Our Team
John Vlastelica
Founder & Managing Director
John Vlastelica draws from 20 years of recruiting experience, including almost 10 years as a corporate recruiting leader and over 8 years as a recruitment management consultant and trainer. He was the Senior Director, Global Recruiting for Expedia, a Recruiting Director at Amazon.com, and the engineering recruiting leader for two start-up divisions of McCaw/AT&T Wireless. In 2002, he started Recruiting Toolbox to help other companies improve their in-house recruiting capabilities.
John has provided training and recruitment management consulting services to companies of all shapes and sizes, including leading organizations in high-tech, bio-tech, healthcare, financial services, and retail. John has shared his expertise with colleagues as an entertaining and credible repeat presenter at regional, national, and international recruiting conferences (including ERE Expo, SourceCon, RecruitingTrends, AIRS Symposiums, Talent42, SmartResourcing UK, and SHRM’s national HR conferences), through online webinars, and as an instructor for various Recruiting Leadership workshops and academies.
He is also an author of several popular recruiting white papers and work published in two books on staffing best practices, and writes for ERE and our blog, Recruiting Toolbox. John was a founder and four-term President of the SHRM Staffing Management Association of Seattle, which draws 250-300 people to its conferences, and co-founder of Talent42, the first national technology recruiting conference. John has also served several terms on the board of Washington State’s largest SHRM chapter, and in 2006 received the Distinguished Member Award from the 7,000-plus member Northwest Human Resource Management Association. He graduated magna cum laude, and first in his class, with a degree in business from Western Washington University.
View John’s keynote speaker bio page at vlastelica.com
John Vlastelica's One Page Bio 
Jason Warner
Principal
Jason Warner has over 15 years of corporate recruiting, talent management, and executive leadership experience at some of the world’s fastest growing and most innovative companies. He has held senior leadership roles in both Talent Acquisition and Learning, Training and People Development at Google, Starbucks, Computer Sciences Corporation, and Intellectual Ventures. At Google, he led the largest Recruiting and Learning and Development teams at the company, supporting the hyper-growth and people development needs of North America, Latin America and Asia for the Online Sales and Operations group, one of the fastest growing business units at Google. At Starbucks, he was the Director of North America Recruiting, responsible for recruiting for all of North America during the greatest growth years at the company. More recently, he led Global Talent Acquisition at Intellectual Ventures, a fast-growing company that is the global leader in the business of invention.
Now, he focuses his efforts on helping other in-house corporate recruiting and human resources teams, at companies of all sizes, improve their internal recruiting capabilities through consulting, training and other project-based solutions.
Jason has been chronicled in the New York Times and featured in the National Best Selling book Mavericks at Work. He is a frequent keynote speaker at leading Human Resources and Recruiting Industry Conferences such as ER Expo, Kennedy Information, and OnRec Exposition. But what is most important to Jason is that he is known by his colleagues and business peers as a pragmatic and practical leader; “someone who really gets recruiting and really gets results” and as someone who turns innovative ideas into practical, efficient realities. He graduated cum laude from the University of Washington School of Business with a focus on HR and Marketing.
Amy Buck
Principal
Amy began her Human Resources career helping corporations build their employment brand and she’s been delivering talent strategies for start-ups and Fortune 500 companies ever since. She’s held senior leadership positions in functional HR, staffing and talent management – giving her a unique ability to “see around the corner” and deliver results grounded in tangible business value. Prior to joining Recruiting Toolbox, she was the senior director for Cisco’s Staffing Innovation Organization (SIO). Amy and her team created, incubated, and delivered enterprise-wide staffing solutions that enabled Cisco to find, keep and engage talent across the globe. Prior to her role in the SIO, she led staffing for the Cisco Development Organization with more than 26,000 employees worldwide. Before joining Cisco, she held both HR and talent leadership positions at KLA-Tencor, New Focus, Lam Research, and OnTrak Systems…all with international responsibilities. Her success portfolio includes building high performing recruiting organizations from delivery to operations (including capability at international sites with deep expertise in India, Japan, Korea, China), creating and implementing communications and organization adoption plans (complementing organization, program, and process implementation), measuring performance and business value through metrics and dashboards, delivering employee engagement programs, and leading acquisition integrations. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Advertising with a minor in Marketing from San Jose State University.
Carmen Hudson
Principal
Carmen Hudson draws from over 15 years of recruiting experience, with a strong focus on helping organizations attract, source and recruit top talent. Carmen’s expertise is in helping clients build the right sourcing and recruiting strategies, and then implementing them in the real world of limited budgets, competing priorities, and highly competitive recruiting environments. She consults and trains companies to help them leverage high ROI solutions for big sourcing, social media, and technology implementation initiatives.
Carmen is a self-described “recruiting geek” who has spent years learning, creating, and sharing best practices around sourcing. She gets that technology – for all of its hype – is still a means to an end, not an end in itself. Her corporate experience includes Yahoo!, where she was Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition. At Yahoo! she led the strategic sourcing team, revitalizing the employee referral program and Yahoo’s employer brand. The team was awarded a coveted Yahoo! Superstar Award, an ERE Excellence award and various recruiting and advertising industry awards. Prior to joining Yahoo!, she was manager, Global Strategic Sourcing for Starbucks Coffee Corporation, where she developed sourcing strategies and recommended resources and tactics to support U.S. retail management hiring. She has also held senior talent acquisition roles at Microsoft, Amazon.com and Capital One and founded a social recruiting technology company.
