Yumi Prentice

The Operator Who Became a Recruiter

"Someone told me that you don't find search. Search finds you," Prentice says, and her own path is the proof. Before executive search, she ran an advertising agency in Los Angeles and saw it through a sale and a pandemic. Before that, she was managing director of the San Francisco office of the agency T3. That operating background is not decoration on a resume. It is the lens she brings to every assignment.

Having sat in the seat, Prentice understands what a leadership hire actually costs an organization and what it can unlock. She thinks in narratives, in brand, in the language of values and aspiration, because that is the discipline she came from. It gives her an unusual ability to translate between two parties who often talk past each other: a company trying to explain who it really is, and a leader trying to work out whether that story matches their own.

The Mentors Who Modeled the Craft

Ask Prentice who shaped her and she pushes back on the premise. Narrowing it to three, she says, is hard. The first name she reaches for is Patrizia Magni, the Italian search professional renowned for exceptional work in advertising on a global scale. Magni knew practically everyone in the business, but that was not what made her extraordinary. "She didn't just know their resumes. She knew their story. She knew them as people," Prentice says. Magni modeled a way of recruiting that was the opposite of transactional: human, caring, and precisely because of that, unusually insightful. Prentice describes her as someone who brought real humanity into the work, and the standard has stayed with her.

The second is Jocelyn Lai, whom Prentice first met as a colleague rather than a peer in search. Lai worked out of T3's Austin office while Prentice ran San Francisco. Prentice calls her "a joyful human being," and credits her with the same depth of understanding that Magni had, paired with a rare fluency in culture. Lai is progressive, Prentice says, in thinking about the narratives that give life to what a company's brand is, what its values are, and how those can match the values and aspirations of a particular leader or candidate. Speaking as an ex-marketer, Prentice recognizes that instinct immediately.

And then there is Jana Rich herself, the recruiter who saw an executive search career in Prentice before Prentice did, and whose firm and mission drew her across the table for good.

Beyond Efficiency

Prentice is clear-eyed about what AI has done to her profession, and equally clear that most of the conversation about it is aimed too low. The change has been prolific, she notes, and not just in recruiting but across every possible industry. In search specifically, the work that once consumed enormous manual effort has collapsed: company mapping, and the identification of candidates who were never sitting on a database or a list. "AI has really kind of shortened the path to talent identification, shortened the path to mapping," she says.

But she refuses to stop there. "If we're only talking about efficiency, then you're already behind the game." The real dividend, in her view, is what the reclaimed hours make possible. Automating the manual layer lets a search professional lead with relationships, insight, human networks, and conversation, and spend far less time looking through lists and spreadsheets connecting dots. That is where the value to clients and candidates actually lives.

Looking forward, she sees opportunity at every stage of the process, not just the front end. She points to compensation as an obvious frontier: comparing offers in real time as a candidate navigates competing packages, or explaining a vesting schedule without dragging someone through what she calls a monolithic spreadsheet. Others are surely building toward this already, she acknowledges. The through line is the same. Used well, AI makes the work more precise, more immediate, and more helpful as vast amounts of information get synthesized into something a person can actually act on.

Where the Human Work Begins

The advice Prentice offers other talent leaders is not a tactic. It is a reallocation. Let the machines take the mapping and the list-building, then pour the recovered time and energy into thinking through the genuine needs of organizations and building trust, insight, and relationships with the people you need to know. "We can bring more value to the clients, more value to our candidates," she says, and that is the test she applies to any new capability.

It is a philosophy that traces directly back to Patrizia Magni knowing the story behind the resume and Jocelyn Lai reading a culture the way a marketer reads a brand. Prentice has spent four years proving that a career built on understanding businesses from the inside is an asset in search, not a detour into it. In an industry racing to automate, she has staked her practice on the part that cannot be.