About Proactive Talent
Proactive Talent is an embedded talent acquisition consulting practice I founded in 2015. I help talent leaders redesign how hiring gets done across Recruiting Operations, Employer Brand and Recruiter Enablement, inside the tools they already own.
It's small on purpose. When you hire Proactive Talent, you get me on the work.
The right expertise and extra capacity, exactly when the business needs it.
I started Proactive Talent on a simple idea. Most companies don't need a senior talent strategist full time. They need the right expertise and extra capacity when the business changes, when a hiring problem won't go away or when they're about to grow. So we built a practitioner-for-hire model, embedded with clients to fix how they attracted and hired people, and left behind systems their teams could keep running.
That idea grew into a firm of 75+ people at its peak. We made the Inc. 5000 in 2022 and worked with 400+ companies, from startups hiring their first team to global enterprises rethinking how they hire.
I've built the big version
In 2023 the market turned and I paused the firm. I went back to school for AI and machine learning at UT Austin's McCombs School of Business, and I kept doing what I've done for most of my career, talking with the people who run talent teams about what's actually breaking.
Now I'm relaunching Proactive Talent as a small, direct practice. As the first version grew, I spent more time on staffing and sales and less on the work clients hired us to do. This model puts that work back at the center and lets me choose clients whose problems I can actually move.
AI carries a lot of the volume a bigger team used to carry, so I don't need a large delivery bench to do serious work. When an implementation needs more hands, I bring in experienced partners, and you'll know who they are and what they're there to do before they start.
The goal isn't another big firm. It's a better way to hire that your team can keep running after I leave.
How I work
Capacity first, AI second
I start with where your team's time actually goes. Then AI takes the repetitive work and people keep the decisions that matter.
Audit, design, deploy
Every engagement starts with an audit or a discovery. Each readout ends with one recommended next step, scoped so you can say yes or no.
The Talent Operating System
The method underneath every engagement. It connects hiring to everything else a company knows about its people.
Who gets hired is a design choice
Hiring systems decide who gets seen and who gets an offer. A badly designed one keeps making the same unfair call, and once AI is part of the screen it makes that call faster. I build for fair hiring on purpose, and I ask the companies I work with to commit to it too.
The community side of my work
Community is where I learned most of what I know about this work. I started the community that became Talent Brand Alliance in 2012. In January 2027 it becomes one of three networks under Talent Alliance Communities, alongside Talent Leadership Alliance for the executives who own the function and Talent Ops Alliance for the people who build the systems.
One rule holds across all of them. No pitches and no vendors on stage, and that includes me.
Talent Brand Alliance
For the storytellers.
Talent Leadership Alliance
For the executives who own the function and set its strategy.
Talent Ops Alliance
For the people who build the systems.
Tell me what's going on
Thirty minutes, no deck. You tell me what's broken, and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person to fix it.