Sabrina Silva

From Psychology Major to the Other Side of the Table

Sabrina is a first-generation college student who changed her major multiple times, which is partly how she ended up at so many career fairs to begin with. She landed on psychology with a minor in business administration, leaning vaguely toward analyst work, without a firm sense of where any of it pointed. The economy at the time was not generous, which made practical advice from a stranger with her resume in hand unusually valuable.

Her first role after graduation combined sales, marketing, and recruiting, selling an accounting CPA review software. The job put her right back at career fairs, now on the company side, surrounded by students, professors, and, crucially, other recruiters. Those recruiters kept asking the same question: had she ever thought about going into core recruiting? Roughly fifteen years ago she said yes and became an accounting recruiter. The symmetry was not lost on her. She was the one at the table now.

A Network Built One Role at a Time

Ask Sabrina about the people who shaped her and she describes a friend group made largely of colleagues. Careers rarely move in a straight line, she points out, and every transition has been a chance to collect a new set of people, many of whom she has stayed close to long after moving on.

The earliest and most durable of those relationships is with Stephanie Tyler, her first boss and the person who gave her the initial opportunity to move into recruiting proper. What made the lesson stick was that it ran both ways. Years later, when Stephanie was looking to move from accounting into a tech and SaaS focused industry, Sabrina served as her reference and helped with her resume. Chelsea Merchan, Senior Staff Recruiter for Executive Search at Tesla, sits on what Sabrina calls her personal board of directors: a close friend who has filled roles for the highest executives imaginable and who Sabrina describes as absolutely killing it.

Her own stint at Tesla came during the Model 3 launch, which she recalls without hedging. Employees stopped working for days and simply delivered cars. It was, she says, a startup taken to the Nth degree, run by a company that is not a startup. The other formative relationships were with hiring managers and senior leaders who tapped her on the shoulder to say they liked how she was thinking philosophically about hiring, and about the people-centric side of it rather than only the business impact. Talking regularly with partners and executives early removed what she calls the hierarchical scare, and that comfort has followed her since.

Tools That Talk to Each Other

Sabrina is unambiguously pro technology, with one condition: a human stays in the review loop as the validation point while the tool supplies the head start. Recruiters who care deeply about people want out of the administrative side of the house, and she has watched tools absorb a real share of what gets in the way. Work that used to consume twelve hours, or sourcing squeezed into an evening meant for rest, can now run overnight through an agent and be reviewed in the morning. She still remembers the nights she stayed up sourcing.

Her sharpest critique is about plumbing rather than intelligence. Getting tools to speak to each other has been a pain point at every company she has worked at, and she is candid that data integration is not always the strongest muscle on the talent acquisition side. What encourages her about newer platforms is that communication is starting to move freely across the stack, which produces better data when hygiene holds and frees the recruiter to build the connection point the person on the other end actually feels. More humans are building on top of these tools now, she notes, adding thoughtfulness instead of a rigid one, two, three, four sequence.

That thinking is live at Apollo. The team is in the middle of tooling decisions, weighing a move from Greenhouse to Ashby that would consolidate several products in the current kit, including Gem. It has been evaluating MetaView and currently uses BrightHire. A new head of talent acquisition operations has come aboard, and the search for a head of talent acquisition is underway. The governing question, for Sabrina, is plain: do the tools talk, and does the whole thing feel like one seamless process?

Advice for 2026

Her counsel for other talent leaders grew out of an exercise that surprised her. Sabrina recently ran a hiring analysis comparing what the organization said it was hiring against what it was actually hiring, and was floored by the gap. Job descriptions needed changes. Calibration needed changes. The result was a tighter profile at the application stage and more accurate calibration on the back end, matched to what the business is doing now.

So the advice is this: be agile, reiterate, and do not take anything at face value. Headcount is fluctuating in ways that break old assumptions, and what used to be a clean one-to-one backfill often is not, because businesses are transforming alongside the technology. She can guarantee almost every business has changed in the last six months, probably the last three, possibly the last week. An iteration period should be a common thread for anyone in talent acquisition, and refusing to assume the next hire looks like the last one is exactly where recruiters earn their seat as strategic advisors, connecting what the business is becoming to the next wave of people who will actually match it.