Joe Ortiz

A Referral, a Placement, and a Rush

The origin story begins with a suggestion from the person who knew him best. Ortiz had finished school and was weighing what he describes as a myriad of different routes, undecided about where to land. His then girlfriend, now his wife, worked in HR and dealt regularly with staffing agencies. She had a hunch. She joked that he would be good on that side of the house, then made a referral that produced his first agency role.

The hunch paid off almost immediately. He made a couple of placements quickly and found something he had been missing since his playing days on the football field. "As a former athlete, sort of that competitive itch was scratched when you join the agency," he says. He loved the rush of closing. From there, in his own account, it took off, and the agency floor became the training ground for everything that followed.

Ortiz still describes the industry's standing joke with affection: almost nobody plans a career in recruiting, they fall into it. He is candid that he was no exception. What separates the people who stay is usually what he found in those first weeks, a job with a scoreboard that resets constantly and rewards preparation.

The Two People Who Shaped His Playbook

Asked who has influenced him most across a decade in the work, Ortiz names two people and attaches a specific lesson to each. The first is Alexandra Scheiman, his manager at Spotify, whom he describes as a genuinely good people leader: smart, empathetic, and fluent in the mechanics of running a recruiting team. What set her apart was restraint. She knew how to give people runway and autonomy rather than manage over their shoulders. Ortiz says openly that he tries to mold his own approach to people leadership on the way she ran that team, and it is a template he has carried into every seat since.

The second is Chrissy Nieves, a close friend who went on to become a director of HR business partners. Where Scheiman taught him how to lead a team, Nieves taught him how to think about the business the team serves. Ortiz calls her business acumen "through the roof," and credits her with showing him how to reason through the commercial side of HR: how structure, headcount and strategy connect to what a company is actually trying to build.

He is unusually direct about the debt. Both, he says, are exceptional at what they do, and both taught him a great deal over the course of roughly ten years. That combination, a leadership model from one and a business lens from the other, describes the job he holds now with some precision.

Automating the Paperwork, Not the Judgment

Ortiz has a specific and practical theory of where AI belongs in the people function, and it starts with the parts of the job nobody romanticizes. Take the intake meeting, the foundational conversation between recruiter and hiring manager. His argument: record it, let AI synthesize the discussion, pull out the action items, craft the plan, build the intake form. "All that quote unquote paperwork of an intake process," he notes, can be automated. What remains is the human work of alignment and persuasion, which is where recruiters earn their keep anyway.

The second application is sourcing, and here he is a builder rather than a buyer. He talks about getting creative with Claude skills and about pairing them with specialized tools such as Pin and Juicebox to surface what he calls "the hidden gems" in a candidate pool, the profiles that obvious keyword searches and obvious channels tend to miss. The premise is that the strongest candidates are rarely the easiest to find, and technology should be aimed at that gap rather than at volume for its own sake.

The third application is the most personal, and it is the Jarvis. Lean teams rarely fail for lack of talent; they fail for lack of coordination. So Ortiz built the agent that keeps him oriented, the one that reads his own digital trail and tells him each morning what matters most. It is a telling instinct. Plenty of talent leaders treat AI as something to procure. Ortiz treats it as something to build, and he builds it for himself first, on his own workflow, before asking anyone else to rely on it.

The discipline runs through all three uses. Manual lift, synthesis, orientation, discovery: automate freely. Relationships, judgment, and the conversation that closes a candidate: those stay with him.

What Carries Over

Laid side by side, the pieces of Ortiz's career line up cleanly. He entered through the agency side, where urgency and closing are learned fast. He grew up professionally under a manager who modeled autonomy, and alongside a friend who insisted that HR earn its seat by understanding the business. Now, leading talent at FINNY, he pairs those inheritances with a willingness to write his own tooling instead of waiting for a vendor to solve his problem.

The competitive instinct that first pulled him into recruiting has not faded. It has simply been paired with better instruments, and with a clear sense of which parts of the work he should hand to a machine and which parts he should never hand over at all.