The resume gap…it used to feel like it spelled the end of a career, but that’s not true, especially now.

We’re living in a time when career gaps (once seen as red flags) are becoming part of the new professional norm.

Whether it's stepping away to raise a family, navigating layoffs, or hitting pause for personal growth. The question isn’t whether you’ve had a break, it’s how you tell the story of that break.

Returning to the workforce after time away can feel like starting from scratch, but what if your so-called "gap" is your greatest strength? What if the skills you gained while off the corporate track are exactly what hiring managers need right now?

What steps can you take to get call-backs and start landing interviews? How do you package your time away?

In this episode, we’re joined by Erika Price, founder and head coach at Root Cause Coaching. We discuss how professionals can confidently reenter the job market and reshape their career narratives.

She shares how she helps professionals transform “career gaps” into value-packed stories.

Guest Bio

Erika Price is the founder and head coach at Root Cause Coaching. She’s led teams at tech giants like Microsoft and Intel, been both a recruiter and a hiring manager, and navigated her own successful return after a long career break. With 20 years of business experience, Erika has seen firsthand how careers evolve, both the planned pivots and the unexpected ones. While at Microsoft, she created an award-winning coaching program that helped hundreds of colleagues navigate career challenges. Today, she’s a career coach with 500+ hours of coaching experience, working with professionals from Google, Microsoft, PwC, Morgan Stanley, AWS, and more. She helps high-achievers break through roadblocks, step into leadership roles, and find careers that align with their values and strengths. To learn more, visit https://rootcausecoaching.com/.

About Your Host

Vince Holt is the founder and CEO of Management Recruiters of Mercer Island. With 35+ years of industry experience, he is the only MRINetwork team member to win CSAM of the Year, Person of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Awards. In addition to spending time with his wife, children and grandchildren, Vince has raced motorcycles for over 50 years, winning 5 National Championships.

Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm, so our show reaches more people. Thank you!

If technology’s impact on the sales profession was up for debate before, 2020 turned the dial all the way up.

The digital transformation that was already in motion accelerated at lightning speed during the pandemic.

Now, salespeople face a new challenge: making sure screen time doesn’t become a barrier to the face time that drives success.

Technology can make us more efficient, but it will never make us more effective. To thrive, we still have to do everything we did before the digital shift, and then some.

Technology should be a tool, not a trap.

That means resisting the urge to hide behind emails, automation, and slide decks, and instead stepping forward with real conversations, insight-driven questions, and authentic value.

In a world where it’s easier than ever to reach people, the hardest part is still truly connecting with them.

So, how do we leverage technology without losing the human edge? What does it really take to go beyond the elevator pitch and deliver real value?

In this episode, Julie Thomas, President and CEO of ValueSelling Associates, shares how salespeople can maintain and even increase their effectiveness in a tech-driven world.

She breaks down the key questions we should be asking and offers a smarter way to think about technology in sales.

Guest Bio

Julie Thomas is the President and CEO of ValueSelling Associates, Inc. She works with revenue leaders across many industries to help them realize results they never thought possible. She is passionate about guiding revenue organizations through uncertainty and helping them build resilient, engaged teams that drive predictable, sustainable results and create customers for life. Julie is responsible for ValueSelling Associates, Inc’s company’s global expansion and its position as a market leader in on-demand, instructor-led, virtual instructor-led, and hybrid (blended) learning solutions delivered throughout the world in more than 17 languages. In a career spanning more than 24 years, she credits her mastery of the ValueSelling Framework® for her own meteoric rise through the ranks of sales, sales management, and corporate leadership positions. Julie began her sales career at Gartner Group (now Gartner, Inc.) In 1999, she became Vice President of Gartner’s Sales Training for the Americas. Her role included successfully onboarding new sales hires and driving adoption of the ValueSelling Framework. She has extensive experience applying, coaching and reinforcing the ValueSelling Framework, ValueSelling Essentials® and their application to all customer-facing roles across the revenue engine. In 2003, Julie joined ValueSelling Associates as Chief Executive Officer and President. She led the company to become an industry leader in competency- and process-based training for escalating sales performance in business-to-business sales organizations worldwide. She takes pride in the fact that ValueSelling Associates is consistently honored as an award-winning Sales Training Service Provider. Visit https://www.valueselling.com/ to learn more.

About Your Host

Vince Holt is the founder and CEO of Management Recruiters of Mercer Island. With 35+ years industry experience, he is the only MRINetwork team member to win CSAM of the Year, Person of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Awards. In addition to spending time with his wife, children and grandchildren, Vince has raced motorcycles for over 50 years, winning 5 National Championships.

Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm so our show reaches more people. Thank you!

Most people think sales is all about getting deals and hitting targets. That mindset misses a much bigger opportunity.

