Tessa Wilder

From the File Room to the Phone

Wilder came to the profession the way most people in it did, which is to say sideways. She went to school and double majored in public administration and human resources management, a combination that pointed squarely at HR and not at all at recruiting. The internship was supposed to be about compliance paperwork. Instead, once she had run those first reference checks, she kept raising her hand. More calls. Then the benefits conversations with new hires and existing employees. Any assignment that put her one on one with a human being, she volunteered for.

What she noticed was that she was not simply making calls. She was explaining a mission she genuinely believed in to people deciding whether to join it. She was, in her own framing, the bridge: the connection between an interested candidate and the company they would eventually help build. The HR mentor who had been watching her do this told her plainly that she should look into recruiting. It was the first time anyone had named the thing she was already doing.

Her first recruiting job came, as she cheerfully admits, from a Craigslist posting, a detail that dates the era as precisely as any resume line could. It landed her at Robert Half, and like so many practitioners of her generation, agency is where she cut her teeth on the fundamentals of talent acquisition. The basics and the essentials, learned under pressure and against a number. She has not looked back since.

The Leader Who Saw It First

Ask Wilder who shaped her and the first name is Jocelyn, an early career manager she thought highly enough of to go work for twice. In a community as small as talent acquisition, Wilder argues, that decision carries real weight. Who you are willing to follow a second time says a great deal about your character, and about what you actually value in the way a TA team is grown and built.

Jocelyn's contribution was specific. Wilder was a strong individual contributor, the kind who exceeded her numbers and quietly taught the people around her, and she was good at advocating for herself in the work. What she was not doing was picturing herself as a manager. People she had mentored were stepping into leadership roles all around her while she stayed where she was, content and effective. Jocelyn saw the potential Wilder had not claimed, and tapped her for it. Wilder has thrived ever since.

Jocelyn also did something less visible and arguably braver. She noticed that Wilder's compensation was not right sized against her peers, and she moved to fix it. Wilder is candid that money has never been her primary motivator, which makes that intervention all the more meaningful: she was not going to ask, and a leader asked on her behalf. It is a model of sponsorship she now carries forward, and one she is especially attentive to as a woman in the profession watching other women undersell themselves.

Mission Over Money

Wilder is disarmingly direct about the calculus behind her career moves, even when she knows it runs against the grain. "I care more about the people I work with, about the mission of the company, than I do about the money I see on the other side of it," she says. Her husband, she notes with a laugh, wishes she would negotiate harder. She concedes the point may cost her certain financial milestones, and she has left the door open to changing her mind someday. So far, she has not.

The logic is consistent with everything else about her. The reason she escaped the file room was that she was passionate about the nonprofit's mission and wanted to tell people about it. The reason she stayed in recruiting was that the job kept putting her in the position of representing something she believed in to someone deciding whether to believe in it too. A recruiter who sells what they do not buy is easy to spot. Wilder has built a career on never being in that position.

A Small World, Carefully Tended

Her view of the industry is shaped by its intimacy. Talent acquisition, she points out, is a small community, one where reputations travel faster than resumes and where the leaders worth working for get sought out again and again. That reality has made her deliberate about the company she keeps and the teams she builds, and it explains why she measures a career less by title progression than by whether she would run it back with the same people.

For anyone standing where she once stood, holding down a role that does not yet feel like a calling, her own path is the argument: say yes to the task nobody else wants, especially if it involves talking to people. Wilder took a phone call an HR rep did not want to make. It has taken her all the way to Anduril.