Mike Spaulding

The Technologist's Instinct

Spaulding describes the current moment in recruiting as split into two camps: the practitioners who want to plug new technology into every part of their process, and the ones who find it a little icky and are not yet sure what to do with it beyond a meeting note taker or a quick summary from Claude or GPT. He puts himself firmly in the first camp. "I'm just a tools junkie in general," he says, and the curiosity is systematic rather than casual. He wants to know what exists across the ecosystem and where each piece can be plugged into a specific use case.

His logic is unsentimental. Talent acquisition has ridden a roller coaster over the last several years, and this is simply the next turn: adapt or die. But he refuses the doom reading. Done well, he argues, the technology does not replace the recruiter, it upgrades one. The most vivid example he offers is interview feedback. Reading through a full panel's notes, digesting them, and finding the patterns used to be a two hour project. Now it can be a ten minute one.

What matters to Spaulding is what fills the recovered hours. He spends them with hiring managers and company leaders who need to be influenced and guided toward better hiring decisions, and with candidates, using the human element to understand their motives and what they actually want out of their careers before matching them to a role. "I just have so much more space to spend with leaders and candidates today than I would have previously," he says. That is the whole argument in a sentence: the machine takes the reading, the recruiter keeps the relationships.

Two Mentors, Two Lessons

Ask Spaulding who shaped him and the first answer is not from tech at all. It is his father, who he cheerfully admits would have no idea how to understand MotherDuck if it were explained to him. What his father gave him was durable in any industry: work ethic, the habit of showing up no matter what, doing the right thing, and pushing through to finish the job regardless of what is standing in the way. Those are the traits Spaulding names first when describing himself, and he traces them directly to watching his dad hustle year after year.

The second is Steve Brain, a former CTO Spaulding had the pleasure of working alongside at two different companies. Brain was the one who saw the potential and moved him into the rooms where it could compound. When Brain took the CTO job at Qualtrics, he brought Spaulding in as the first in-house recruiter, handing him the mandate to scale technical recruiting at what was then a small software startup and later became one of the sector's great exits. Spaulding calls that moment pivotal and foundational: proof of how much a leader who deliberately puts people in the right places can accelerate a career.

Agency and Thoughtfulness

Asked for the best advice he would give another talent leader, Spaulding offers two principles that happen to overlap with his company's core values, though he is careful to note he held them long before he arrived and suspects they are part of why the company appealed to him in the first place.

The first is agency. In a function where teams are shrinking and the individual contributor carries more of the load, a talent leader has to own the space outright: a bias for action, a strong sense of urgency, the ability to remove their own roadblocks. He is blunt about the budget reality too. Talent is typically the smallest line on the finance sheet, which makes resourcefulness less a virtue than a job requirement.

The second is thoughtfulness, which he calls the yin to agency's yang. Talent leaders get to shape the culture of the companies they serve, and the CTO, the CEO, or the VP with the impressive title is looking to them for guidance precisely because hiring is not their day to day. That makes the way a recruiter communicates consequential. Spaulding notes that everyone has worked for someone with enormous agency who managed to alienate people on the way through; thoughtfulness is the corrective. It means weighing every action against its effect on a candidate, a user, a system, a process.

Put the two together, he argues, and the outcome takes care of itself. Take ownership, move with urgency, and think carefully about every component of every detail, and "you're going to be set up for success."

Paying It Forward

Spaulding's instinct to credit others extends to the people who once reported to him. He singles out Adam Olbrychowski, a former direct report now at Hadrian after a stint at Facebook, as a very strong systems thinker who builds the processes that let talent acquisition scale, while remaining deeply empathetic toward his team and his candidates and hands on in the work itself.

It is a telling choice. Systems plus empathy, structure plus humanity: the same pairing Spaulding preaches as agency and thoughtfulness, and the same balance he has been striking since a career fair booth in the mid 2000s turned into a career.