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 of people with nontraditional backgrounds, how he cut turnover at a food manufacturing plant by slowing down the hiring process, and the career advice he wishes he had given himself decades ago. Takeaways:Understand the business before you recruit for it. Pedro believes every talent acquisition professional has to learn how their company actually makes money and how each department contributes to that, not just the requirements of the job description.Diverse backgrounds build stronger teams. Pedro has hired a former elementary school teacher and a shipyard carpenter of 25 years onto his recruiting team, valuing the outside expertise they bring over a traditional recruiting resume.The country faces a massive skilled trade shortage. Pedro cited an estimate from the Department of Defense of roughly 175,000 skilled workers needed over the next ten years, and welding booths sitting empty is a lost opportunity.Growth is coming fast. Hanwha Philly Shipyard currently builds about one and a half ships a year with roughly 2,000 employees, and the goal is to reach ten to twenty ships a year, which could grow the workforce to somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand people.Slowing down hiring can fix turnover. At a previous food manufacturing job, Pedro pushed back on a plant director who wanted twenty new hires a week, arguing that better onboarding and training would keep more of the people they already hired.Do not be a one trick pony. Pedro describes himself as having a Batman utility belt of skills instead of one specialty, and he encourages his team to build a little bit of knowledge across finance, comp, and employee relations rather than mastering only one lane.Quote of the Show:"Don't be afraid to fail, and have confidence in yourself."  - Pedro Velis Links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedro-velis-mba/Website: https://www.hanwha.com/companies/hanwha-philly-shipyard.doWays to Tune In:Recruiters On The Rise Website: https://recruitersontherise.com/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6j8LK95YtqW7ZMU4kwBNgR Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/recruiters-on-the-rise/id1891705495  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b7f77aa2-de4c-4e5c-b5de-cfe60fe39c77 iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/328811219/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@recruitersontherise 

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 recently went through layoffs, she made a point of calling every person she had hired in recent years to ask how she could help them land their next role. Takeaways:Resilience beats any tool or process. The best recruiters treat every day as a reset, good or bad. If you can shake off a rough day and show up again tomorrow, you'll outlast almost anyone in this business.Don't let fear of AI shrink your skillset. Learn the tools, but keep building the core sourcing and relationship skills underneath them. The human nuance in recruiting won't be replaced, no matter what changes on top of it.Build the hiring manager relationship in the intake, not after. Set expectations up front about how many candidates they'll see and how you'll operate. That early trust is what buys you grace when a role takes longer than planned.Track quality of submission to offer, not just time to fill. Aim to know a role and a hiring manager well enough that three to five candidates gets you to offer. Document everything, because data protects you when a hire drags on for reasons outside your control.Treat your TA team like an internal agency. Control your spend, prove your value, and only go outside when you've exhausted what your own team can do. That ownership mentality is what makes hiring managers trust you instead of shopping you around. Quote of the Show:"You're as good as your last deal and you're as good as your next deal, as long as you continue the momentum forward." - Kathryn Knox Links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathrynknox/Website: https://trailerparkgroup.com/ Ways to Tune In:Recruiters On The Rise Website: https://recruitersontherise.com/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6j8LK95YtqW7ZMU4kwBNgR Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/recruiters-on-the-rise/id1891705495  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b7f77aa2-de4c-4e5c-b5de-cfe60fe39c77 iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/328811219/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@recruitersontherise 

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 resumes are making human conversation more important than ever. Allison also shares what it's like owning the entire employee lifecycle, from the first interview to the final goodbye, and how that shapes the way she treats every single hire. Takeaways:Follow up is not optional. Telling a candidate when to expect feedback, and following through even when the update is that there is no update yet, builds trust and keeps people engaged with your process.The candidate experience is the company's first impression. How someone is treated during the hiring process, whether or not they get the role, shapes how they talk about the company afterward.Getting hiring managers to adopt intake forms takes more than handing them a template. Allison drafts the process herself before the kickoff call so the conversation starts from something concrete instead of a blank page.AI has made resumes easier to tailor and harder to trust. Getting candidates on the phone to talk through what they actually owned in past roles matters more than ever.Owning the entire employee life cycle, from the first interview through termination, changes how Allison shows up for people. Employees already know and trust her, which makes hard conversations easier on both sides.Quote of the Show:"Follow up and follow through. If you say that you're going to do something, make sure you do it in the timeframe that you say it's gonna be." - Allison DykesLinks:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-dykes/Website: https://goharness.com/Ways to Tune In:Recruiters On The Rise Website: https://recruitersontherise.com/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6j8LK95YtqW7ZMU4kwBNgR Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/recruiters-on-the-rise/id1891705495  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b7f77aa2-de4c-4e5c-b5de-cfe60fe39c77 iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/328811219/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@recruitersontherise 

