Jamie Grossman

Before There Was a Front Door

When Jamie entered the field, there was no obvious way in. There was no major in HR or recruiting, no certification track, none of the human behavior coursework and HR curriculums that exist now. People arrived sideways or they did not arrive at all.

Her sideways route ran through marketing. Jamie had built a career in entertainment marketing and internet marketing, which is exactly what put her on the radar of a well known marketing recruiter in the Los Angeles area, the woman who kept calling for names and eventually offered to teach her the craft. Jamie decided to give it a go, and the training took. What she found was not just a viable second act but something closer to delight: she got to talk to people all day and learn something new about every one of them. That was the hook, and it held.

The Anti Transactional Agency

Jamie is candid that she did not come up through a traditional big agency, the kind of shop that measures a recruiter by whether the daily dial count reached 100 today. She understands the logic of that model. She simply does not believe it produces the work she wants to do, or the experience a candidate deserves at the moment of one of the largest decisions of a professional life.

So she built the alternative. Jamie started her own agency alongside people who shared a single conviction: recruiting stops being fun the moment it turns transactional. That is not a marketing line at PRTNR, it is the operating premise, and it surfaces in the parts of the process that cannot be automated or rushed, from a real client intake conversation to the exchange that reveals why a particular person is right for a particular job. Relationships, in her telling, are not the soft layer on top of the work. They are the work.

Learning From the People Who Would Not Box Her In

Ask Jamie about the people who shaped her and she starts with gratitude. She considers herself extremely fortunate: many of the colleagues she met along the way became good friends, some of those relationships long lasting, others newer but clearly the kind she would have formed whether or not this industry had introduced them.

The greatest gift, though, came from someone who chose restraint over control. That person let Jamie run with her own network and her own way of doing things instead of putting her in a box, then reeled her back at the right moments and handed her skills she would not otherwise have had, precisely because she had fallen into the profession rather than studied for it. Freedom first, structure second. It is a rare sequence, and it is arguably the reason she was able to found a firm on her own terms.

She pays that forward by naming peers rather than keeping the spotlight. Jamie points to Cultivated Talent, a two person team made up of Kelly and Malik, and to Diane at WorkGenius, as talent leaders whose work she believes deserves recognition of its own.

Working With AI, Not Against It

Jamie's read on artificial intelligence is refreshingly unromantic. She does not claim it makes her faster. She says plainly that it slows her down, because the tools keep changing and excelling at them takes a genuinely technical mind. She is adapting anyway, on the theory that the profession has to evolve and that the only sane posture is to learn to work with the technology rather than against it.

Her real concern is not speed but judgment. Nobody enjoys being judged by people, she notes, and nobody enjoys being judged by a bot. She knows a couple of recent college graduates whose first screening conversation was conducted entirely by an AI, and she worries about what that filter quietly discards: great candidates, real quality conversation, the reasons a particular person would be right for a job, and the nuance of client intake. The human element is not a flaw in the technology. It is simply not what the technology was built for.

She has watched a version of this cycle before. LinkedIn was supposed to take over the work, and it absorbed a real share of it, but people still want the human touch. Post an advertisement and the candidates arrive in volume, Jamie points out, and someone still has to go through all of them, with slim odds of surfacing the great ones depending on the job. Where she is genuinely enthusiastic is the other side of the ledger: technology that hands a recruiter's attention back to the person in front of her instead of pulling it into another tab. That, she says, is what she actually loves it for.

Advice for 2026: Support Each Other, Not Elbows Out

Asked what she would tell other talent leaders heading into the new year, Jamie did not reach for a productivity tip or a technology forecast. She went straight to the profession's reputation problem. Recruiters, she observes, have a really bad name.

Her prescription is unglamorous and hard to argue with: support each other and stop being so cutthroat. Coming from a founder whose own career was built on other people's generosity, an established recruiter who offered to train her for nothing, and later a colleague who gave her room to run instead of boxing her in, it reads less like advice than like a description of how good work actually gets built.