Maggie Fish

The Coordinator Contract That Started Everything

Maggie is candid that she did not graduate with a plan to recruit. Almost nobody does. What she had instead was an uncle who had spent many years in talent acquisition and a piece of timely information: when he left a company down in San Jose, he mentioned they were looking for a recruitment coordinator. Maggie was contracting at Facebook at the time, with the end of that contract in sight, and she needed her next role. She took the coordinator job.

Six months later, a friend of a friend needed a coordinator in San Francisco. That move turned out to be the hinge. There she met a connection who later moved into a talent leadership role at Checkr and brought Maggie along, a partnership that lasted five years before she joined Grafana Labs. Eleven years on, the through line is not a master plan but a pattern of people betting on her and Maggie saying yes quickly.

It is worth noting what that path built. Maggie came up through coordination, the function that sees every crack in a process, every handoff that breaks, every hour swallowed by administrative work. It is not a coincidence that she now leads with a stopwatch in one hand and an automation roadmap in the other.

Learning to Be the Voice in the Room

Ask Maggie who shaped her, and she describes two leaders rather than two job titles. Both had a clear point of view. Both were, in her word, opinionated. She is quick to reclaim the term, noting that opinionated can carry a negative connotation but that there is a way to be opinionated and kind at the same time. When those two spoke, the room listened, because they were offering not just expertise but a judgment about what would be best for the company and the team.

She also watched the inverse play out. The people who sat back and did not speak up were, over time, quietly left out. They were not called on to weigh in, not invited to shape how things got designed or implemented. Maggie drew the obvious conclusion and decided which of those futures she wanted.

So she raises her hand. She shares the different viewpoint, including the one that may not land well, and she contradicts the accepted way of doing things when contradiction is warranted rather than drifting along with the current. Had those two leaders been more behind the scenes, she believes she might have followed their example into the background. Instead, she saw firsthand the respect that attaches to a name when someone treats every meeting and interaction as a chance to add something real.

From Skeptic to Power User

Maggie's position on AI a year and a half ago was, by her own account, unenthusiastic and vaguely alarmed. It was going to take the job. That was the prevailing narrative, and she carried it like everybody else.

Today she cannot get enough of it, within reason. The reframe she now delivers to her team is precise: AI will not replace recruiters, but it will leave behind the recruiters who refuse to adopt it. She puts a sharper edge on it for anyone still nervous. If you are afraid of being replaced by it, that fear is a signal you are not yet comfortable enough with it, and the fix is to lean in and ask which manual task in your day it could streamline.

The past year turned that conviction into infrastructure, with the heaviest build happening in the last six months. Maggie got the team out of Google Sheets, integrated the AI note taker with the applicant tracking system and Workday, and pressed the obvious question: why are we still doing so much of this by hand? Anything that could be automated or handed to Claude was. Then she flipped the exercise around and made it personal for each recruiter, starting not with the technology but with the wish. What is one small thing you want to do? From there she brainstorms the AI path to it alongside them. Her motive is protective as much as operational. Whenever someone on her team goes for their next role, she wants them walking in as confident power users who think about what comes next, not as people playing catch up.

Advice for Talent Leaders Heading Into 2027

Maggie's guidance for her peers circles back to AI, which she considers unavoidable, but the actual instruction is about humility. Leaders should put themselves back in the shoes of a working recruiter, because the leadership lens is genuinely different and what a director wants from a tool is rarely what the team needs from it.

In practice that has meant shadowing her own recruiters and asking them to walk her through the day: where the time goes, where the friction is. Before the team consolidated onto Claude, she had them log it in a Google Sheet so she could see the time drain in detail. Her point is that a one on one will not surface this. Ask someone what they are working on and half the day gets glossed over. Watch where the hours actually land and the real pain points appear, including the ones nobody thought to raise.

That diagnosis is what makes the leadership part possible. Once Maggie can see the roadblock, she can remove it, redesign around it, or drop AI into the gap. Her warning to fast-scaling companies, AI companies emphatically included, is that speed without understanding is just motion. Slow down enough to learn how the team processes the work in front of them, then use the 10,000-foot view to clear the path.

She is equally attentive to the people coming up around her. Asked who else in the industry deserves recognition, Maggie pointed immediately to Michaela Burpoe, a former Grafana Labs colleague now leading recruiting at the high-growth company Supabase, who has moved from individual contributor to talent leader and, in Maggie's telling, is doing genuinely interesting work there.