Our Story

It started with an entrepreneurship competition in the late 1980s
As corny as this sounds, John Vlastelica knew, at 17 years old, that he’d start his own company someday. In High School, he was a business geek, reading Fortune Magazine for fun, helping to run the student store, and working in a corporate office after school. He was encouraged to participate in DECA, a business club, which encouraged High School students to write a business plan and then compete head to head with other young entrepreneurs to see who could sell their ideas to real corporate finance and marketing leaders in an intense competition. John took his business plan for “Action Advertising,” his selling skills, and his nervous energy beyond the state competition to place third in the national entrepreneurship competition. It was a huge confidence builder and a confirmation that he should pursue a business degree and, eventually, start his own company.

Gaining confidence and humility as a practitioner
Fast forward 20 years, and John had gained considerable experience and expertise as a corporate recruiting leader with fast growing companies like AT&T Wireless (early ’90s, when wireless was exploding), Amazon.com (late ’90s, at the epicenter of the dot com boom), and Expedia (late ’00s, as the economy rebounded and recruiting picked up around the globe). As a corporate recruiting leader with big, global recruitment teams, he found it challenging (and even unrealistic) to complete many of the key initiatives that would take his company’s recruiting capabilities from good to great.

In 2002, Recruiting Toolbox was born
Recruiting Toolbox was born from the idea that busy corporate recruiting leaders didn’t have the capacity to get to all of the critical projects and key training initiatives that the business and HR teams needed to complete; too often, even the really high ROI projects were pushed out another quarter, another year. John believed he and his peers would benefit from a specialized consulting and training firm that employed successful former corporate recruiting leaders who understood their pain and priorities, and delivered real-world solutions to their recruiting strategy, process, systems, training, and tools needs.

The future is bright
Recruiting Toolbox is a leading management consulting and training firm that has helped organizations like Nike, Salesforce.com, Groupon, Kindercare, and the World Bank recruit better. Our team now includes consultants and trainers who have spent years honing their craft in the real world from companies like Amazon, Starbucks, Expedia, Cisco, KLA Tencor, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Become part of the story, and contact John Vlastelica to see if we can be a resource to you.