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, "candidate curation," for blending attraction, assessment, and authentication into every stage of the funnel. Plus the origin story behind her new community, Fraud Squad, and a few personal detours involving Fireball shots and a serious game show obsession. Takeaways:Fraud and volume are two sides of the same problem. Bots, auto apply, and AI written resumes have made every funnel noisier, so the real fix isn't more screening at the end, it's reducing junk at the front door.Assume sophistication on the other side. Fraud rings operate like businesses, with shared scripts, proxy interviewers, and laptop farms; recruiters who treat fraud as a one off problem will always be a step behind.Don't bolt AI onto a broken process. Layering automation on top of an outdated 2019 hiring funnel doesn't fix it, it just breaks it faster; redesign the process first, then apply AI.Build deterrents that are invisible to good candidates but costly for bad actors. Things like in person final rounds or small pre-screen tasks create friction for fraud without adding burden for legitimate applicants.Authentication isn't a final round checkbox, it's a continuous thread. Talent attraction, assessment, and authentication should run together at every candidate touchpoint, not in sequential funnel stages.Quote of the Show:"We're not organized as an industry, but the fraud rings absolutely are. I just want us to be one step ahead for once." - Stacy ZaparLinks:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacyzapar/ Website: https://thisistenfold.com/ Ways to Tune In:Recruiters On The Rise Website: https://recruitersontherise.com/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6j8LK95YtqW7ZMU4kwBNgR Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/recruiters-on-the-rise/id1891705495  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b7f77aa2-de4c-4e5c-b5de-cfe60fe39c77 iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/328811219/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@recruitersontherise 

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 closer to home. With seven years of sales experience in his back pocket, John brings a grounded, people first perspective to talent acquisition that is equal parts strategic and human. Takeaways:Curiosity is the one thing that sets the best recruiters apart. The recruiters who truly stand out are the ones willing to lean into discomfort, challenge what is not working, and speak up in a professional and positive way. It is not about being formulaic. It is about being genuinely curious and unafraid to do things differently. Metrics are a diagnostic tool, not a report card. Conversion ratios, time to fill, and quality of hire numbers are most powerful when they reveal root causes rather than assign blame. At Danaher, tracking every stage of 435 manufacturing hires showed bottlenecks in interviewer availability, not recruiter performance. The data pointed the team to the real problem. Challenge the thought, not the person. When coaching hiring managers toward better decisions, the most effective recruiters reframe the conversation around outcomes rather than ego. Getting a peer to adopt a new process and seeing it succeed publicly can do more than any direct pushback ever could. Employer brand only works when it is authentic. At Genomic Health, John helped build a culture brand so genuine that alumni still gather for dinners today. From flash mobs to professionally produced culture videos, the goal was always to capture the real spirit of the place, not manufacture one. Non tech companies are an untapped opportunity right now. For recruiters who are displaced or burned out on long commutes and rigid structures, industries like senior care, manufacturing, and utilities are hungry for recruiting expertise and far more open to new ideas. The impact potential is enormous, and the appreciation is real. Quote of the Show:"I just stopped being afraid. You just shake it off. There's a certain point where you're like, yeah, I don't care. Let's just do it. And I think it's very empowering if you can get beyond that point." - John CurranLinks:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-curran-55600a1/Website: https://hillendalehomecare.com/Ways to Tune In:Recruiters On The Rise Website: https://recruitersontherise.com/ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6j8LK95YtqW7ZMU4kwBNgR Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/recruiters-on-the-rise/id1891705495  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b7f77aa2-de4c-4e5c-b5de-cfe60fe39c77 iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/328811219/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@recruitersontherise