Todd Hazen

Learning to Operate in Ambiguity

Todd moved in house when he joined Uber, arriving at a moment when the company was still defining how internal recruiting should work. On his first day he was handed a laptop and told to go. There was no playbook and no clear structure, just goals and ambiguity. That environment taught him how to prioritize without perfect information, how to operate through uncertainty, and how to deliver results while the systems around him were still being built.

Leadership came into focus during his time at Facebook. After succeeding as a recruiter, Todd intentionally stepped into a different part of the organization and took ownership of candidate experience. Almost immediately, the manager above him left, and he found himself leading a team of roughly twenty five people with no prior formal management experience. Soon after, COVID reshaped the world of work. It amounted to a crash course in leadership: managing scale, navigating uncertainty, supporting teams through disruption, and learning how to make decisions when the ground is constantly shifting.

Building and Scaling at Gusto

At the time of this interview Todd was at Gusto, where he had held multiple leadership roles across go to market, G&A, and then technical recruiting; he has since become Vice President, Talent at HUMAN CAPITAL. Despite not coming from a traditional technical background, he led a global tech recruiting organization with three managers and a team of about twenty five recruiters, all oriented around a single clarifying question: how do you increase hiring velocity in a market that is constantly changing?

The work that energizes him most is problem solving alongside the business. At Gusto he partnered closely with senior leaders who brought different pressures, expectations, and priorities, and his role was to bring clarity to talent decisions. What does the business need, when does it need it, and what has to change in process, data, or structure to make that possible? There is no one size fits all answer. Different teams require different hiring models, expectations, and levels of engagement, and Todd embraces that complexity rather than flattening it, designing deliberately for the differences.

Leading People and Learning Along the Way

People leadership sits at the center of Todd's approach. He focuses on developing recruiters, placing the right people in the right roles, and being the kind of manager he once wished he had. Transitioning fully into technical recruiting has also required humility. He is open about what he does not know and actively learns from the institutional knowledge of his team, recognizing that each function, from engineering to product design to data, carries its own nuances, and that senior level hiring only amplifies them.

He often describes his role as a quarterback: knowing when to be in the weeds and when to step back, where to focus attention, how to manage time, and how to anticipate issues before they become blockers. No two days look the same, and recalibration is constant.

How the Recruiting Landscape Has Shifted

Over the past year, Todd has watched recruiting become faster and more competitive, particularly for senior talent. Strong candidates move quickly, and if a process slows down, the best people are already gone. That reality has produced sharper conversations with the business about interview design, decision making, and speed, because recruiting velocity has become a competitive advantage in its own right.

At the same time, AI has moved from experimentation to expectation. Todd views it as a way to improve efficiency and productivity rather than a replacement for judgment, and at Gusto his team was actively testing AI across sourcing, outreach, ATS workflows, and operational tooling, with a clear goal of moving faster without sacrificing quality. He is equally emphatic about diversifying outreach. Conferences, networking, employer branding, and direct hiring leader involvement all matter, and when leaders show up early and engage directly, candidates respond differently and processes move faster.

Advice for 2026

Stay relentlessly close to the data. Understanding funnel health, pipeline signals, and capacity constraints allows talent leaders to spot issues before they become problems.

Think ahead, not just in the moment. Forecasting, capacity planning, and forward looking analysis are critical, because the job is not only to react but to anticipate.

Move with urgency for senior talent. Speed matters, slow processes lose great candidates, and clear decision making with aligned stakeholders is essential.

Lead with humility and partnership. You do not need to know everything. Learn from your team, trust their expertise, and build credibility by listening.