This former HR tech exec thinks companies are losing sight of hiring top talent. She wants to help.

When trying to make big changes, is it better to start from inside or outside?

When it comes to hiring, Jackye Clayton is trying the latter. In January, she launched PeoplePuzzles, an HR consultancy-slash-neurodiversity career support service, focused on improving hiring, and offering productivity tools to executives with ADHD. (Clayton herself has ADHD.) She previously worked at several HR tech startups, most recently as VP of talent and DEI at Seattle-based Textio, an AI firm that aims to remove bias from feedback.

Her motivation stems from watching recruiting teams struggle to make top hires amid strict timelines and high volume.

“I’ve worked at several startups in the HR tech space, and my role has always been really helping people navigate through talent acquisition,” Clayton told HR Brew. “I realized that through the years, people have kind of lost the strategy piece, and misunderstand the lessons.”

When it comes to culture fit vs. culture add, for example, recruiters might downplay the importance of organizational alignment to business success. And, with AI increasingly at the forefront of hiring, these nuances could become even more overlooked.

While she is still in the early stages of her new venture, Clayton spoke with HR Brew about her top goals.

“I’m still kind of finding my feet of exactly how we’re going to put all these things together,” she said. “But my core interest is being able to find exactly what kind of people are going to be the right fit at the right company at the right time.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What motivated you to launch your new business?

I worked at all of these various startups and people [would] say, “I need to talk about career trajectory.” I’d always say, “Your career trajectory is out…this is a startup.” If you want a career, you need to go to a company where they have things like training and employee days and ERGs…we are going to work 12 hours a day, and that’s going to mean the weekend, and there is no life balance, and there is no place for you to go. That’s what startups are like.

You would lose lots of good people [at startups] because they wanted to go somewhere else in their career, but there’s lots of people who are at these other companies that would thrive from these types of environments. [I’m] trying to help people look past just the algorithm to make sure, once they’ve done all this matching, that the person is going to be somebody there for the long haul that understands the business.

Hiring is tough right now. If you’re getting thousands of résumés as a recruiter, how do you quickly turn those around and decide: Is this person a good fit?

And the [résumés] all look the same. I don’t think people realize that the algorithm that we’re working with is not like Netflix’s.

When you ask AI to enhance your résumé for the job description, [some of those] are gonna rise to the top, but they’re all gonna look the same. How do you know who to bring into the organization? You have to be able to break it down, but you can’t hint to the algorithm the things that you’re looking for. You have to be more specific.

Would you say that the algorithms aren’t capable of that nuance at this time, or recruiters are not good at that kind of prompt engineering?

I think it’s a mixture. I think [recruiters] have learned so much software before learning people…and [it’s] because of not understanding necessarily how [AI] bias works and how they’re already programmed. So an example is, most people will say, we want to hire people like our top performers…[but] all your top performers look the same, act the same, have the same background. So it kicks out [overlooked talent]… People don’t recognize the environment that they have, so it’s very difficult to know what you’re missing, and what would be a good fit and a culture add at the same time.

Your new venture has a couple focuses—which are you most passionate about?

Helping people understand where they can find the talent, even just from a technology standpoint…Simple tweaks to job descriptions, simple tweaks to the type of work that we’re looking at can help us find better candidates. And just taking the time. We try to slap a job description together, [post] it anywhere and just wait for people to come. But there’s so many applicants.

This is strategic. They’re not taking strategic goals. And now it’s being left to these systems to try to come up with the answer. You just have to dig just a little bit deeper. If you could just take it two more notches, you will have a better chance of hiring the right talent and explaining to the whole team why you’re doing this.