Matt Craven

An Accidental Start in 1997

Craven never planned on recruiting. He relocated to California in 1997 wanting to break into HR, and one of his first conversations with a large banking organization redirected him entirely. You would be great for TA, they told him. Have you ever thought about it? He had not. They hired him as a recruiting assistant precisely because he had no recruiting background, and within a few months promoted him to recruiter. He has not left the profession since.

Nearly three decades later, he pushes back hard on the idea that TA is a narrow specialty. Recruiters, he argues, sit at the intersection of every other HR discipline. They handle employee relations by default, because the recruiter is the first person a new hire knows inside the organization and the one they come back to when something goes wrong. They practice compensation daily, negotiating offers with internal partners and reading the market in real time even without the annual survey data the comp teams receive. They have to know the benefits cold. "We touch so many different things," he says, and the reach is the point: strong recruiting shows up later as strong leaders and high performing front lines.

A Career Measured in Dollars Saved

When the banking sector contracted after 9/11, Craven moved into healthcare, and healthcare is where his numbers got big. After proving himself on that first contract engagement, he worked through a couple of different hospitals before taking a TA leadership role at a large hospital system in Central California. There he built strategies to eliminate contract labor entirely and saved the organization more than $20 million over five years. His team recruited from 26 different states. The system reached 93 percent retention and held its vacancy rate under 5 percent, results he describes as unheard of in a market defined by shortages of nurses and other licensed staff.

A consulting stretch followed, during which he stood up recruiting departments, and when the economy dipped again around 2008 to 2010 he moved into the tech space with Schneider Electric, where he stayed for eleven years. He served as manager of every technology tool the TA organization used and handled rollouts across the global business. He then built a four person sourcing team at the moment sourcing was becoming a discipline of its own. That team ran pipeline development and, just as importantly, used the data behind those projects to show leaders exactly what the investment produced: shorter time to deliver candidates, higher candidate quality, and less friction for recruiters trying to find talent.

He returned to healthcare at PeaceHealth, building another sourcing team over a couple of years and saving roughly $10 million in contract staffing while elevating nursing pipelines and reducing the organization's reliance on travelers. The dollars were smaller than earlier in his career, he notes without hedging, but the mechanism was the same. "We're talking about doing things paper and pencil" early on, he says of the arc from then to now. The tools changed completely. The scorecard did not.

The Case Against Time to Fill

If there is one argument Craven has spent years making to executives, it is that the industry's favorite metric is the wrong one. A recruiter can deliver a qualified candidate in five days and watch a hiring manager sit on that candidate for six months. The recruiter did the job. The requisition still shows a six month fill. "Time to fill is not a recruiting metric," he says. The honest measure is the time it takes to present a candidate to the leader with a real pipeline behind them. If a recruiter can deliver people in ten days, that is the standard worth managing to.

The alternative he teaches his teams is to reverse engineer the commitment out loud. A leader who needs someone in 30 days gets the math up front: candidates produced within seven to ten days, then two to three weeks for the hiring team to meet them and reach a decision. Setting that expectation converts a vague promise into a shared plan, and in his experience performance rises to meet it. Beyond delivery speed, he tracks reduction in temp labor cost, quality of candidate, and retention rate. Ten or fifteen years ago, he notes, nobody really cared about data and recruiters told leaders they were doing the best they could. Data is what ended that conversation and let TA argue its value in the language the business already speaks.

The Leaders Who Shaped Him

Craven is quick to say the people who shaped him were not always the ones with the biggest titles, but two stand out across twenty nine years. The first was the leader who hired him into that banking recruiting job, a woman who has since retired. She gave him the opportunity, then did something rarer: she told him plainly which skills he already had and which ones he would need to develop over time. She shaped how he thinks about talent acquisition, the tools available to him, and above all how relationships get built. It was his first recruiting job, and he still traces his instincts back to it.

The second is the VP of Talent Acquisition he works for today, now the second organization the two have shared. Craven counts him among the best bosses of his career and credits him with a specific and difficult skill: how to project at the executive level, to the most senior leaders in very large organizations, while keeping the approach personal. His approach, Craven says, is unlike anybody else he has worked with.

AI as a Multiplier, Not a Replacement

On artificial intelligence Craven is clear-eyed and consistent with everything else he believes. It is a tool inside the process, and its highest value is giving time back. Automation now handles scheduling, moves information to candidates faster, and supports the earliest stages of prescreening. Sourcing tools built on AI are getting genuinely good at surfacing the same passive talent legacy platforms find, at a fraction of the cost, which matters when those platforms can consume 30 to 40 percent of a recruiting budget.

What he refuses to accept is the premise that the technology eliminates recruiters. Some organizations may believe it will. "It's not going to," he says, because the work itself is human. Recruiting is building relationships, building trust, and influencing people to consider an organization they had not been thinking about. In healthcare that is especially true: most people choose the field because they like helping people, and they want a genuine connection with another person before they make a decision about their career.

The pressure driving his adoption of automation is real and familiar. Expectations of TA keep rising while the resources allocated to it keep shrinking. His answer is to let the technology absorb the administrative load so his team can spend more time with candidates and deliver higher quality slates to hiring managers faster. Nearly three decades in, that remains the whole job. Everything else is instrumentation.