Jamie Adasi

The Work at Merit America

Adasi joined Merit America after leaving Greenhouse Software last June, and she now partners closely with the organization's talent acquisition team to, in her words, reimagine what hiring looks like for America. That partnership is not theoretical. She recently went through the full process herself, hiring the first team member for her Inclusive Excellence function alongside Merit America's TA partners, which put her on both sides of the table at once: the architect of inclusive hiring standards and the hiring manager living inside them. She came away with plenty of feedback and, she is quick to add, great experiences with the team.

That dual vantage point runs through everything she says about the craft. Every scorecard, every job description, every debrief carries weight because of what sits on the other end of it.

Roots in Identity and Leadership

Adasi's path into talent leadership was never separable from her path into inclusion work. Fresh out of college and thinking hard about her own identities, she built her early leadership portfolio around LGBTQ+ leadership, Black leadership, and making sure women were represented across the board in the work being done at Maryland. Hiring became the place where those commitments could be operationalized rather than merely discussed.

The commitment persists in the ordinary rhythms of her week. She still writes for her own people, including a Transgender Day of Visibility post for her staff members, drafted in the middle of a crowded calendar, because visibility is not an initiative to her. It is a habit.

The People Who Shaped Her

Ask Adasi about influences and she starts with two names she keeps as one. Angela Jackson and Meredith Carpenter, both her supervisors during that Maryland assistantship, gave her, as she puts it, her passion and hunger and excitement and joy for TA and recruiting. It is a striking thing for a leader to credit at the very start of a career: not technique, but appetite.

Her second influence is not from the industry at all. Her brother, a successful realtor in the DC and Maryland area, showed her early what intentional hiring produces. She watched him build and lead a diverse team, hiring deliberately from the beginning, and watched that intentionality convert directly into success.

The third is Arianna Moon, Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Greenhouse Software and a dear friend, who is a large part of why Adasi joined Greenhouse as Director of DEI. Over five and a half years she worked closely with Moon and the TA team at a company whose stated purpose is making every company great at hiring. What Moon modeled was strategic altitude: a relentless focus on hiring prioritization at the executive team level, and the discipline to make leaders see it as a business function with real strategy behind it rather than a favor to the DEI office. Adasi credits her with helping transform how Greenhouse thought about hiring prioritization, and about diversity in hiring. Over those five and a half years, she says, the company saw major gains in diversifying its teams, and its leadership team in particular, while still hitting hiring goals with speed and tenacity and capacity.

Peers Worth Watching

Adasi is generous about the practitioners who make inclusive hiring real, and specific about why. Katie Rakusin, senior director of talent at Merit America and a Greenhouse award winner for her talent-making initiatives, earns praise for designing an inclusive process from start to finish and for her willingness to push back on hiring managers when bias creeps in. Adasi describes her posture plainly: are you sure about that, because here is what I am seeing from the scorecard versus what has been said.

Mary Warnock, VP of People at Slack, is someone Adasi has shared panels with on Slack usage, DEI, and AI. What she admires there is scope. Warnock advocates for inclusive practices across the entire people system, which begins with how an organization recruits, and she does it inside a company that sits under Salesforce, carries significant diversity, and has worked through restructures in the pursuit of better hiring.

Then there is Freddie Montgomery, now senior manager of talent acquisition at the nonprofit Common Cause, whom Adasi worked with closely at Greenhouse. Active in the company's employee resource groups, Montgomery was dedicated to diversity sourcing in a way that changed process: roles would not be posted externally until the team had spent a week or two sourcing diverse candidates first. Adasi credits him with expanding how the organization thought about diversity, in thought, background, and experience as well as demographics, and with sharpening its attention to candidate experience.

On AI, Bias, and the Human Review

Having spent her most recent chapter inside a technology company with a heavy AI focus, Adasi is refreshingly unromantic about the tooling now flooding the profession. AI, in her assessment, is already relieving recruiting teams of the menial tasks that have held them back, and it is genuinely useful in places that matter to equity: making job descriptions more inclusive so teams can cast a wider net, and supporting scorecards so candidates are compared neutrally, on credentials and on the skills they are building, rather than on personality. She sees the benefit flowing to candidates too, who can now tailor a resume to a specific company or role and make it stand out.

Her advice to talent leaders comes in two parts. The first is not to be afraid of it. The technology is changing rapidly, she notes, and leaders who use it and learn about it will find it an advantage rather than a drag on their effectiveness. The second is the guardrail: always bring in the human element. That means understanding the toll AI takes on society, including the environmental cost, and it means ending every process with a human review of whatever the machine produced. In hiring above all, she argues, because hiring is one of the primary mechanisms by which people move up.

It is a characteristically balanced position from a leader whose career has been spent making systems work better for the people inside them. Adopt the tools. Keep the judgment. Never forget who is on the other end of the decision.