Tracy Wojo

When the End Client Is a Child

Gifted Healthcare places talent in school-based and education settings, which means the calculus of a placement is different from most staffing work. The candidate is a professional. The client is a district or a school. But the true end client, as Tracy frames it, is a kid.

That reality sets the tone for everything downstream. The professionals Tracy's organization recruits are not, in the main, chasing the fastest available job. They are drawn by the nature of the work and by how they are treated on the way in, which makes the quality of a human interaction a competitive asset rather than a nice-to-have. It also imposes a rhythm most staffing leaders do not have to plan around: the year turns over when the school year does, and Tracy talks about the coming one in terms of what got the organization to its current point of growth.

The last two years have been a period of deliberate modernization. Tracy describes an organization that needed to catch up to the modern age on technology and has done a strong job of it, without surrendering the part of the process that candidates actually remember.

The Case Against Leading by Fear

The people who mattered most along the way were not clients or star candidates. They were leaders. Specifically, the ones willing to take someone under their wing and teach the dos and don'ts of an industry that rarely bothers to write them down.

One name stands out: Julie Selders, of Crystal Equation. The lesson attached to her is compact and durable. A kind leader can also be an awesome leader. That single proof point reframed what authority was supposed to look like, and Tracy still counts it among the biggest influences on the shape of a career.

Tracy has also worked in the other kind of environment, under leaders who ran on fear, and drew a firm conclusion from it. Those cultures consistently capped what their teams could do. Nobody has to be big and scary to get good work out of people. Build a genuine culture, lead as a servant to the team, and people want to do a good job on their own initiative.

So when Tracy moved into leadership, the standard became specific and personal: every single person on the team, regardless of role or seniority, should know exactly what kind of impact their work has across the business. Tracy is blunt about the stakes. Good leaders are often the deciding factor in whether talented people build careers in this industry or leave it quickly.

AI Behind the Scenes, People Out Front

Tracy watched the industry's mood on artificial intelligence swing hard. First came the excitement, and with it the pressure to learn every tool and every platform at once. What registers now, internally and among candidates, is something closer to AI fatigue.

The response has been a division of labor rather than a retreat. Tracy's teams use AI extensively behind the scenes and have proven they can implement the technology and get real efficiency from it. What does not get automated is the point of contact. Messaging, customer service and direct human interaction with candidates and clients are where impressions are made, and Tracy does not believe those can be supplemented away.

None of this is sentimentality. Candidates still want to speak with a person. They do not want a chatbot, and they do not want to work through twenty-five prompts to reach a human being. Tracy expects the technology to keep getting better, stronger and faster, and plans to keep using it accordingly. The happy medium already found is the part worth protecting: heavy automation where it creates capacity, unmediated human contact where it creates trust.

Advice for the Next School Year

Tracy's guidance to other talent leaders follows directly from that balance, and it comes with a warning about proportion. You can implement a thousand tools. You can automate enormous amounts of work. But do not lose sight of the fact that people still want to feel valued and treated like people.

"If you have good people who really understand what they are doing and want to do good work, that will get you further faster," Tracy says, positioning that as the better bet against overbuilding a stack and automating away the human component.

The second half of the advice is gratitude, and Tracy means it operationally rather than as a sentiment. Somebody is doing the unglamorous work behind the scenes. Somebody is learning each new platform and pushing the organization forward through the change. Recognizing those people, by name and by impact, is how Tracy intends to enter the next school year: mindful of exactly who delivered the growth, and focused on the good rather than the noise that tends to creep in around it.