Mike Greenleaf

From Monster Resume to Technical Recruiting

The agency world suited him immediately. Coming out of business school, Greenleaf recognized something familiar in the work: it was entrepreneurial, it rewarded initiative, and the scoreboard was honest. "I just kind of fell in love with it," he says of those first months. What began as a general recruiting seat narrowed quickly into technical recruiting, a specialization that would define the next stretch of his career and eventually carry him from the agency side into corporate talent organizations.

That move from agency to in-house is one many recruiters attempt and fewer navigate well. Greenleaf treated it as an evolution rather than a jump, carrying the hustle and commercial instincts of agency work into environments where the measure of success shifts from placements closed to businesses built. Along the way he has recruited inside organizations including Moderna, and he has watched the discipline change shape several times over.

Building the Tools, Not Just Buying Them

Greenleaf's relationship with AI is unusually hands-on for a talent leader. He has partially built a tool himself, an application designed to help review applicant resumes, and roughly two years ago he began work on a side startup. That project began from a position of skepticism. He describes himself at the time as "very anti-AI and very cautious." What changed was the technology itself. Over two years, he watched the tools travel a distance that made the caution obsolete.

He sees the most meaningful gains at the front end of the recruiting lifecycle: AI sourcing agents, automation, and large language models capable of extracting genuinely granular detail from candidate profiles. But some of the change he finds most interesting sits further downstream. Tools like BrightHire that record interviews and feed coaching back to interviewers are, in his view, quietly solving one of hiring's oldest problems, which is getting a panel of people to agree on what they are actually evaluating against.

He is equally clear-eyed about the cost of easy access. When applying to jobs takes seconds and AI can generate a plausible application, volume stops being a signal. Fake candidates have become a real operational problem, and Greenleaf has spent time evaluating tools specifically for their ability to cut through that noise. Recently he led a full revamp of the Paradigm Health recruiting stack, purchasing a new applicant tracking system alongside new sourcing tools, work that was completed within the last several weeks.

Advice: Lean In, But Do Not Drift

His counsel to other talent leaders is a balance rather than a slogan. Embrace new technology, constantly, and study how it can reshape the recruiting function. That is the first half. The second half is the guardrail: do not let the tooling pull the team away from its business partner responsibilities. "I think that is important to kind of keep at the core of our roles," he says. Automation can compress the mechanics of recruiting. It cannot replace the trust a recruiter builds with a hiring manager, and Greenleaf treats that relationship as the non-negotiable center of the job.

It is a philosophy that reflects both mentors and method. The fundamentals learned early, a partnership model refined over years, and operational scale tested at large organizations all point in the same direction: technology is leverage applied to a human craft, not a substitute for it. Greenleaf sits on the Silo Tank, where he reviews emerging tools and pitches from the vendor community, which keeps him closer to the frontier than most practitioners ever get.