Jay Olson

The Job That Was Never the Same Twice

Olson's first job out of college was in a customer service department on a sales track, entering telecom orders into a computer system and pulling paper off a fax machine. Every day looked exactly like the one before it. A close friend from college had landed at a staffing agency, an entire category of business Olson did not know existed, and their near daily phone calls became an accidental recruiting pitch: breakfast meetings with candidates, a morning in a hiring leader's office, an afternoon of back to back interviews with five or six people in a row.

What hooked him first was not purpose. It was variety. "Every day didn't need to be the same," he says, and that was enough to change direction. The deeper understanding arrived later, and it is what has kept him in the work. Olson puts job searching in the same tier as marriage, divorce, birth, death and buying a house, one of the five most stressful things a person can go through. Sitting on the other side of that experience, he argues, is a privilege. "There's a lot of joy that comes in seeing people have aspects of their life changed through finding new work." His own evolution, as he describes it, runs from thinking recruiting was cool because it was never boring to understanding that it is entirely about the person, and about engineering the rare match where what a candidate wants is mirrored by what an organization needs.

The Leaders Who Taught Him How to Lead

Ask Olson about gratitude and he starts naming names, with the caveat that three is not nearly enough. Barb Fryermuth comes first. He had managed people before, at Robert Half, but leading an internal team at RSM was a fundamentally different feel, and it was her belief in him that opened the door. "Her belief in my ability changed everything for me," he says. He had put his name forward mostly to signal ambition: that he wanted to move, wanted more, wanted to learn and grow. She answered by handing him the job.

Then came Eric Harkins, the boss who recruited him away from RSM to build the talent acquisition function at Jack Link's, then a beef jerky company and today Jack Link's Protein Snacks. Harkins remains a mentor and a friend, and Olson hands out his book, "Great Leaders Make Sure Monday Morning Doesn't Suck," to every leader on his team. The lesson was permission. "He's the first person that really put the human in human resources for me," Olson says, and that gave him license to bring his personality into leadership rather than performing as a corporate robot. Harkins also gave him a philosophy of trust that Olson has adopted wholesale: you do not have to earn it, because you are on the team for a reason, just do not break it. And he drilled in a cycle Olson still teaches: try, fail, get back up, make something out of the failure.

The third is Mark Smith, his current leader at Medtronic. They clicked inside two minutes on two things, continuous improvement and growth mindset, and concluded almost immediately that they should be working together. What Olson values most is a leadership culture in which any idea can be a great idea, it is just a question of fleshing it out, so that a leadership team's conversations get genuinely powerful because every perspective is welcome in the room. It has also given him room to be himself. Vulnerability, transparency and radical honesty are his stated defaults, and he is not afraid of mistakes as long as he learns from them. Above all, Smith reinforces the thing Olson believes an efficiency obsessed industry keeps forgetting: none of it happens without your team, and none of it happens without people.

Still Early Days

Olson's read on AI in talent acquisition is neither breathless nor defensive. The biggest shift he has seen in the past 12 months is belief, because the proof points have stopped being theoretical. He uses AI constantly, personally and professionally, and Medtronic uses it across the function. He calls it a tremendous unlock.

His worry is sequencing. Some organizations, he argues, are putting the cart before the horse, cutting headcount on the assumption that AI will absorb the work before anyone has proven it will. "You don't want to just jump into the deep end of the pool with a cinder block around your legs," he says. Olson is a self described speed obsessive who loves urgency, but insists urgency without evidence is just risk.

For perspective, he reaches for a story from last year's ERE conference, where Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com, explained that his site was roughly the 493rd or 497th dot com ever listed, back when Stanford held the registry. There are millions now. Monster came first, then CareerBuilder, then Indeed, then LinkedIn Jobs and Google Jobs. "AI for us is what Monster was back then," Olson says. Landscape shifting, genuinely new, and very early. His practical caution follows from that: most AI tools on the market today are point solutions rather than end to end platforms, and every additional layer in a tech stack creates another handoff where data can break down. Is the data clean? Is it accurate? Where does it change hands? Those questions, he says, are the unglamorous work standing between the industry and its ambitions.

The Questions Nobody Used to Ask

Olson points to the intake meeting as the clearest evidence of how much has changed. Five or ten years ago, when a hiring leader said they needed someone to do a job, no recruiter asked whether AI could do it instead, or whether a person was needed at all. Now those questions are unavoidable, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet. "So we're making bets," he says. He would rather the profession place those bets consciously than pretend to certainty.

What he refuses to trade away is judgment. His concern about over reliance is not job loss but cognitive decline, professionals outsourcing their own thinking to a tool. And he is clear about where the enduring advantage sits. "AI cannot bring emotion to these conversations." Talent acquisition is a process and a business function, but it is a human centered one, and losing sight of that has a cost he can name precisely: a candidate experience that is already strained in the current market getting measurably worse. His hope for the industry is simple and demanding at once, that as the tooling accelerates, people on the other side of the process still feel seen and heard, and not just a number on a spreadsheet.