Michael Bitar

An Accounting Degree and a Seat in the Room

The path started in public accounting. Bitar joined Ernst & Young straight out of school and landed, by what he calls dumb luck, in a very small office. It turned out to be the luckiest kind of accident. In a small office, a young accountant is in rooms he would otherwise wait a decade to enter, and Bitar found himself sitting across from the CEOs and CFOs of smaller companies at an unusually early age. He was not leading those meetings. He was watching them, and he found the whole thing intriguing.

That curiosity pulled him out of audit and into industry. He went to Nabisco, then to BIC, developing a genuine passion for consumer packaged goods along the way. The move from Nabisco to BIC came through a search firm, and the recruiter on the other end of the phone was Burt Miller. Bitar did not know at the time that Miller was the founder and CEO of the firm, which was then all of six months old. He only knew that the conversation was different. It was not transactional. It was about his career, not about a requisition.

Bitar took the BIC role, but the entrepreneurial bug had already lodged itself. He spent about a year in Connecticut, kept dialoguing with Miller, and decided he wanted to be in charge of his own destiny and his own performance. Miller was looking for someone to help him build a firm. Bitar moved to Indianapolis and never looked back.

Building Companies and Changing Lives

Miller is the first of the three people Bitar credits without hesitation. He taught Bitar the business, often while learning it himself, and much of what Bitar absorbed came not from formal instruction but from observation. At a time when many people entered recruiting because they were between things or because they were enamored with what the profession could pay, Miller framed it differently. Bitar still quotes him: we will know we have really made it when we stop worrying about the dollar signs and the commas and the decimal points, and we are just focused on building companies and changing lives.

That line became the tagline of Protis Global. It has also functioned, for nearly three decades, as Bitar's internal compass.

The Meeting That Rebuilt the Method

The second influence arrived as a client. Harry Bigelow was an executive at Diageo, the largest spirits company in the world, and Protis had won a retained project inside his group. Bitar has never forgotten his first meeting with him, roughly 27 or 28 years ago. Bigelow asked penetrating questions about the talent being presented, questions Bitar could not answer, and Bigelow knew it. Rather than tap dance, Bitar was candid about what he knew and what he did not.

The meeting reset his standard permanently. He resolved never again to walk into a client conversation without an extraordinary depth of understanding of the people he was representing, not at the level of selling talent, but at the level of genuinely knowing them. That resolution changed the firm's approach, not just his own. Protis moved from a solid conventional recruitment process to what Bitar calls the scorecard approach: personally, professionally, financially. Instead of leading with roles and opportunities, however attractive the retained mandate, he leads by helping the individual gain clarity on what actually matters to them, so they can manage their own search. If they choose to let Protis participate, his team already understands what they are optimizing for.

There is a postscript that Bitar tells often. Roughly 20 years after that first bruising meeting, Harry Bigelow came to work for Protis Global.

Peers, Sounding Boards, and Jen Meyer

The third name is Jen Meyer, and the relationship goes back a generation. Her father, Bill, who passed away a number of years ago, was one of the mentors who guided Bitar and Miller when they were opening the firm. Bitar met Jen in 1999 at a Management Recruiters International training in Cleveland, Ohio, and she has been a peer, a friend, and a sounding board ever since.

He calls her the best overall recruiter he has ever been around, and he is precise about what he means: excellence on the candidate side in how she engages talent, and excellence on the retained partnership side with clients. Plenty of people in the industry talk about delivering business solutions, he notes, and some are sincere while others are simply spewing words. Meyer is honest and direct, and she is exceptional in the moment. Not because she is armored with preparation, though she prepares thoroughly, but because her approach to a conversation is legitimate and she is actually listening. That, Bitar argues, is what allows her to diagnose a situation correctly instead of merely responding to it.

A Pen, a Notebook, and an Impatience With the Industry

Bitar is careful not to overclaim on technology. His daily plan lives in Outlook, but he still takes notes by hand, because there is a connection between the pen and the paper and what he retains afterward. He is not, by his own description, a cutting edge techie. He has, however, watched an enormous number of technological evolutions pass through recruiting since 1997, and he has consistently valued them as enablers.

Which makes his verdict on the current moment interesting. Asked how AI has shifted the recruiting landscape over the past year, his honest answer is that he is disappointed it has not shifted more. He did not expect to lean into AI the way he has, and now that he has, he sees an industry that is not leaning in nearly enough. He credits Matt and the team at Loxo, the applicant tracking system Protis uses, for doing genuinely good work implementing AI components into the platform, but even there, he says, they are scratching the surface. When he looks across consumer goods, the industry he serves, and at what his client partners are and are not doing, he finds it basic. Elementary. An enormous efficiency opportunity sitting largely uncapitalized.

His advice to fellow talent leaders follows directly from that. The analog habits, the manual data entry, the administrative sediment that has always coated recruiting work, are exactly what the current generation of tools is built to absorb. Bitar's own career argues the rest of the case. The parts of this business that cannot be automated, the depth of understanding behind a recommendation, the willingness to say what you do not know, the discipline of leading with what matters to the person in front of you, are the parts he has spent 28 years perfecting. The technology should be clearing the runway for them.