Tony Chimera

Thirty-Three Requisitions and a Filing Cabinet

His entry into the profession was, by his own telling, an accident of organizational design. His first job out of school was at a technology company, a high end defense contractor, that did not really have an HR department. The executive assistant was managing most of it. Finance had picked up compensation and benefits. Chimera was hired, technically, as an HR generalist.

Then the executive assistant handed over the work she had been carrying: roughly 33 open requisitions, nearly all of them highly technical. The irony was not lost on him. He had once pointed himself toward engineering before concluding it was not his path, and here he was recruiting for a discipline he had decided not to pursue. "I found it amusing that I was recruiting for a function that I didn't have the capability really to master on my own," he says.

It took time, but the realization that followed shaped everything after it: recruiting was one of the most direct ways to make an impact on an organization. From those 33 requisitions forward, Chimera stayed with small companies and heavy loads, and he began to see talent acquisition not as a transaction but as a full life cycle. Get to know the talent early, match good people to the right positions, and the frantic part of the job largely disappears. As he puts it, "you find the good people, you match them with good positions, and then you don't have to really recruit at all."

The People Who Sharpened the Lens

Chimera is quick to note that because he has spent his career at smaller companies, the people who shaped him were rarely pure recruiting specialists. That, he suggests, is part of the point.

The first is Lori Gaten, his first boss, a chief human resources officer who came out of a compensation background. What he took from her was not technique but perception: she understood why people succeeded and how they fit an organization, and she gave him the room to arrive at that same understanding himself. He worked with her at two different companies.

The second is the head of property and casualty at Axis Capital, the first person he met when he joined that firm. The man invested seriously in early talent and in industry initiatives designed to bring new people into the business, and watching that became what Chimera calls "a tipping point" for him. The inclination stuck. Early talent has been a throughline in his work ever since.

The third influence is not a single name. It is a composite of roughly 20 people he has observed across the industry, some of whom he never worked with directly, who demonstrated the discipline he now considers the whole job. "Successful talent acquisition is understanding the industry and the business you're in and the company that you work for, and understanding the talent," he says. "If you got those three things nailed, everything else sorts itself out."

A Clear Eyed Read on AI

Chimera is neither an evangelist nor a skeptic on artificial intelligence, and he is careful about the label itself. Every company is using AI now, he observes, but a fair amount of what gets branded that way is repackaged: the same instinct that once drove offshoring or handing work to outside partners rather than doing it in house.

What concerns him is measurable in the conversations he has with applicants. The candidate experience, he says, seems to be degrading, partly because of how these solutions are deployed and partly because many talent acquisition teams are shrinking rather than growing. He sees genuine value in the technology, particularly for the tedious and administrative layers of the process. He sees real danger in using it to commoditize how a company treats talented applicants.

"I get really nervous when I hear companies using it as a way to replace that one-on-one interaction," he says, "because I still believe that's how you sell a candidate on the company and how you learn that a candidate can be or can't be successful at your company." His own philosophy is deliberately simple: use AI and technology as a way to get closer to your candidates, not to insert distance between you and them.

Advice: Start From the Start

For talent leaders under pressure to implement something quickly, Chimera's counsel is to slow down at the front end. All of us, he acknowledges, can name ways we could improve how we identify and acquire talent. But before integrating any solution, he argues, leaders should go back to the beginning and honestly diagnose what was working and what was not in the first place, gathering feedback from hiring managers, from applicants, and from third parties outside the building.

That is where the castle in the swamp comes in. Technology layered onto a broken process does not repair it; it accelerates the collapse. The better use of this moment, he says, is to examine how the function is adding value for everyone across the chain, from the hiring manager to the person on the other end of the outreach.

The same standard shapes who he admires in the field. He speaks with real conviction about Megan Connors, a colleague who built the company's early talent program, its intern and trainee pipeline, while also running full cycle talent acquisition alongside employee relations, compensation, and organizational design. He points to Emma Patterson at Oliver James, an insurance sector talent firm, whom he describes as "a massive exception" to an industry that too often stays transactional: smart, collaborative, a relationship builder who genuinely knows the talent. And he cites Peter Reed at the executive search firm Caldwell Partners, who shares competitive intelligence even with people he is not working with, on the understanding that hiring is a long tail game. When everyone benefits from better information, Reed's logic goes, the whole industry elevates.

It is a fitting set of choices. In a profession increasingly tempted to automate its way to scale, Chimera keeps returning to the same three anchors: know the company, know the industry, know the talent. Everything else, he insists, sorts itself out.