The fact is: even the best salesperson won’t win every deal, that’s just the nature of the game.

But what if you could lose the deal and still win the relationship? What if you could deliver value even when someone chooses not to work with you?

When we shift from chasing transactions to building trust, we gain something far more lasting. Because long after the deal is off the table, the relationship can still be intact, and still be meaningful.

Relationships don’t grow through pressure tactics or perfect pitches. They grow through curiosity, humility, and a willingness to show up as a human, not just a salesperson.

How do we make that shift? What are recruiters and sales leaders getting wrong in their approach?

In this episode, we’re joined by Casey Jacox, speaker, coach, sales and leadership expert, and author of WIN the RELATIONSHIP – Not the DEAL.

Casey shares how to rethink your entire approach to sales and why recruiters, hiring managers, and business leaders can get better results when they focus on connection over conversion.

Guest Bio

Casey Jacox is a speaker, coach, sales and leadership expert, and the author of "WIN the RELATIONSHIP – Not the DEAL." Throughout his career, adversity has been his strength. At Kforce, Casey held the top national sales position for ten consecutive years before becoming President of Client Strategy and Partnerships. In March 2019, Casey left Kforce as the all-time leading salesperson to author his debut non-fiction book. With over 100 organic Amazon reviews, it's reshaping how teams build customer relationships and internal cultures. Drawing on lessons from my college quarterback days, he embraces adversity and leads Winning The Relationship, LLC, where he offers executive sales leadership and coaching. Casey also hosts The Quarterback DadCast, sharing stories and wisdom on fatherhood and leadership. To learn more, visit https://www.caseyjacox.com/.

About Your Host

Vince Holt is the founder and CEO of Management Recruiters of Mercer Island. With 35+ years of industry experience, he is the only MRINetwork team member to win CSAM of the Year, Person of the Year, and Lifetime Achievement Awards. In addition to spending time with his wife, children, and grandchildren, Vince has raced motorcycles for over 50 years, winning 5 National Championships.

Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm so our show reaches more people. Thank you!

Most people think tech jobs are just about building complex systems, but that’s only scratching the surface.

Technology doesn’t exist for its own sake. It exists to solve real problems for real people and companies.

At its core, working in tech means standing at the intersection of two worlds: the product and the business, the hard technical skills and the soft human ones.

The challenge? That intersection is often ignored in hiring. Too many tech companies treat roles like a checklist of tools and buzzwords.

They build convoluted hiring processes that favor keywords over clarity. In the process, lose sight of what drives innovation: people who can connect the dots between code and customer, solution and strategy.

Tech gets outdated. People don’t. The smartest companies invest in both.

Recruiters and hiring authorities need to bridge the gap between technology jobs and all the other aspects of the business.

If not, we’ll end up with corporate jargon, vanity metrics, and shortcut language that creates more confusion.

In this episode, we’re joined by Vlas Lezin, CEO of the Silicon Valley Innovation Center, to talk about the hidden pitfalls in tech recruiting.

Vlas breaks down why misalignment between recruiting, engineering, and leadership is hurting hiring outcomes and how recruiters can play a central role in fixing it.

Guest Bio

Vlas Lezin is the CEO of Silicon Valley Innovation Center. He is a seasoned business professional who works between business, finance, and technology. Vlas helps companies find their narrative, build products, and grow their customer base. His experience started with designing, building, and managing various quantitative models for a variety of front, middle, and back office functions in the financial sector. Vlas has founded, mentored, and helped a variety of startups to achieve their strategic goals. Additionally, by partnering with top minds in Silicon Valley and beyond, he has delivered actionable insights to global business players. Vlas enjoys leading the digitization, automation, and overall execution of complex and unstructured problems in the modern world.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlaslezin/

About Your Host

Vince Holt is the founder and CEO of Management Recruiters of Mercer Island. With 35+ years industry experience, he is the only MRINetwork team member to win CSAM of the Year, Person of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Awards. In addition to spending time with his wife, children and grandchildren, Vince has raced motorcycles for over 50 years, winning 5 National Championships.

Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm so our show reaches more people. Thank you!

If you ask five recruiters what they think of AI, you’ll get five different answers, ranging from “total game-changer” to “the end of the profession.”

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

AI isn’t a magic button, and it’s not a death sentence. It’s the perfect tool for subject matter experts who want to cut out the busy work and spend more time where they truly add value.

That makes it a natural fit for recruiters who know how to leverage it.

But AI has its limits. It’s not human. It doesn’t feel. It can’t build trust or navigate the nuance of candidate conversations.

It won’t make a bad recruiter better, but in the hands of a great one, it can be transformative. It doesn’t work against you. With the right strategies, it can work alongside you.

