Michelle Smalls

Eight Years Inside Healthcare Hiring

From that operational grounding, Smalls graduated into recruiting in a hospital setting and stayed for about eight years. Her scope widened steadily until she was hiring at all levels, from nursing through the C-suite, and the work extended well beyond posting and screening. She partnered with colleges. She spoke at conferences and events. She ran Lunch and Learns with students, promoting the hospital and its recruitment program to people who had not yet pictured themselves in healthcare at all.

That pairing became a signature. High-stakes executive hiring on one side, early-career evangelism on the other. Smalls has rarely been content to work only at the top of a market. She has consistently spent energy building the pipeline that will eventually supply it.

A Leap of Faith into Technology

Then she changed industries entirely, in what she describes as "a different leap of faith." Smalls moved into information technology and joined Microsoft, walking into a hybrid remit that would have overwhelmed a narrower practitioner: human resources business partner work combined with recruiting. She supported the LATAM division from the United States, covering every country in the region with the exception of Brazil, and stepping in there when help was needed.

The work sat high in the organization. Smalls partnered with the executive team at the C level across Latin America and with their direct reports, handling talent management, performance management and one on one coaching alongside hiring. In effect she learned a second version of recruitment, practiced from a different vantage point and inside a very different business culture from the hospital corridors where she began.

DigiGirls and the Deliberate Pipeline

Inside LATAM, Smalls also ran diversity programs, and one in particular captures how she works. She championed girls in technology through an event she built called DigiGirls, and as she puts it, she would "create this synergy" with a school in Miami and another in Boca to bring the girls in. Smalls designed the whole program. Then she did the thing that makes such events actually land: she put the company's executive women team in front of the room to present.

None of that was incidental. Girls in the seats, women running the podium, by design. It was the same instinct that had sent her into college Lunch and Learns years earlier, translated into technology. Show young women the people who already did it, and the career stops looking like someone else's. Smalls has never treated diversity work as an accessory to a recruiting portfolio. She treats it as recruiting, conducted several years upstream.

Mapping the Top of the House

From there Smalls elevated again, into recruitment management and resource management, and then into executive recruiting, where her work centered on C-level searches. The instruments of that trade are talent mapping and market mapping, the patient cartography of an industry's leadership bench: understanding who exists, where they sit, and which of them could be dropped into a high-level position and genuinely thrive in it.

She has done, by her own accounting, so many things across so many realms that the list resists summary. What organizes it is not a single job but a single arc. "Really the bulk of it is going gradually in each stage of my development in recruiting and in human resources," she says, learning the whole aspect of both ends of it. That means knowing what has to happen at the front end, getting the right person through the door, and what has to happen afterward, developing that person into who they become inside the organization over time. Very few practitioners can credibly claim both. Smalls built her career specifically so she could.

The Standard Eric Martin Set

Ask her who shaped that career and she names Eric Martin, her general manager in HR at Microsoft and, in her assessment, the best she worked with there. She describes him as focused, sharp and intuitive, with a rare equilibrium between empathy and work ethic. What stayed with her was less a technique than a discipline about why the work was being done at all.

The lesson, in her words, was to make sure "that we're doing what we're doing with a purpose, make sure that we're having an impact and really making an impact by really being meaningful about what we do." That standard is visible in how she runs a search today. Mapping a market is easy to treat as an inventory exercise, a list of who happens to be available. Smalls treats it as a question of fit, hunting for the leader who will still be the right answer three years after the offer is signed, because the front end and the development that follows are, to her, the same job.

It also explains the shape of her resume. Operations before recruiting. Nursing and the C-suite in one portfolio. Executive search in one hand and a room of girls from Miami and Boca in the other. Smalls has spent a career insisting that talent work be meaningful at every level of an organization, not only the expensive ones.