Joseph Albano

The Admissions Office That Was Really a Recruiting Desk

His first job out of college was in admissions at an online university. At the time he did not realize how closely the work mirrored recruiting: the outreach, the qualifying conversations, the coaching of people through a decision that would reshape their year. What he did notice was how the work felt.

"It was just the feeling of knowing that I was able to make an impact and help someone change their life for the better," he says of that period. Whether the outcome was a return to school or a new job, the mechanism was the same, and it was enough to set a direction. Everything since has been a larger version of that desk.

Mike Miller, and the Leaders Who Taught by Counterexample

Albano spent eight years at Chipotle Mexican Grill. Roughly six years in, during a leadership shakeup, he began working for Mike Miller, and the timing mattered. Albano was moving into director-level scope with far more exposure to the C-suite, and Miller taught him how to prepare for anything and, crucially, how to shift a message to fit the room. On any given day that could mean speaking with a 16-year-old hoping for a job in one of the restaurants and, hours later, briefing the CEO on recruitment strategy. Same person, same conviction, entirely different register. Albano still credits Miller with that range.

He is candid that not every formative lesson arrived from a role model. Earlier in his career he worked for leaders who treated recruiting as a pure numbers game, a matter of filling a box, and who did not treat people especially well along the way. Rather than absorb it, he inverted it. Those experiences are precisely why he insists on the smaller, unglamorous acts of the job: coaching someone through how to handle a tough question, giving honest feedback on a resume, treating a rejection as a conversation rather than a status change. "You learn what not to do," he says. He has built a leadership style out of the negative space.

A Chatbot With a Traffic Light

At GoPuff, speed was the constraint. The company was filling thousands of micro distribution centers, the roles were high touch from a recruiting standpoint, and the candidate pool was overwhelmingly hourly. Albano implemented an AI chatbot that ran the same preliminary questions his recruiters would have asked, then applied a grading scale to the results. Green meant the recruiter should reach out and schedule next steps. Red meant the candidate was not worth engaging and the team should move on. Yellow flagged specific follow-up questions worth asking.

The elegance was in the timing. Much of that workforce was on overnight or second shift, and those candidates could now engage the moment they were free rather than waiting for business hours to come around. Recruiters, in turn, opened their ATS each morning to a queue of already qualified leads. "It just made the process so much easier for all parties involved," Albano says. It is a useful test for any automation: it removed friction on both sides of the table rather than shifting the burden onto the applicant.

Teaching 5,000 People to Use the Tool That Scares Them

His two years at HelloFresh presented the mirror image of that problem. The company was closing distribution centers, and thousands of employees were facing the loss of their roles. Albano and his team made a deliberate pivot: instead of focusing on recruiting, they would focus on getting people to their next job.

The population numbered between four and five thousand, largely hourly. By his estimate, roughly 80 percent did not hold a high school degree and very few had gone to college. Most had no clear idea how to run a modern job search, and most had never touched generative AI. So he taught them. How to use it for a resume review. How to be coached through tough questions. How to write a strong LinkedIn post. How to identify a hiring manager and craft a message that would actually get a reply. It amounted to a mass literacy program in a technology that was already being used to evaluate them, delivered to the workers least likely to be handed it. That project, more than any hiring metric, is the clearest statement of what Albano believes recruiting is for.

The View From Both Sides of the Machine

Over the last year and a half, Albano has watched AI reshape hiring from both directions at once. Candidates now arrive far better prepared, having rebuilt their resumes, rehearsed with a chatbot, and researched the company before anyone picks up the phone. On the employer side, he has watched organizations hand candidate selection over to AI wholesale, a shift he observes with more caution than enthusiasm.

His own record is the argument. He has used the technology where it buys speed and access, and kept people in the seat where judgment is required. What he keeps coming back to, across restaurants, warehouses and now animal emergency medicine, is the part of the job no tool can do for him: the moment someone's life changes for the better, and he had a hand in it.