The Coat Buyer's Daughter

Ask Brick who shaped her and she goes straight to her father, and apologizes in advance for how ordinary the answer might sound. It is not ordinary. He was a coat and suit buyer for over 50 years, a veteran of retail and fashion himself, and he began her education when she was nine or ten years old.

The lessons were physical, not theoretical. On a Saturday he would say, "Hope, let's go," and they would drive to a Macy's store in Kansas City to look at the inventory on the floor. If he judged that there was too much of it, the two of them would hand carry the excess to the next store, where it was needed more. A child learning allocation by hauling coats across a city. Decades later she is still moving supply toward demand.

The verbal lessons stuck just as hard. Be the first one to get to work in the morning and the last one to leave at night. Cream rises to the top and strong performers are recognized. Be humble and hungry. When she graduated from college and called home to announce that she had taken a job with Macy's in Kansas City, she opened with a line she still enjoys: "Hey, Dad, guess what? We're colleagues now." His response was disbelief, and then pride.

She is careful to add that many mentors across the industry reinforced the same ideals her father had planted, and that those people gave her something beyond encouragement. They gave her the skills she needed to mentor others. That obligation, passed down and passed on, is now visible in the recruiters she leads.

A Clear-Eyed View of AI

Brick uses AI every single day, multiple times a day, and has no patience for peers who treat it as optional. "If you're not using it you should be using it, because we're all using it," she says. Her use case is precise. Where she once depended on outside resources such as Upwork for leads, she now turns to ChatGPT or Claude as a lead vehicle: give me the top 100 footwear companies in North America, or Europe, or the world, ranked by revenue, with the metrics attached. It returns a spreadsheet in seconds. Then she pushes further, asking for the CEOs, their LinkedIn profiles, their email addresses. It delivers.

She is equally candid about the limits. On a recent and very niche search for a client in Seoul, Korea, the tool could not get there. Worse, she felt it pulled her focus. She lost the search, says so plainly, and draws the lesson rather than the excuse: don't rely on it.

The sharper story is a cautionary one she volunteers because she thinks the industry needs to hear it. She retained an outsourced service that billed itself as AI scrapers, spending $10,000 across two months. The vendor identified companies that had recently been through acquisition or were hiring, wrote the outreach scripts, and sent them under her name. When Brick reviewed who had been contacted and what had been said, she was horrified, precisely because of how long she has been in the business. She knew those people. Many she had worked with or for. One was Oscar, a former employer, whom she had to call personally to explain that the message signed by her was not hers.

Her guidance is unambiguous. When you retain an AI company, be very careful who that company is reaching out to on your behalf and what they are signing your name to. She takes ownership for having been too trusting, and files it as tuition. Used well, she notes, the technology handles the administrative work at the speed of light and frees practitioners to do what they actually love: work with people.

Know Who the Customer Is

Brick's advice to talent leaders heading into 2027 is the kind that generates arguments in the room, which is why it is worth reading twice. Recruitment as a collective, she argues, needs to understand that the customer is the client, not the candidate. Executive search professionals get so attached to their candidates that they lose sight of who pays them.

She illustrates it with a live example. One of her recruiters, a specialist in the CPG and wellness space rather than fashion and, in her words, "a badass pro," was closing a chief of staff role against a budget of $180,000. The client wanted elite talent at that number. The finalist, currently earning $200,000 and working from home, declared in the eleventh hour, after rounds of interviews, projects, and testing, that she would not accept a lateral move. She would need $210,000 or $220,000. Part of the rationale offered to the client was that the five-day in-office requirement would force her to find a dog sitter. Brick's response to her own recruiter was blunt and, she concedes, perhaps could have been gentler: the client does not care about your candidate's dog.

The point underneath the bluntness is economic literacy. Brick asks recruiters to get into the shoes of the client and count what a hire actually costs: Social Security, benefits, unemployment, taxes, PTO. Return on investment on an executive hire can take more than 90 days, sometimes a year, before the business sees a single cent back. She notes how expectations have shifted, from two weeks of PTO until you had five or ten years of service, to candidates arriving with five weeks and asking that it carry over. A hiring manager weighing that is also weighing freelance coverage and the things that fall through the cracks while a leader is away.

Her conclusion is a standard, not a slogan. Think as though you, the recruiter, own that client's business. Be an ambassador and an advocate for the client in the best possible way for your candidate. In practice that means selling the promise of the brand your client is offering. And if you cannot feel that promise, she says, do not work with that client.

Passion, and the Shortness of Life

For all the rigor about budgets and ROI, Brick's animating belief is not transactional. Whether a person came into search from decades inside an industry or arrived new to recruitment entirely, she believes practitioners share a real passion for life and for waking up every day to a job they love, because life is short. It really is.

That is the through line from a nine-year-old carrying coats between Kansas City stores to a search principal advising clients across continents. Put good people with good people. Know the business well enough to be useful. Be humble and hungry. Nearly 50 years in, Hope Brick has not amended the brief.