Michelle Yoshihara

Recruiting on Purpose

The conviction had a face attached to it. Yoshihara watched her brother, trained as a mechanical engineer, decide to pivot into software engineering and complete a bootcamp to get there. He was then turned away from a handful of job opportunities, not because he could not do the work, but because he had not studied it through a formal education. "The system feels a little bit broken," she remembers thinking, and alongside that thought came another one: she could make a real difference here.

The question she has been working on ever since is deceptively simple. How does an organization connect talent with demonstrable skills to the opportunities it actually needs filled, without leaning entirely on backgrounds, degrees and resumes taken in totality? That question, more than any job title, is the through line of her career. It is why she went into talent acquisition intentionally, and why she has stayed.

The Mentors Who Built Her

When Yoshihara started at Greenhouse she was a recruiting coordinator, and Ariana Moon was one of the company's senior recruiters. Moon took on a mentorship role early, later became her manager, and has now worked closely alongside her for just under a decade, guiding her through dozens of transitions both in her own roles and in how Greenhouse itself looks and feels. Yoshihara is unequivocal about the impact. She admires Moon's mind and her work ethic, but what she names first is something harder to teach: the way Moon brings herself to the workplace as a genuinely full person, and the way her mentorship has extended well beyond work. "She's had the biggest impact on me for sure," Yoshihara says.

The second name is Minji Liu, who heads up learning and development at Greenhouse and has partnered with Yoshihara across a range of initiatives. Liu taught her something different and equally durable: how to demand excellence without sacrificing warmth. She is exceptionally strong in her output, Yoshihara says, and as a collaborator she holds a high bar for everyone around her in a friendly and kind way. She is also willing to speak the truth, unwilling to let work drift in a direction she does not believe in, and protective of the quality of what the team produces together. That has meant tough conversations, including tough conversations directed at Yoshihara herself. The result was not friction but trust. Liu is now among her closest mentors and friends.

Three Lenses on AI

Ask Yoshihara how AI has reshaped recruiting and she does not offer a verdict. She offers a framework, and it has three parts.

The first is volume and authenticity. The everyday recruiter is now absorbing enormous numbers of applicants, many of uncertain quality and some of uncertain reality. Greenhouse's answer, Real Talent, is aimed squarely at that problem: using AI to filter out what is not aligned or not genuine, and, just as importantly, to surface the real candidates already sitting inside the applicant pool.

The second lens is the one she finds most interesting, because it is the one talent teams uniquely control. Assessing candidates for AI fluency, proficiency or expertise, she argues, is structurally the same exercise as hiring for culture add. You are not looking for someone who mirrors the organization as it exists today or the behaviors it already has. You are looking for something aspirational. Your company may not be where it wants to be on AI yet, but by continually adding talent that is genuinely AI forward, you change what the organization is capable of. "That's a really unique thing that talent teams can do," she says, "because they are the people that are bringing in the talent."

The third lens is workflow, and here she is both enthusiastic and precise about the limits. Turning a bare job spec into a job post that actually appeals to candidates, drafting interviews, tightening the mechanics of a process: all of it can be made more efficient. What cannot be outsourced is judgment.

Where the Expertise Still Lives

Yoshihara has a favorite illustration of what recruiters are still for. You ask Gemini or Claude for ten interview questions. Two of them are excellent, but someone earlier in the loop is already asking those. Three are solid, so you keep them. The rest are not good enough, so you either rework them or cut them entirely because you simply do not need them.

That triage is the job. It is the discernment her team is actively honing, and the discipline she encourages other teams to build rather than assume. The tools generate. The recruiter decides. Losing that distinction, in her telling, is how organizations end up with faster processes and worse hiring.

Curiosity as a Career Strategy

Asked for the single piece of advice she would hand to other talent leaders, Yoshihara does not hesitate. Be curious. "Where you are today is certainly not where you have to be tomorrow," she says, "and your curiosity is going to be the thing that propels you forward." Coming from someone who moved from recruiting coordinator to talent leader inside the same company, it reads less like a slogan than a description of method.

She is unreservedly optimistic about what comes next. By her read, the industry is only at the early midpoint of what AI can do for talent. Forward thinking teams have already found impressive efficiencies, but the efficiencies are not the point. What excites her are the new things those efficiencies will unlock, the work talent teams have never had the room to attempt. Greenhouse will keep exploring, she expects, and so will talent professionals everywhere. "I'm genuinely so excited about where we can go," she says. Given where she started, and the brother whose experience set her on this path, it is a fair bet she means people as much as technology.