AI TALENT & RECRUITING ADVISORY
I help founders and growing companies identify hard-to-find technical talent, improve how they evaluate candidates, and build recruiting operations that use AI without losing human judgment.
AI talent evaluation · Recruiting systems · Human judgment
EXPERIENCE BUILT AT
Big-tech discipline.
Built for your next stage.
01 / CONSULTING
Senior judgment for the decisions, systems, and searches that shape your team. We’ll start with the hiring problem that matters most, then bring the strategy and execution it needs.
Find the people who can do the work, from specialist individual contributors to founding teams and senior technical leaders.
Get clearer about what good looks like, what evidence to look for, and how your team makes the hiring decision.
Build recruiting operations that give your team useful information, fewer manual handoffs, and more time for judgment.
02 / SELECTED WORK
A selection of outcomes from my technical recruiting career.
GOOGLE X · FOUNDING TEAMS
Hired founding engineers and product managers for a moonshot team, supporting an on-time launch and additional R&D funding.
CRITEO · GLOBAL ENGINEERING
Reduced engineering time-to-hire while maintaining an 80% offer acceptance rate through focused recruiting and process improvement.
GOOGLE X · ROLE CALIBRATION
Standardized intake and calibration to reduce role clarification time and improve the quality of candidates progressing to onsite interviews.
03 / TESTIMONIALS
“Six months of searching. Three weeks with CJ. I'd call that the whole ballgame.”
We'd been trying to fill a senior AI engineer role for six months. Not just anyone, someone who actually understood RAG pipelines, token optimization, and what it looks like when things break at scale in production. I'd worked with agencies before and kept getting candidates with great resumes who fell apart when I asked them to walk me through a chunking strategy or talk about cost-efficient inference. Impressive on paper, useless in practice.
CJ was different from the first conversation. He understood what we were actually trying to build, not just the job description. The way he communicated with our leadership team gave me confidence early. It felt less like working with an outside recruiter and more like someone who'd already been embedded with us.
Three weeks in, he brought me someone who wasn't even on the market. An engineer who'd built and scaled AI systems to millions of requests and could have a real conversation about latency versus quality trade-offs, not recite talking points. The close was smooth and low-pressure, which honestly matters more than people think when you're dealing with passive candidates.
“Worth every dollar. Paid for itself in the first week.”
Honestly, we were buried. Résumés flooding in from people with AI PhDs, "LLMOps specialist" in their title, the whole thing, and most of them couldn't actually ship. Ask them about token cost trade-offs or walk you through a production RAG pipeline and you'd get a blank stare. Prompt engineers cosplaying as AI engineers.
CJ cut through it fast. Within a week he showed us exactly where our job descriptions were pulling in the wrong people and accidentally screening out the ones we actually wanted. The video he put together didn't feel like a consultant deliverable. It felt like talking to someone who'd already spent time understanding how our team thinks and what we're actually trying to build.
The fix wasn't just a list of problems. It was sequenced, prioritized, and actionable. We started implementing it and within two weeks the conversations we were having with candidates were completely different. These were engineers who talk in latency budgets, not buzzwords.
04 / WORK WITH ME
Bring me the hiring challenge. We’ll work out whether you need market clarity, a stronger hiring system, hands-on recruiting, or an ongoing senior advisor. Discuss Your Hiring Challenge.
START HERE
$1,500 USD
A focused two-day market and sourcing sprint for one critical technical role. I’ll identify 15–20 strong prospects, explain why they fit, and give you a practical starting point for outreach and pipeline development.
STRATEGIC DIAGNOSTIC
$3,500 USD
A focused review of the systems behind your hiring process — from role definition and sourcing through interviews, recruiting technology, AI workflows, and pipeline management.
HANDS-ON TECHNICAL SEARCH
Starting at$8,500 USD
Hands-on recruiting support for one important hire, from defining the brief through sourcing, evaluation, pipeline management, and supporting the close.
Highly specialized, senior, founding, AI/ML, robotics, and leadership searches may be scoped above the starting price.
Discuss a Hiring SprintFLAGSHIP · ONGOING ADVISORY
Starting at$5,000 USD / month
Senior talent strategy and recruiting operations support without the cost or commitment of a full-time Head of Talent. I work directly with founders and leaders to improve hiring decisions, prioritize roles, strengthen recruiting systems, and solve the problems slowing hiring down.
EMBEDDED SENIOR TALENT LEADERSHIP
Starting at$7,500 USD / month
For teams that need more than advisory support. I work more deeply inside the hiring operation, combining senior recruiting leadership with hands-on execution.
We’ll agree on priority roles, depth of involvement, and ownership before we begin.
Talk About Embedded SupportEvery engagement starts with a conversation about the problem, scope, and fit. For ongoing partnerships, we’ll agree on priorities and how closely you need me involved before we begin.
Discuss Your Hiring Challenge
05 / YOUR ADVISORY PARTNER
My career began in the Army, leading people as a staff sergeant. From there, hands-on Linux and infrastructure work gave me a practical understanding of the systems engineers build—and the judgment their work requires.
I brought that perspective to technical recruiting at Google X, Facebook, and Criteo. Today, I advise founders and growing companies on AI and technical talent, candidate evaluation, and recruiting operations. I help choose the tools, design the workflows, and do the recruiting work that moves a team forward.
AI can accelerate the research. Experience, context, and human judgment still guide the hire.
AI & TECHNICAL TALENT FOCUS
SHRM Talent Acquisition · Generative AI for Recruiters · SHRM AI in HR · Behavioral Event Interviewing · Hogan Assessment
06 / INSIGHTS
How I think about evaluating talent, choosing recruiting technology, and building better operations.
AI TALENT EVALUATION
For an AI role, I want to understand the decisions behind the demo: what the candidate tested, what failed, and what they changed.
Start with the work the person will own. Ask them to explain a trade-off, walk through a failure, and describe how they would know their solution was working. A candidate who can name the limitations gives me more to evaluate than one who only describes the happy path.
My starting point: agree on the evidence before the interview. Then use a scorecard that separates technical execution, evaluation, and judgment. Fluency with AI tools is one input into that decision.
RECRUITING TECHNOLOGY
I start with the bottleneck: research, outreach, handoffs, or reporting. Then I ask whether a tool improves that part of the workflow.
A good demo is a starting point. I want to try the product against a real role, inspect the output, and count the corrections it needs. Candidate matches should be explainable; outreach should be relevant; handoffs should reach the system where the team actually works.
My test is practical: does this save useful time after review and cleanup? Keep a person responsible for candidate evaluation and external communication, and define what needs approval before automating the task.
AI PM & ENGINEERING TALENT
Before sourcing, I ask what the team needs to ship, who owns the technical decisions, and how success will be evaluated.
An AI product manager and an AI engineer may work on the same problem, but I would look for different evidence. For product, I want clarity on the user problem, priorities, evaluation criteria, and adoption. For engineering, I want evidence of implementation, testing, reliability, and technical trade-offs.
Those boundaries vary by team. Write down the first outcomes the hire must deliver, the decisions they will own, and the support they will have. That gives sourcing and interviewing a shared target.
LET’S GET TO WORK
Tell me what you’re building and where you’re stuck: finding talent, evaluating candidates, or getting your recruiting systems to work together.
Discuss the problem with me hello@cjwooden.com