Hiring has never been more complex—or more exciting. Between skills-based hiring, talent intelligence, AI sourcing, pay transparency, and evolving candidate expectations, the playbook is changing fast. The easiest way to stay sharp is to learn from practitioners who ship ideas, test them in the wild, and share what actually works. Below is a curated list of 10 hiring influencers who consistently deliver practical, field-tested insights for TA leaders, recruiters, and HR strategists.

This isn’t a popularity contest or a list of who posts the most. It’s the people whose frameworks, tools, and perspectives raise the quality of your decisions—across strategy, operations, and day-to-day recruiting craft. For each influencer, you’ll find why they matter now and how to apply their thinking immediately.

1) Hung Lee — Curator of Recruiting Brainfood

Hung Lee is best known for Recruiting Brainfood, a weekly digest that distills the best thinking across talent acquisition, HR tech, labor markets, and work design. His superpower is pattern recognition: he connects dots between macro trends (like demographic shifts or AI regulation) and micro tactics (sourcing workflows, interview design, employer branding experiments) so you can prioritize what’s truly material.

Why follow: If you’re short on time, Brainfood keeps you current without the noise. Hung also hosts lively AMAs and live streams with operators who share battle-tested tactics—from nurturing niche talent communities to running equitable panel interviews at scale.

How to use his ideas: Turn the newsletter into a weekly stand-up ritual. Pick one thread to test (e.g., structured rubrics for skills-based interviews), assign an owner, set a success metric, and review results in two weeks. Brainfood becomes an engine for continuous improvement, not just reading.

2) Glen Cathey — The Boolean Black Belt of Sourcing

Glen Cathey is a sourcing legend whose writing goes deep on talent discovery, search logic, and data-driven outreach. He breaks complex techniques into explainable steps: search operators, semantic expansion, entity disambiguation, and the art of narrowing in on intent signals across platforms.

Why follow: In a world where everyone has the same tools, edge comes from how you use them. Glen teaches repeatable workflows to locate scarce skills, de-bias search, and scale personalization without sounding robotic.

How to use his ideas: Run a “sourcing excellence” sprint. Pick one hard-to-fill role and rebuild your search strategy using Glen’s principles: map synonyms/adjacencies, build layered queries, test platform differences, and create three outreach variants tied to candidate motivators. Track conversion improvement from search to interested reply.

3) Stacy Donovan Zapar — Candidate Experience Architect

Stacy blends high-touch recruiting with scalable process design. She’s a go-to voice on candidate experience, recruiter productivity, and “white-glove” workflows that don’t break when requisitions spike. Her playbooks cover everything from expectation-setting emails to time-to-feedback SLAs and recruiter enablement.

Why follow: Candidates now expect clarity, speed, and humanity. Stacy shows how to operationalize these virtues: consistent interview kits, journey mapping, feedback templates, and ways to empower hiring managers without losing quality.

How to use her ideas: Audit your end-to-end candidate journey. Quantify response times, ghosting risk, and friction points (e.g., unclear take-home instructions). Then implement two Stacy-style quick wins: (1) a “What to Expect” email sent immediately after application, and (2) a two-day feedback SLA for every interview loop. Measure NPS and acceptance-rate lift.

4) John Vlastelica — From Order-Taker to Talent Advisor

John, founder of Recruiting Toolbox, focuses on elevating recruiters into strategic talent advisors. He translates business strategy into hiring plans, teaches managers to interview well, and builds competency models that align to outcomes, not gut feel.

Why follow: Most hiring failures stem from misalignment—unclear success criteria, unrealistic timelines, or interviewers who can’t assess what matters. John’s frameworks (intake meetings, bar-raising interview training, prioritization matrices) fix these upstream problems.

How to use his ideas: Rebuild your intake meeting. Replace generic “requirements” with a success profile: 6- and 12-month outcomes, non-negotiable competencies, and trade-offs you’re willing to make. Share the one-page profile with interviewers to focus signals and reduce bias.

5) Lou Adler — Performance-Based Hiring Pioneer

Lou Adler popularized performance-based hiring: defining a role by outcomes and evidence of comparable results. He pushes teams to swap laundry-list job descriptions for mission-driven scorecards and to evaluate candidates against past performance in analogous situations.

Why follow: With skills-based hiring on the rise, Lou’s methods are more relevant than ever. His work helps you hire for impact, not pedigree—critical in tight labor markets and new-to-role transitions.

How to use his ideas: Convert one key role to a performance profile with 5–6 measurable outcomes. Build interview questions that probe for “achievement stories” tied to those outcomes. Calibrate your panel on what “good” looks like, and use a simple 4-point rubric to decide quickly.

6) Katrina Collier — Humanizing the Hiring Process

Katrina evangelizes “robot-proof” recruiting: technology is a tool, not a substitute for trust. She’s sharp on candidate engagement, boundary-setting with hiring managers, and dismantling process debt that degrades experience.

Why follow: When automation multiplies, humanity differentiates. Katrina’s advice helps you write messages people want to answer, host interviews candidates enjoy, and run kickoffs managers respect.

How to use her ideas: Rewrite your outreach and rejection templates to sound like a person, not a system. Add a short “why this role, why you” sentence rooted in the candidate’s work. For rejections, include a sincere close (“We’ll reach back if X changes”) and a way to stay in your talent community.

