Jessica Stinson

Math, Market Research, and a Newspaper

Jessica arrived in Philadelphia straight out of graduate school, in time for the blizzard of 1996, and went to work in economic consulting. Rigorous, quantitative, and not remotely people-oriented enough for her. A move into custom market research as a statistician got her closer, but not close enough. The turn came when her best friend's father, whose family worked in RPO recruiting, spread a newspaper out in front of her and walked her through it: find the jobs, pick up the phone, see what you can do. She started meeting with firms and landed at Empire International, a retained search shop, where she stayed for years. After her son was born, the family moved to North Carolina. She missed the work and came back.

What followed was Century Associates, a contingency search firm, where five or six years in she bought the business from a boss heading toward retirement and ran it for another four or five. Running a company, she decided, was not the part of the work that lit her up, so she shopped her book, her process, and her database of resumes to firms that might want them. She had spent a career at boutiques, so The Judge Group looked corporate by comparison, right up until she walked in past a ping pong table and a pool table and thought she had wandered into one of those Google rooms. Then she discovered she had connections there, through people she does theater with. It felt like home.

The People Who Taught the Trade

Her first firm was four people: a husband and wife, one other recruiter, and Jessica. Vic, who ran the firm, put a book in front of her and told her to work through the CFOs, CEOs, and VPs of HR and try to sell them on a retainer. She left, briefly, then returned as research manager, and Vic taught her retained search as a discipline. She has since adapted it so that she does not always have to charge a retainer. Clients deserve a rigorous process either way, she argues, and that money can be doing something else for them. The person who marked her most from those years, though, was Melinda, Vic's wife, who became a dear friend and later coordinated Jessica's wedding.

Then came Jen, hired as a research assistant at Century Associates and promoted to COO once Jessica owned the company. Jen ran back-office operations so Jessica could stay on her desk, and taught her something less tangible: patience, and how to keep a passionate temperament from running ahead of her. Jessica cares deeply and will argue hard when she believes someone is not getting the best outcome available to them. At Judge she credits the organization rather than any single figure: the flexibility to work from home, the resources that let her do the job better, the travel that comes with it. Twenty-five years in, she is comfortable calling herself a subject matter expert on search. Client outreach has never given her trouble. Candidate outreach is the grind.

The Employment Exchange

While she owned Century Associates, Jessica built something adjacent to search: The Employment Exchange, a small platform about employment with a Hot Topics podcast attached. She recorded 30 sessions with senior leaders drawn from her network, which sits at the LinkedIn ceiling of 30,000 first-degree connections. The format was simple: people telling her what they knew, including a veteran who walked through veteran hiring. The plan was to continue the show at Judge after the sale, then COVID hit and it never restarted. She has been thinking about it again since a candidate she coached through interviews and the mechanics of negotiating an offer told her the guidance was too useful to keep private. The version she imagines takes calls from anyone: hiring questions, interviewing questions, or the messy human ones, such as what to do when a spouse does not want to move.

Holding Two True Things About AI

Jessica's group trained her on AI, and she uses it without ceremony. She asks it about hiring trends and salary benchmarks, a real need in a market that has moved: 25 years ago a North American sales and marketing director carried a base of 125,000 to 150,000 dollars, and she will not guess at today's figure. She prompts it for sharper boolean strings so she is not scrolling through a million LinkedIn profiles, and her team now uses a LinkedIn hiring assistant to surface candidates that make sense. After a full day on her desk, she is not going to sit and read articles. Let the tool gather.

At a lunch where she was seated with three men she considers genuine experts, a longtime technology expert who was working in the field back when the internet arrived made the point that stuck: the machine will not replace him, because compassion, critical thinking, and empathy are not on offer. Jessica does not believe AI is coming for people's jobs, and she wishes those who are frightened could hear that clearly.

She also refuses to pretend the tradeoffs are simple. She cares about the environment and about where data centers get built, near farms and behind people's houses, even as many of her clients supply those very data centers. There is someone smart enough in this country to find the happy medium, she believes, and she is excited about the two camps working it out together.

Advice for 2026

Her counsel is unfashionably plain: be kinder to one another about all of this. Jessica offers herself as the example. She works in theater and independent film, she is building a web series that turns service animals on their head with people rather than dogs in the vests, and her 28-minute pilot, a dramedy called Plant-Based, is making the rounds of festivals in New York and New Jersey. Needing a graphic to entice people to come read a script, and having no design skills, she made one in Canva using AI. Someone objected, loudly and publicly. The point of the graphic was to get human beings into her house to read human writing out loud.

That does not make her uncritical. Having grown up in the seventies and eighties, she misses the work ethic of index cards and card catalogs, and she notes that her son, now nearly 21, was among the last taught cursive, which meant he could sign his own lease. Her worry is skimming the work rather than doing it. Compassion for the people worried about environmental cost, reassurance for the people worried about being replaced, and a search process rigorous enough to name: that is the equation she is still optimizing.