Mattison McGee

From Pre-Seed to the Corner of Talent

McGee's entry point was the least glamorous and most instructive one available: pre-seed startups, where there is no playbook, no employer brand, and no budget, and where a recruiter learns quickly that the job is persuasion, not processing. He climbed from coordinator upward, absorbing the operating logic of wildly different industries along the way. Construction hires differently than real estate. Real estate hires differently than tech. AI and advertising hire differently than all of them. Each move added a layer of pattern recognition that he now draws on daily.

He is candid about why he stayed. Recruiting, in his view, is one of the only white collar professions where the scoreboard is not purely revenue and shareholder value. "I feel like it's really the one profession in the corporate and kind of white collar world where you can make a more positive impact," he says. The chance to hand someone an opportunity they would not otherwise have had is, for McGee, the actual product.

The Manager Who Handed Over the Reins

Ask McGee about the people who shaped him and he arrives quickly at Megan Opp, VideoAmp's Chief People Officer for roughly a year and a half and his most recent manager before she departed for a new role several months ago. She gave him something no previous leader had: complete ownership of an entire department, with the latitude to run it as he judged best.

"It was kind of my first experience where someone just fully gave me the reins for an entire department and let me navigate it however I saw fit," he says. The result was that a decade-plus of accumulated knowledge finally had somewhere to go. He could pull from everything he had learned across industries and steer the company's hiring in a genuinely different direction. The lesson he took from it is one he now applies to how he thinks about leadership generally: that level of trust in a mentor relationship is not a nicety, it is the mechanism by which good people become effective ones.

A Department of One, Powered by AI

McGee has watched recruiting change more in the past decade than most functions change in a generation. When he started, the job carried what he calls a hunter mentality. Sourcing meant career dinners, in-person events, and a great deal of legwork, because LinkedIn was not the default and often not the answer. "It's a completely different role than it was when I first stepped into it," he says.

Today the contrast is stark. He once worked alongside large recruiting teams stocked with coordinators and matrix staffing. At VideoAmp, it is just him, and the expectation is explicit: use AI to fill the gaps that would otherwise require a full talent acquisition team. He uses Claude every single day, something he says he never anticipated. Natural language search on LinkedIn, where a recruiter describes what they need in plain English and candidates surface, still strikes him as remarkable. "Crazy and beneficial," is how he puts it.

His view on where this lands is measured rather than evangelical. The outcome, he argues, will be decided company by company, in leadership rooms rather than by the technology itself. Organizations that lean into ethical AI and treat it as a tool in their employees' hands will look very different from those that overhaul teams and swap people for agents. For recruiting specifically, he expects fewer recruiters in the years ahead, but far more specialized ones, with deep expertise tied to particular industries rather than generalist coverage.

Trust the Ebb and Flow, Then Trust Yourself

For anyone entering the profession now, McGee's advice comes down to two disciplines that took him years to build. The first is composure. Hiring freezes arrive constantly, and two months later the situation can flip entirely and leave a recruiter carrying a workload of 100 open positions. "Really just trusting, like, the ebb and flow of recruiting," he says, has been a defining feature of his own career. The market changes quarter over quarter. Panic is not a strategy.

The second is harder won. Once a recruiter deeply understands the role, the industry, and the company they work for, their gut feeling about a candidate becomes a genuine asset. "Trust your instincts," he says, on whether someone will fit the team and the position itself. It is the kind of judgment that no tool replaces and that only accumulates with time on the job. And alongside it, he adds, leaning into AI is now non-negotiable. Every single day, in his estimation, it matters a little more.

Lifting Others Up

The instinct that pulled McGee into recruiting in the first place has not faded. Asked to name someone in the field deserving of wider recognition, he immediately put forward Lindsay Cohen, Recruiting Director at Tribe AI. It was a small gesture and an entirely characteristic one from a leader whose stated reason for staying in this profession is the power it gives him to uplift other people's voices. Twelve years in, running a function alone in one of the most volatile hiring markets in memory, he is still measuring the work by who got an opportunity because of it.