Lauren Cassen

From Sociology to the Corporate Route

Cassen graduated with a sociology degree and a plan to become a therapist. Then she reconsidered. She was, in her own words, done with school and ready to be done with it, so she pointed herself toward the corporate world without much of a map. When the agency recruiter asked her what she wanted to do, her honest answer was that she had no idea, only that she liked people, liked talking, and liked having a lot of conversations. That answer turned out to be a job description.

Agency recruiting became her first professional home, and she fell in love with the whole of it before moving in-house. The therapist's training never quite went to waste. Reading people, drawing out what they are not saying, holding a conversation that matters to someone's life: those are the muscles she has spent a career strengthening, just applied to hiring instead of a clinical practice.

The Leaders Who Shaped Her

Cassen is quick to credit the two managers who changed her trajectory. The first is Alex Shaw, the recruiter who hired her and became her first manager. "I was so lucky that in my first corporate job I ever had, I had an amazing and incredible manager," she says, noting that not many people get to say that. Shaw introduced her to recruiting and taught her every foundational element of the craft, and she did it as an exceptional practitioner herself. The two have stayed in touch through moves, families, and years, a relationship that outlasted the job that created it.

The second is Resika, VP of People and Talent at Savvy and Cassen's current manager. In ten months, Cassen says she has learned tenfold from her: a partner, a coach, and a thought leader who is deeply respected across the leadership team. What Resika has given her most is pressure of the productive kind, pushing her to own more, drive harder, and operate at a level Cassen did not expect to reach this early in her career. She calls her one of the most impactful leaders she has ever worked for.

Building a Second Brain

Cassen's org structure asks something close to impossible of one person. She recruits for roughly thirty different roles across every function but engineering, and no human being can be a genuine subject matter expert on thirty jobs at once. Her answer has been to engineer her way around the limit.

The company runs a Granola account for recruiter screen notes. Alongside it, Cassen maintains separate projects in Claude for each open position, loaded with the intake form, the job description, working notes, and the take-home assignment, on top of a broader knowledge base covering Savvy's teams, org structure, and what it takes to succeed there. The result is a searchable database of every role in the company. During an interview she can drop in raw notes and ask what a high-impact follow-up question would be, or test her own read against the model's. "This gives me a way to have a little second brain of my hiring manager," she says.

The payoff is not speed for its own sake. Because Cassen probes deeply in the recruiter screen, hiring managers get notes rich enough that their own conversations can skip the preliminaries and go somewhere more valuable. She is now working with a talent ops partner to connect Ashby's newly released MCP to the company's Claude account, unifying pipeline visibility and notifications around onsites and candidate movement. She uses AI for sourcing, for her own work product, and for executive stakeholder communications. The point, as she frames it, is to spend her brain power on the things that genuinely need it.

Resourcefulness as a Superpower

Last month Cassen received Savvy's monthly values award, given to one person across the entire company. Her manager singled out her resourcefulness, and that is precisely the trait Cassen would pass on to anyone else in talent acquisition. Be resourceful with your network. Be resourceful with the connections you make. Be resourceful in how you gather information, and just as deliberate in how you disseminate it. It is, she argues, the single skill most likely to separate a good talent leader from an ordinary one.

She pairs that with a clear-eyed read on the moment. Talent sits at the top of the pressure cooker, she says, because every company now wants to hire AI-native people, which forces recruiters to interrogate their own playbooks: what changes, what stays, what gets sacrificed. The tooling shifts every month, and she is candid that it can be overwhelming. Anyone claiming otherwise, she suspects, is not being straight with you. But she is emphatic on one point: AI is not the enemy.

Where the Human Stays

The question Cassen hears everywhere in TA is where automation stops and where the human comes back in. Her answer draws on the business she recruits for. Financial advisors will never be automated away, she argues, because money is the most emotional subject people discuss and an advisor does far more than manage a portfolio. Recruiting is the same. "A recruiter is so much more than getting people a job," she says.

People are drawn to people, to community, to culture, to missions they feel connected to. That is human nature, not a preference held by some candidates and not others, and it shows up sharply at a company where most employees work in person. Cassen is also alert to the cost of getting the balance wrong. Job searching is already capable of being dehumanizing, full of ghosting and silence and unrewarded effort, so her rule is to humanize the process wherever possible while still using efficiency gains to expand what each recruiter can do.

Her closing counsel to a profession under strain is about connection rather than tooling. Cassen belongs to multiple talent communities, venture firm networks, and TA groups, and she shows up for the dinners, happy hours, and events. "Community is the biggest thing that we have," she says. In a field being rewritten month by month, she intends to keep it that way.