Marisa Ianelli

The Mentor Who Refused to Let Her Go

Like many practitioners, Ianelli landed in talent acquisition through the agency world, hired straight out of school after being networked into someone who owned a recruiting company. She stayed because of the pace, and because of a feeling that never faded: getting genuinely excited on a candidate's behalf when they landed the gig.

Then a mentor named Gary recruited her to a different kind of agency, one that employed technologists on staff alongside recruiters. A recruiter ran the first screen, a technologist ran a second, and only then was the candidate presented to the client. In an era with almost no tooling, that human layer of technical vetting was the differentiator. It was also, in retrospect, an early lesson in something Ianelli still practices: screening is a design problem, not merely a volume problem.

The defining moment came when she went to tell Gary she was leaving to go back to school. She liked recruiting but thought she might want more. His answer was immediate and emphatic. No. The firm would pay for her MBA and she could stay on. "I've been so thankful to this person who paid for me to go back to graduate school," she says, and the gratitude is less about tuition than about what it signaled. Someone believed she was good enough at the work to invest in keeping her. That confidence became structural.

The C-Suite Detour

After the agency years and her MBA, Ianelli moved into corporate recruiting and spent time at a large corporate consulting company, where she gathered more mentors and leaders who shaped her thinking. She was then recruited out to lead recruiting at a cybersecurity company, reporting to chief people officer Amy Guiel.

Guiel's contribution was belief. She trusted Ianelli, backed her, and encouraged her to pursue a chief people officer role of her own. Ianelli is direct about the arithmetic of it: without Guiel and one other mentor there, she is not sure she would have believed she could do the job at all. She took the CPO seat. She learned the full breadth of the people function. Then she made a decision most executives never make, stepping back toward the discipline that first drew her in, because a CPO oversees everything and she wanted to be focused on recruiting.

She now works, in her words, for an unbelievable chief people officer at Zelis. The pattern across her career is consistent. The leaders who mattered most invested in her before it was obvious, and she has built a habit of doing the same for the people who work for her.

Thousands of Applicants and a Human Limit

Ianelli has worked through a number of very different labor markets, and she is blunt about the current one. The volume of applicants arriving on a regular basis is, in her assessment, crazy. Thousands per job. The instinct to give every candidate a shot runs straight into a physical constraint: reviewing all of them is not humanly possible.

That is the problem Phenom was brought in to address at Zelis, and the framing is telling. The goal was not to look at fewer people. It was to give candidates a greater review by narrowing intelligently, taking a couple thousand applicants down to a couple hundred worth a serious second look. Her team also used the implementation to automate the calendar work that surrounds interviews, which she counts as a huge savings. The endless loop of can you do two o'clock tomorrow, no we cannot do two o'clock tomorrow, is administrative burden that produces nothing. "Recruiters want to be spending time on the phone with candidates having thoughtful conversations," she says. Handing that simple coordination to software has been one of the clearest wins AI has delivered to her function.

Beyond the platform, her recruiters use ChatGPT under enterprise licenses to build candidate summaries, generate pre-screening questions, and draft follow up notes, all inside a safe environment. Because Zelis is AI focused as a business, the talent team has to keep pace, and that has changed who they hire. Ianelli looks explicitly for curiosity and learning agility, for candidates who want to learn AI. Some are there. Some are not. That gap is itself one of the biggest shifts in the market.

The New Burden Nobody Budgeted For

Ianelli is clear eyed about the cost side of the ledger. Vendors pitch her a new option practically every day, and each one demands the same interrogation: is it really worth it, do we actually need that. Layered on top is candidate fraud, which she treats as a genuine operational issue rather than a curiosity. Her team has to function almost like a private investigator, working out whether a person is who they claim to be.

The cumulative effect is real. Teams get drained, she notes, because there is far more on their plates today than there was two years ago. She holds both truths at once: this is a genuinely exciting moment to be in talent acquisition, and a genuinely heavy one for the people doing the work.

Advice: Stay Read, Stay Close, Place Bets Carefully

Her counsel to other talent leaders starts with education. Keep pace. Network and have real conversations with peers. Be extremely well read. Then stay close to the ground: no matter where you sit in the organization, keep skip level check-ins with the recruiters who are on the phone with candidates every day, because that is where the true pulse of the market is.

On technology, she urges restraint over enthusiasm. Do not get overwhelmed by everything being thrown at you. Assume the vendor landscape will shake out, with smaller players scooped up by bigger ones. Above all, resist assembling a mishmash of tools, because recruiting teams cannot absorb it. Doing the work in Workday today, somewhere else tomorrow, and somewhere else again the day after is not a strategy, it is churn. Be thoughtful about where you place your bets, and be willing to let the market settle a little first. Move quickly, she says, but not too quickly.

Among the peers she elevates are Laurie David of The FedCap Group, a senior leader in the Boston market who has led very large teams for a long time and consistently gets things done, and Amy Guiel, whom she describes as hands on, a great mentor, and a leader who truly supports her team. Coming from someone whose own career was built by mentors who invested early, her choice of whom to spotlight says as much as anything else.