Zack Rome

From the Music Business to the Search Business

Nobody majors in recruiting, and Rome certainly did not. His plan was the music industry, and his internships and earliest jobs were built around it. He pivoted into a sales role, spent roughly a year in it, and concluded clearly that it was not the right fit. Rather than discard the skill set, he went looking for adjacent work and found an opening as an entry-level recruiter at an executive search firm.

It was, by his own account, a random entrance into the field. Fifteen years later he is still in it, now running technology recruiting for one of the most recognizable names in media. The instinct that got him through the door is the same one that kept him there: follow the work that keeps changing.

The Early Adopter Team

Inside NBCUniversal's global talent acquisition organization, Rome's group plays a specific and useful role. Because it recruits for technology, it is naturally tech forward and comparatively easy to change manage through new tools. "We're kind of like the early adopter team," he says. New workflows get pressure tested there before they travel anywhere else.

His assessment of the market is anything but starry-eyed. There is genuinely strong technology available now across scheduling, sourcing, screening and candidate experience, and there are, as he puts it, "a million vendors in the marketplace." The discipline is in the sorting. His team is constantly weighing two distinct paths: influencing existing partners to build a capability into the workflow they already run, or adding a new layer on top of the tech stack. That decision gets made repeatedly, tool by tool, and it is complicated by the fact that plenty of vendors over-promise against what they can currently deliver.

None of that has dampened his appetite for the moment. He expects the landscape to keep shifting drastically over the next three or four years, and he frames the present as "a once in a generation opportunity to really be able to be a part of the transformation from the ground." He is also plain with peers about what that requires. "If you're fearful of change and you're in the talent acquisition space, it's going to be an interesting couple of years," he says. He counts himself firmly among the excited.

People, Then Process, Then Technology

Ask Rome for his operating philosophy and the answer arrives as a hierarchy. Hire the right people, then enable them, train them, develop them and coach them. Build the process next. Bring in the technology third. In a period when the technology conversation dominates every panel and every vendor deck, the ordering is a deliberate statement about where a leader's attention belongs.

His second principle is a filter he applies constantly: how is what we are doing enabling the business to be more successful? He is realistic about how easily a talent function can be swallowed by the day to day, and he treats business impact as the test that cuts through it. If an activity is not high impact for the business, he argues, the team's time should be spent in a more efficient manner. The two ideas work in tandem. Strong people running a clean process, pointed only at work that moves the company forward.

The Leaders Who Shaped Him

Rome puts himself on the luckier end of the spectrum when it comes to the people he has reported to, and he says he has never been in a situation with a bad boss. Three leaders stand out. Rodel Wright, a boss from his agency years, is the one he credits with helping him cut his teeth and teaching him the baseline of recruiting best practices early in his career. His first boss at NBCUniversal earns her place for the decision that shaped the last decade of his working life: bringing him on. And Susan Voulay, global head of talent at NBCUniversal, is the leader he works alongside today and describes as a really positive influence.

It is a lineage that spans the two halves of the profession, agency and in-house, which may explain why Rome is comfortable operating in both registers. He talks about fundamentals and enablement the way someone trained on an agency floor does, and he talks about business impact the way someone embedded in a large enterprise has to. He does not claim credit for either instinct on his own.

Never Stagnant

What Rome loves most about technology recruiting is the very thing that wears other people down. It never sits still. There is always a new transformation, a new technology, a new way of doing things around the corner, and the work never becomes stagnant or gets old as a result.

That preference informs the advice he offers most freely, and it reaches well beyond recruiters. Continuous learning, he argues, will benefit anybody in their career, and the barrier has never been lower given how easy it now is to access genuinely good, personalized content. His counsel is to take advantage of it now rather than waiting a couple of years until circumstances force the issue. Coming from a leader who built a fifteen-year career by following the work that kept evolving, that reads less like a platitude than a method.