Tripp Conrad

Drinking From the Fire Hose

Recruiting was not the plan. Conrad came out of college as a communications major, had friends and family working in the technology space, and landed a role as a recruiting coordinator with a company in Atlanta that was based out of Portugal: OutSystems, which built low code development tools. Ten or twelve years ago, Conrad notes, that company was already working on a version of the movement everyone now calls AI, well before it became what it is today.

The timing mattered more than the title. OutSystems was on a hypergrowth run, and Conrad arrived as the sole person handling recruiting in the United States, helping the company scale from roughly 300 people to roughly 1,500 in a two to two and a half year span. That kind of assignment teaches by immersion. It also opened up travel to Portugal and Singapore, and it produced a lasting fascination with the mechanics of scaling companies and with pushing the boundaries of what recruiting can do globally and at pace.

One recruiter can only do so much, a constraint Conrad has been circling ever since. Stops at Accenture and then at Everstream, a risk analytics business Conrad describes as an AI company in its own right, kept the through line intact: technology companies, technical hiring, and the question of how much leverage a single recruiter can generate.

A Community 3,500 Strong

The other education has come from the sheer volume of people on the other side of the table. Conrad has talked with a steady stream of engineers and builders, some of whom joined the companies in question and some of whom did not, and many of whom have since founded businesses and raised Series A rounds. Staying in touch with that group turned into infrastructure. The Goanna Collective gathers builders across frontier tech and is sustained by events, dinners and happy hours.

Hiring managers form the third leg. Whether the stakeholder is a chief executive or an engineering manager, Conrad's approach is to dig into what it will take to improve that leader's life, that leader's team and that leader's product. Recruiters are not super technical by nature, theoretically, as Conrad puts it, yet they end up learning multiple areas of a business and improving each one. Many of those managers have since become champions of the Collective, the sort of compounding return that only patient relationship work produces.

Scale Is Easy, Precision Is Hard

Conrad's read on the profession is candid: recruiters as a group have been hesitant. For a decade the standard kit was a LinkedIn Recruiter license, a set of Boolean strings and, for the more creative, conferences and the occasional trip through someone's GitHub. What has changed, especially in the past six months, is what tools like Claude and ChatGPT can do. Conrad believes recruiters can now 10X and even 100X their output, and is an unapologetic adopter.

The focus is not volume. Finding people, Conrad argues, is the easy part now. The interesting work begins when you use these systems to reason through profiles in depth and to search beyond LinkedIn: into GitHub repositories, open source groups, Hugging Face and other places where technical relevance actually lives. The context window, in Conrad's framing, is the most important thing, because the goal is precision and not merely scale. The team has tested and used a lot of the sourcing tools now on the market, and several live permanently in the stack; some team members were slow adopters who became the loudest advocates once they got hands on.

Automating scheduling and other daily activities is table stakes at this point. Conrad wants to go further, using AI to think and reason more deeply than a person could: mapping out every hire OpenAI has made over the past six months, for instance, and connecting dots the company may not have connected for itself. The payoff is human. Time saved on synthesis becomes time spent on community, on in person events with panelists drawn from across these companies, on the mutual fit that decides whether a hire works. Hiring a person requires two people to agree, and that, Conrad maintains, will never be automated.

Advice for 2026: Get In There and Build

Conrad's message to other talent leaders is to talk to each other. The function has been siloed inside individual companies and individual calendars for too long, and Conrad would like to see it behave more like a collective. That conviction is already becoming logistics: a talent series dinner launching in New York, with editions planned for San Francisco and Los Angeles, designed to bring talent leaders into the same room for real conversation.

The ambition goes past panels. Conrad wants building days, sessions where talent leaders open up Claude and Claude Code and vibe coding tools and construct their own products, for the practical reason that discussion alone does not move the needle and for the simple reason that it is fun. Based in Atlanta, with a New York trip already on the calendar, Conrad is clear about the tempo the field is operating on. The relevant horizon is not the next couple of years. It is the next couple of months.