John Vlastelica
CEO & Founder
He has sat on your side of the table.
Twenty years spent on one question: why do good companies keep making bad hires, and what actually fixes it. John did not arrive at this from consulting. He ran recruiting inside companies that were growing faster than their hiring could keep up, which is where most of what Recruiting Toolbox teaches was worked out the hard way.
Amazon
Head of Tech Recruiting during the years the bar mattered most. He co-created the bar raiser programme there in 1999, and it is still the reference every quality mechanism gets compared to.
Expedia
Head of Recruiting, scaling a function through the kind of growth where process either holds or quietly stops working.
Before that
A hands-on recruiter and engineering recruiting leader for two start-up divisions of McCaw and AT&T Wireless. The unglamorous end, which is the part that shows.
Why he started Recruiting Toolbox.
By 2005 John had watched the same thing happen at company after company: recruiting treated as an administrative function, hiring managers treated as people who turn up to interviews, and everyone surprised when the results were inconsistent.
His view has not moved since. Recruiters are more than req fillers and hiring managers are more than interviewers, and if you train them properly and fix the system around them, the quality of who you hire changes.
Twenty years later the firm has worked with around 350 companies across more than 20 countries, from start-ups to Amazon, Disney, Google, Starbucks, Nestlé and Adobe.
The most-booked voice in the room.
John has taken the number one speaker rating at LinkedIn Talent Connect, ERE, SourceCon and RecFest, and holds the highest NPS LinkedIn has recorded for one of their webinars.
He served four terms as President of the Seattle Staffing Management Association, co-founded Talent42, the national tech recruiting conference, and sold it to ERE and SourceCon in 2018. Since 2021 he has advised SocialTalent, the hiring training platform out of Dublin.
He still runs the Recruiting Leadership Labs himself, twenty leaders at a time, because that is where the arguing happens.
What he actually believes.
Three things that show up in every session he runs, and which are worth knowing before you book him.
Write the bar down
If you cannot say what good looks like in a sentence your interviewers would repeat, you are not hiring against a bar. You are comparing opinions.
Train the whole loop
Recruiters alone cannot fix hiring. Neither can hiring managers. The gains come from the handful of conversations between them.
Say when it will not work
John will tell a client that training is not their problem. It costs the firm engagements and it is the reason people come back.
What John writes about.
Twenty years of arguing with the industry in public, mostly about quality of hire and what recruiters are actually for.
Talent Advisor
What a talent advisor actually does differently
Not confidence, not seniority. Four concrete behaviours that separate advisors from order takers, and how to build them.
Talent Advisor
Why your hiring managers ignore the training
John on the gap between running a session and changing what managers actually do in the room.
Talent Advisor
The intake conversation that changes the hire
Most briefs are accepted as written. A better intake asks what the role is for before it asks what it needs.