7) Tim Sackett — Practical Playbooks for TA & HR

Tim blends humor with hard truths about recruiting operations, agency/in-house dynamics, and leadership. Expect candid takes on metrics that matter, recruiter comp, recruiter capacity planning, and vendor selection without the hype.

Why follow: When you need pragmatic guidance—how to set req loads, what to stop reporting, how to build a recruiter competency ladder—Tim delivers. He also tackles sensitive topics like ghosting, counteroffers, and employer brand misfires.

How to use his ideas: Build a simple recruiting scorecard that leadership actually reads: time-to-first-interview, qualified pipeline per req, hiring manager satisfaction, candidate NPS, and offer acceptance rate. Use trends, not vanity metrics, to drive quarterly priorities.

8) Lars Schmidt — Modern HR & TA Operating Systems

Lars is a champion of modern, open-source HR and TA—sharing org charts, competency frameworks, career ladders, and case studies from high-growth companies. He connects talent to broader people-ops design: onboarding, internal mobility, skills taxonomies, and culture.

Why follow: Hiring doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If your internal mobility is weak or onboarding is thin, you’ll keep filling the same roles. Lars gives you blueprints that tie hiring to retention and growth.

How to use his ideas: Stand up an internal mobility pilot for one function. Map skills, publish open roles internally first, and create a lightweight “tryout” project path. Track time-to-fill, retention, and engagement. Hiring costs go down; advocacy goes up.

9) Dean Da Costa — Tools, Tech, and Talent Intelligence

Dean is a power user and reviewer of sourcing tools, scrapers, enrichment platforms, and productivity utilities. He’s the person many sourcers consult before buying software or wiring up a new stack.

Why follow: Tool bloat and overlapping features are real. Dean helps you sort signal from noise and assemble a stack that fits your strategy—whether you’re focusing on niche sourcing, diversity pipelines, or recruiter enablement.

How to use his ideas: Run a quarterly tool audit. For each product, log use cases, adoption, outcomes, and redundancies. Keep the few that demonstrably move a KPI (e.g., qualified responses per 100 outreaches). Sunset the rest and reinvest in training or data quality.

10) Greg Savage — Leadership, Agency Excellence, and Quality

Greg brings decades of perspective on recruitment quality, client partnership, and leading high-performing teams. His philosophy centers on discipline: rigorous job qualification, candidate care, and “owning the process” with confidence and warmth.

Why follow: Whether you run an agency or manage an in-house TA team, Greg’s emphasis on standards—follow-through, honest counsel, and commercial acumen—builds trust and repeatable success.

How to use his ideas: Introduce a “quality of hire” retrospective for every critical placement. Meet with hiring managers at 90 days to review ramp-up, performance signals, and onboarding gaps. Feed those insights back into job scoping and assessment to compound quality.

How We Chose These Influencers

We prioritized practitioners and operators who:

• Share repeatable frameworks (not just opinions).
• Cover the full funnel: workforce planning, sourcing, assessment, candidate experience, and hiring manager enablement.
• Balance craft with systems thinking—linking hiring to mobility, onboarding, and business outcomes.
• Publish consistently and teach through real examples, workshops, or open resources.

This mix ensures you get strategic clarity and tactical plays you can run this quarter.

What to Implement This Quarter (A 90-Day Action Plan)

Weeks 1–2: Intake & Scorecards

Adopt a performance profile (Lou Adler/John Vlastelica) for one high-impact role. Define 5 outcomes, build a focused interview kit, and align the panel.

Weeks 3–4: Candidate Experience Sprints

Borrow Stacy Donovan Zapar’s templates to set feedback SLAs and expectation-setting messages. Measure candidate NPS before/after.

Weeks 5–6: Sourcing Excellence

Apply Glen Cathey’s methods to rebuild your search universe and outreach variants. Track reply rate, qualified pipeline per req, and time-to-first-interview.

Weeks 7–8: Tool & Process Audit

Channel Dean Da Costa to rationalize your stack and automate low-value steps. Reinvest savings in interviewer training.

Weeks 9–10: Hiring Manager Enablement

Run a recruiting-as-talent-advisory workshop (Vlastelica/Sackett) on intake quality, signal-rich interviewing, and decision speed.

Weeks 11–12: Mobility & Retention Link

Use Lars Schmidt’s frameworks to pilot an internal mobility path. Publish internal roles first and measure impact on time-to-fill.

Pro Tips to Get the Most From Influencer Learning

• Turn content into experiments. Don’t just bookmark—run a two-week test with a clear metric. Share results at your team retro.
• Create a “TA OS” wiki. Curate the best frameworks, templates, and rubrics you adopt, with examples from your own roles.
• Teach back. Assign team members to present learnings from a talk, post, or workshop; teaching deepens adoption.
• Balance tech and touch. Use tools to speed discovery and scheduling; reserve human time for scoping, storytelling, and decisions.
• Measure what matters. Track leading indicators: time-to-first-interview, pipeline quality, interview cycle time, offer acceptance, and 90-day success.

Final Word

Hiring is evolving from requisition-filling to value creation: building pipelines aligned to outcomes, assessing skills fairly, and designing experiences candidates rave about. The influencers above don’t just comment on those shifts—they provide the blueprints to lead them. Follow a few closely, pick two ideas to implement each month, and your team will feel the compounding effect: clearer roles, faster decisions, better offers, and new hires who ramp like pros.

Use this list as a working toolkit. As your priorities change—new markets, new roles, new constraints—rotate which voices you lean on. The throughline remains the same: curiosity, experimentation, and a relentless focus on quality.