Quynh-Nhu Mai

A Career She Went Looking For

The industry cliche is that nobody plans to become a recruiter. Mai is the exception. Fresh out of university and convinced she needed a change, she moved to the Bay Area and set about learning what functions existed inside tech companies and where her own abilities might fit. Her degree was broad. What she kept gravitating toward was people: understanding them, managing them, supporting them.

A mentor pointed her toward HR. Rather than take the suggestion at face value, Mai went and read through every facet of the discipline, from benefits to talent acquisition, looking for the corner of it that would let her engage with people every single day. Recruiting was the answer. Then came the harder part, which was getting in. She began mass sending networking messages to recruiters on LinkedIn, back when the platform itself was still new. The pitch was simple and unembarrassed: I am fresh out of college, I see you have been in recruiting, I want to learn what this is all about.

The break came from LinkedIn itself, which at the time ran a program that brought new graduates in and trained them to be recruiters. As she puts it, there was no better boot camp available. She joined an early stage company and learned the craft inside the building that every recruiter in the world relies on. That grounding, in a place where sourcing and talent data were the product, shaped the technical instincts she still carries.

The Uber Classroom and the People Who Ran It

Six months in, Mai was hired at Uber. She was a new grad with barely two quarters of recruiting behind her, and she landed as one of the company's first five recruiters during its most explosive period of growth. She ran full lifecycle hiring and traveled to launch cities as Uber opened them.

She credits two women with making that possible. Sophia Bianchi and Eden Emerson gave her the opportunity to sit inside a fast scaling, high growth company before she had the resume to justify it, and then taught her how to survive there. From them she learned how to prioritize under real pressure, how to become a genuinely better sourcer, and how to support hiring managers rather than simply serve them. What mattered most, she says, was simpler than any of that: they believed in her.

The leader who shaped how Mai manages is Andrea Dantley, now VP of HR at Carta, who rose from recruiting manager to recruiting director at Uber. Mai still goes to her for guidance, inspiration and advice. Dantley is the model she measures herself against: data driven, strategic and empathetic at the same time, able to get along with every executive in the room and still push back when the business needs to hear it, funny and sharp, fiercely protective of her team while never losing sight of the company's interests. That balance, backing your people and owning the business outcome, is the thing Mai says she is still working to embody.

Her path since has run through senior recruiting leadership, including a stint as head of recruiting at BetterUp. Over the last three years she has added a full people and HR lens to that recruiting foundation, and at Splash Financial she oversees recruiting alongside the broader people function. Her loyalties, though, are not in question. "My heart is big recruiting," she says.

AI as the End of Transactional Recruiting

Mai's view of artificial intelligence is unusually specific because it is grounded in the tasks she used to do by hand. Deep research into talent pools. Data reports. Quarterly business reviews on recruiting performance. The decks and reports that consumed entire afternoons now get built in record time, and a three hour initiative can collapse into thirty or forty five minutes of prompting, editing and refining before it is ready to present.

The point is not the time saved. The point is what the time is spent on instead. Manual steps, high volume steps, research, talent mapping, data gathering and data production are exactly where AI belongs, she argues, precisely so that recruiters can remain the strategic partner to hiring managers and preserve the empathy and care that candidates need. "That's where AI can't replace the human in recruiting or in HR," she says. She also values what the technology surfaces rather than what it removes: scenarios, strategic options and patterns in the data that a leader working without that access would simply miss.

The Reputation Fight

Ask Mai for advice to recruiting leaders and she goes straight to a grievance she has been arguing against for years. Recruiting is widely regarded as transactional, she says, and the perception is not entirely unearned. In companies that have never seen the function done well, recruiters are pushed into administrative, mindless, high speed work, and the output looks exactly like the stereotype. She has been fortunate to work at high bar companies where recruiting is treated as a partnership: thoughtful, intelligent, data driven, strategic, technical. Most of the profession has not had that exposure.

Her advice, then, is to understand exactly how AI can make you less transactional and more strategic. Strip out the volume, the hundreds of resumes, the repetitive lift, and what remains is the space to be a thoughtful recruiter and a thoughtful recruiting leader for every population you serve, hiring managers, executives and candidates alike.

She believes the payoff will be a reckoning with the old narrative that anyone can be a recruiter because the job is easy. "I have fought very hard to build teams that are smart, strategic, and are relied on by people in the business," she says, and she expects AI to amplify that work tenfold while making it obvious who the 10X recruiters actually are. Expectations for the function are rising, which she welcomes, because it finally showcases that the people who actively pursue this career and love it are smart and ambitious. In a few years, she predicts, the role will look different, be more respected, and give the people who do it something to be genuinely proud of. It is a future she has been building toward since she was a new graduate cold messaging strangers on LinkedIn to ask what recruiting was.