The Talent Bar

Dana Neiger spent eight years running her own recruiting firm focused on transportation engineering before stepping into talent acquisition leadership at Barge Design Solutions, a 70-year-old, employee-owned AEC firm with plans to grow from 700 to 1,000 employees in under two years. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about why relationship-based recruiting is non-negotiable in a talent pool small enough that everyone knows...

Jennifer Neef has spent more than two decades building one of the largest career services operations in the country at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with 40,000 students a year and coordinating over 150 career professionals across campus. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about what she's actually seeing on the ground as AI reshapes how students apply for jobs, why internships have become the cleare...

Robyn Vasko has spent over 25 years in talent acquisition, including leading recruiting for healthcare systems as large as 14 hospitals, 40,000 employees, and 10,000+ hires a year. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about the year and a half she spent as a stage four colon cancer patient inside the very kind of healthcare system she used to staff, and how that experience reshaped the way she thinks about hiring, retention, and...

Sarah-Jayne Lehtinen never planned on a career in HR. She spent four years as an elementary school teacher, seven years at an aerospace company, and the last decade building the entire people function at ed-tech company Prodigy Education, where she now serves as Chief People Officer. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about borrowing a page from the sales playbook, literally handing her recruiting team a copy of the HubSpot Sa...

Sofie Roberge has hired at a scale most recruiters never see, from staffing 1,200 roles in 18 months to get a Lucid Motors EV factory production-ready, to leading talent acquisition roles at Apple and Canva. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about how her team at A1 Garage Door Service processes roughly 100,000 applications a year with just four recruiters, why she thinks the "AI is rejecting candidates" narrative on LinkedIn...

Show Notes Template

A new name. A new look. A higher bar.

Welcome to The Talent Bar, the new home for candid conversations with the leaders shaping Talent Acquisition.

Hosted by Colleen Gallagher, The Talent Bar goes behind the scenes with the leaders making big decisions about recruiting, teams, talent, and the future of work.

The bar just got higher. Welcome to The Talent Bar!

Ways to Tune In:

• The Talent Bar: https://th...

Yolanda Hawkes has spent more than 20 years building recruiting operations inside some of the most complex, high-volume environments in the country, from manufacturing and aviation to AWS, along with a side chapter advising professional athletes on career transitions. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about why curiosity and lifelong learning separate the best recruiters from the rest, how she approaches turnover as a root-ca...

Jen Paxton just got promoted to SVP of People and Talent at Roofr, and she's earned it: an opera degree, three startup acquisitions, and a co-founded company (also acquired) later, she's built a people function that runs on urgency without sacrificing quality. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about why speed and momentum are everything once a candidate is in process, how "going slow to go fast" with hiring managers at the in...

Guillermina Cabello has spent more than 30 years recruiting IT talent across Mexico, Latin America, and the US, building her own agency from scratch and developing a proprietary screening method along the way. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about what nearshore recruiting really requires, from correcting cultural assumptions about salary bands to navigating TN1 visas and the accent bias that gets mistaken for a language pr...

Pedro Velis spent six years as a staff accountant at Wawa before pivoting into recruiting, and today he is the Director of Talent Acquisition and Workforce Development at Hanwha Philly Shipyard, a shipyard recently featured on 60 Minutes for its role in growing America's shipbuilding capacity. In this episode, he talks with Colleen about the massive skilled trade shortage facing the shipbuilding industry, why he builds his team out...

In this episode of Recruiters on the Rise, host Colleen Gallagher sits down with Kathryn Knox, Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Trailer Park Group. Kathryn brings more than 30 years of recruiting experience, starting at Arthur Andersen and moving through staffing, PE backed companies, and high growth tech before landing in entertainment marketing. She has led teams as large as 23 recruiters, and when her own company recentl...

Allison Dykes joined her current company, Harness, as its first and only HR hire at 25 employees and built the entire people function from the ground up, recruiting through termination. In this episode, she talks with Colleen about why follow-up and follow-through are non-negotiable in candidate experience, how she uses the EOS "right person, right seat" model to evaluate both candidates and current employees, and why AI-polished r...

Stacy Zapar spent almost 30 years teaching recruiters how to find great talent. She built the Zappos Insider program and trained teams at Amazon, Netflix, and Walmart. Now she's back from a multi-year hiatus with a new mission: helping recruiters catch candidate fraud before it costs them the hire.

Colleen and Stacy dig into how organized this fraud has gotten, why AI made it worse before it gets better, and Stacy's new model, "cand...

In this episode of Recruiters on the Rise, host Colleen Gallagher sits down with John Curran, Director of Talent Acquisition at Hillendale Home Care. John has been in recruiting since the mid 1990s, back when Java was not yet a thing and Dice was the only way to find technical talent. He spent decades in tech and biotech at companies like Symantec, Invitae, and Genomic Health before making a deliberate pivot to in-home senior care ...

Bruce Nichols didn't plan on a career in HR. He planned on jumping out of planes for 25 years and retiring at Home Depot. Life had other ideas. After leaving the 82nd Airborne, Bruce fell into recruiting, then into HR leadership, and spent the next few decades inside some of the most complex business environments around, including a $2 billion private equity acquisition where he ended up standing in a pile of soot in a Brooks Broth...

In this episode of Recruiters on the Rise, host Colleen Gallagher sits down with Jeremy Cockrell, Director of Talent Acquisition at Torrent Consulting, a Salesforce implementation partner recently acquired by a global consulting firm. Jeremy shares how he built a hiring machine that moves candidates from the first interview to offer in under two weeks and exactly how he got hiring managers on board to make it happen. He gets into t...

In this episode of Recruiters on the Rise, host Colleen Gallagher sits down with Dubi Ben-Shoham, Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Socotra, who has personally hired nearly every employee at his company, all but three. Dubi shares why he hasn't posted a single job in over two and a half years and why he considers that a feature, not a bug. He breaks down his white glove recruiting philosophy, from prepping candidates ...

In this episode of Recruiters on the Rise, host Colleen Gallagher sits down with Dennis Ivanov, Director of Global Talent Acquisition at Unimacts Global and former Amazon recruiting leader. Dennis has made over 400 hires in under three years with almost no dedicated recruiting team, including several C-suite executive searches, at a company that grew from under $100 million to nearly half a billion. Before any of that, he was track...

In this episode of Recruiters on the Rise, host Colleen Gallagher sits down with James Callender, VP of Workforce at EPC and host of the HR View Podcast. James brings a rare blend of experience from manufacturing floors and construction sites to JPMorgan Chase and a conviction that's stuck with him since his first day in HR, if you don't speak the language of business, you can't be a real partner to the people you serve. He shares ...