Carmen is a regular contributor to recruiting industry publications, including ERE and Recruiting Trends. She is a frequent speaker at recruiting events, including the Social Recruiting Summit, Kennedy Online Recruiting Conference, SourceCon, Talent42, and the Seattle Staffing Management Association. She is also the co-founder of Talent42. Carmen earned a degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
Chris Havrilla
Principal
Chris started her career as a Software Engineer and IT Consultant, eventually finding her true passion in the Recruiting/Sourcing community. She spent most of her career in corporate recruiting, leading recruiting functions and teams at companies like Hitachi and Deloitte, and consulting with corporate recruiting teams for small companies to Fortune 100 companies.
Never straying too far from her geeky roots, she loves figuring out how data, tools and technology can enhance the corporate sourcing, recruiting, and assessment process. She brings a strong business acumen, real-world technology orientation, and deep subject matter expertise to her projects, and keeps up her skills as a speaker, writer, and/or adviser to organizations such as SourceCon, Human Capital Institute, SHRM, Technology Association of Georgia Recruiting Society. She’s also a popular blogger, and tweets like there’s no tomorrow. She holds a BBA in Management Information Systems from the University of Georgia, and is based out of Atlanta.
Ben Gotkin
Principal
Ben Gotkin draws from over 18 years of recruiting experience in tactical and strategic leadership roles at organizations including Marriott International, McGladrey, The MITRE Corporation, Intelsat and BAE Systems. In each of these roles, Ben has been a leader in promoting the applications of technology in recruiting, advocating collaboration and community building, utilizing metrics to improve performance, providing interviewing training to management and staff, and developing out-of-the-box tactics and strategies to identify and engage talent. He also has had significant experience building referral and social media programs, the implementation of Applicant Tracking Systems, technology evaluation, and the development of sourcing, employment branding and college recruiting strategies.
Ben is also the Founder and President of recruitDC, Inc., a non-profit organization devoted to producing conference-style events that attract national speakers and highlights local best practices, which has offered unequaled learning and networking opportunities to the members of the Washington, DC area recruiting community. Ben has also served as a board member of WTPF (a DC-based HR organization) from 2006-07, and was an Expert Adviser with the Human Capital Institute. He has also been the author of a recruiting blog and articles for ERE, has been quoted in numerous national publications, and has been a featured speaker and panelist at the ERE Expo, Kennedy Recruiting Trends Conference, SourceCon, Social Recruiting Summit and WTPF.
Ben is a graduate of the University of Maryland at College Park with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Ben and his family live near Washington, DC.
Matt Grove
Principal
Matt brings more than 15 years of talent acquisition and talent management experience to Recruiting Toolbox including a long tenure at KPMG LLP. During his years with KPMG, Matt played key roles within the human capital organization. He built and led the firm’s dedicated sourcing function from the ground up, where he designed the organization’s structure, goals and metrics, and personally selected and trained each team member. This group has achieved great success and is currently a model being implemented by other KPMG firms globally. As US Director of Experienced Hire Recruiting for Tax, Matt advised executive firm leadership and developed this team of successful recruiters into true talent advisors who help their clients attract and hire top talent. Prior to these roles, Matt was an HR business consultant who designed and implemented successful people strategies for a rapidly growing practice of over 4,000 professionals.
Matt began his professional life as a classically trained singer, actor and teacher, a background which has proven surprisingly valuable in the business arena. Leveraging both his performance and business experience, he is in demand as a sourcing and recruiting trainer and has led trainings for teams throughout the US and Europe, as well as India and South Africa. Matt has been a speaker and panelist for the Thought Leadership Institute and SourceCon, has taught members of the International Association for Corporate and Professional Recruitment, and was an Expert Advisor for the Human Capital Institute. Matt holds the Senior Professional in HR certification, graduated cum laude from Southwestern University and earned his Master’s from Texas Tech University.
Greg Stock
Senior Consultant
Greg Stock draws from almost 15 years of recruiting experience. He consults with companies that need pragmatic solutions to scale up their recruitment functions, build out their recruiting programs, evaluate and select new vendors/partners, and improve their recruitment processes.
As a Corporate Recruiting Practitioner, Greg has successfully built and managed recruiting capability across a number of highly respected Silicon Valley technology companies. His expertise comes as a result of leading large-scale recruitment teams on a global level as well as managing strategic recruitment programs. Most recently at Cisco Systems, Greg was part of the Staffing Innovation Organization that launched a program that won a 2011 ERE Recruiting Excellence Award. Also while at Cisco Systems, Greg drove the company’s global job board strategy, led the staffing integration component of the WebEx company acquisition and played critical roles in the company’s diversity recruitment and vendor management functions. Prior to Cisco Systems, Greg was the Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition at KLA-Tencor – a leader in the semiconductor industry – and was responsible for all global hires during a period of rapid growth and intense competition for top talent. He helped KLA-Tencor improve their recruitment strategies, processes and team capabilities while the company expanded its global footprint and reached record revenues.