Meghann Hanvey

From the Admin Desk to Build Mode

She graduated in 2009, into one of the worst job markets in living memory, and took an HR assistant role at a small biotech company in San Diego. Her reasoning at the time was unglamorous and, in retrospect, exactly right. "I care about people. I like people. Let's see what happens."

The team was small enough that the work was largely administrative, but the seat was excellent. Her manager sat directly across from her, which meant Hanvey absorbed in real time how to speak with executives, how to present herself, how to adjust her register for different audiences, how to stay on task. She is a committed fan of remote work and says so plainly, but she credits those early years in the room with building the professional foundation everything else sits on.

As the biotech grew, it needed help on the hiring side, and Hanvey picked up the scheduling and the small coordination tasks first. When the company decided to spin recruiting out into its own function separate from HR, her manager made a call that redirected a career. "I hate to lose you, but I think you should move over there," she told her. "That's where I'm seeing your passion. That's where I'm seeing you shine."

She was right. Hanvey discovered she loved growth-stage work and began selecting for it deliberately, joining startups at the point where the org chart is still a sketch. At nearly every organization she was hired under 100 employees and left with headcount approaching the thousands, which is a rare thing to be able to say once, let alone repeatedly.

The Leaders Who Said Go Run

Ask Hanvey who shaped her and she talks almost entirely about women who trusted her before she had finished proving anything. At Rescue, a small marketing agency in San Diego, she reported directly to the CEO. That CEO was, by Hanvey's account, the first leader in her career to skip the audition period entirely: "Hey, I hired you. You know what you're doing. Do it." There was no let me get my footing, no let me prove myself. Having that kind of confidence extended to her from the C level, she says, is what allowed her to come into her own.

At Sprinklr, recruiting sales representatives, she worked for women sales leaders whose approach to hiring reshaped how she ran a search. At Bobbie, the pattern went org-wide. The company was roughly 95 percent women when she joined. The co-founders were women. Her direct manager, a VP, was a woman. What she took from that environment was less about representation than about method: how to be thoughtful, how to think in big-picture terms, how to design a process rather than inherit one.

By that stage of her career the prove-yourself ritual that dogs younger professionals had disappeared entirely, replaced by something she found genuinely empowering. "People were saying, hey, do what you do best. Go run." She attributes it to the kind of leaders they were. They were not micromanagers. They trusted the people they hired.

Hanvey is careful not to pretend the whole ride has been sunshine and roses. It has not. But she is unusually generous about the managers who were less empowering, treating them as instruction of a different kind. Even from those, she says, she still learned things she now knows how to do.

Two Questions for Every AI Tool

Hanvey came to AI apprehensive. Her first instinct was uncertainty: what is this, exactly, and is it just another search engine? Rather than picking a side, she took the time to study it, and emerged with a discipline she still applies to every tool that crosses her desk. Two questions. Is this making me more efficient? Is this making me more mindful? If the answer to both is no, she does not use it.

What survives that filter is specific and unglamorous, which is precisely the point. She uses AI heavily on job descriptions, prompting it to respond in the voice of different candidates: someone with a disability, someone from a minority group, someone whose reading of a posting she cannot access from her own vantage point. The goal is equal language that lands the same way on everyone. That practice traces back to a conviction she holds firmly: every candidate who applies for a job should have the exact same equitable experience as the person next to them.

It has also sharpened her reporting. Greenhouse is the applicant tracking system she works in, both with clients and in house, and AI has helped her refine reports well beyond what the standard vendor training covers. And she uses it as an antidote to institutional inertia. Recruiting organizations calcify easily, she notes, defaulting to this is the way it's always been and these are the interview questions we've always asked. So she feeds the model the company, the year's changes, the old question bank, and asks how to develop it and take it a step further. Things change. Company size changes. The process should too.

The adoption curve, she observes, is accelerating past individual users. A couple of her clients have now bought Claude for everyone in the organization, which means whole companies writing in the same brand voice. "It's crazy how fast it's moving," she says. In her telling, the tools are not merely improving, they are improving constantly, which is why she treats fluency with them as maintenance rather than a one-time project.

A Seat at the Business Table

Asked what she would tell talent leaders heading into the next year, Hanvey does not reach for a tactic. She reaches for a structural problem she has watched from both sides, in house and now from the consulting chair.

Recruiting, she argues, too often operates inside its own bubble. Teams have the roles to fill, but they do not know the why behind them. They are not getting the big picture, so they optimize for closing the requisition rather than for the business outcome the role exists to serve. Her remedy is access. Let recruiters sit in on QBRs. Send them to the monthly leadership meetings. At minimum, distill the notes for them: how teams are growing, why they are growing, how a given hire affects a specific part of the business and a specific business goal.

The results she has seen are consistent. When recruiters understand the business, they hire with more intention, and the candidates they find are the ones who genuinely fit and keep growing inside the company. That, in her framing, is the difference between transactional recruiting and strategic recruiting, and closing the gap is the leader's job. Empower the teams. Give them the seat. Let them see how it all connects.