So, how do you use AI to elevate your impact, not erode it? How do you offload low-level tasks while dialing up the work only humans can do?

In this episode, we’re joined by Debra Senra, founder and CEO of Hyphenate.
She shares the real-world promise and pitfalls of AI in recruiting, along with practical strategies for making it work for you.

Guest Bio

Debra Senra is the founder and CEO of Hyphenate. With 15+ years of revenue experience with 10+ years of revenue leadership experience, she has a proven track record of helping organizations grow and scale profitably. Experience leading all revenue functions, including sales, account management, customer success, revenue operations, demand generation/marketing, implementation, and customer care. Connect with Debra on LinkedIn.

About Your Host

Vince Holt is the founder and CEO of Management Recruiters of Mercer Island. With 35+ years industry experience, he is the only MRINetwork team member to win CSAM of the Year, Person of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Awards. In addition to spending time with his wife, children and grandchildren, Vince has raced motorcycles for over 50 years, winning 5 National Championships.

Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm so our show reaches more people. Thank you!

If you’ve ever bought something on Amazon with one click, you’ve seen embedded payments in action.

But that same seamless experience is now making waves in the B2B world.

And it’s changing how money moves between businesses and how fintechs and banks collaborate.

As organizations modernize operations, they’re looking for talent that can not only keep up but lead the charge.

They need people who understand automation, spot inefficiencies, and speak the language of finance and tech.

If you’re in talent acquisition, understanding the evolution of B2B payments can help you source, attract, and place better talent.

How do we find talent for this brave new world of payments?

In this episode, we’re joined by Senior Treasury Sales Officer at Fifth Third Bank and C-suite advisor, Richard Dooley. He breaks down all the latest developments in the payments world and how to staff for this digital transformation.

Guest Bio

Rich Dooley is a senior treasury sales officer with Fifth Third Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina. Now Richard serves as a trusted advisor to C-suite executives and treasury teams to understand their processes and goals so he can help deliver maximum effectiveness and efficiency in working capital and treasury functions involving emerging payment industry trends and best practices. Within the payments industry, Rich is a frequent conference speaker and author of The Signal, a curated LinkedIn newsletter focusing on payments and finance. He serves on several committees of the Accredited Standards Committee X9, focusing on faster and real-time payments, artificial intelligence, and blockchain in the payments space, and the ISO 20022 Financial Data Standard. Rich was one of the authors of the ISO 20022 Remittance Content Market Guide published by X9 (ISO 20022 Remittance Content Market Guide), and also served on the education advisory committee of the Southern Financial Exchange (SFE Education). Connect with Rich on LinkedIn.

Subscribe to Rich’s newsletter here: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7063677977468833792/.

About Your Host

Vince Holt is the founder and CEO of Management Recruiters of Mercer Island. With 35+ years industry experience, he is the only MRINetwork team member to win CSAM of the Year, Person of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Awards. In addition to spending time with his wife, children and grandchildren, Vince has raced motorcycles for over 50 years, winning 5 National Championships.

Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm so our show reaches more people. Thank you!

For most of the workforce, the chaos, uncertainty, and intensity of COVID are in the rearview mirror.

But for the healthcare workforce and hospital systems, it’s still very much the present.

Not only has the sector struggled to recover from the effects of the pandemic, but in many ways, working conditions have worsened. From unsustainable hours to shrinking margins, the human toll has been immense.

Simply put: we’re not attracting doctors and nurses like we used to, and we’re rapidly burning out the ones we still have.

Something has to change. We need to rethink talent acquisition and retention in ways that weren’t necessary before.

Data and AI offer the most powerful tools to do this.

Healthcare generates more data than any other industry, and that data can be leveraged to solve some of the sector’s most urgent challenges.

So, how do we use data and AI to get a handle on what’s really happening in the workforce? What pressures are healthcare workers and hospital systems facing?

In this episode, I’m joined by two workforce leaders from Mercer, John Derse and Will Self.

They unpack the current state of healthcare and share how we can use data to improve working conditions and support the well-being of the people behind the care.

Guest Bio

John Derse is a senior partner and healthcare provider, and industry practice leader at Mercer. His consulting is in the area of People Strategy, which includes strategy, alignment/change management and workforce analytics, and rewards, providing clients with "end-to-end" strategic advice concerning the design, implementation, and operation of human capital and the HR function. Healthcare is an incredibly important industry to Mercer. $1 of every $10 of Mercer’s revenue in the US comes from a hospital or health system. Our commitment to this industry runs deep, and our powerful and unique research has helped us to understand this world today, but more importantly, tomorrow as well. John’s clients include some of the largest health systems and academic medical centers in the United States. John has also collaborated with organizations and brought innovative work for a broad range of clients across various industries, including financial services, consumer products, retail, manufacturing/distribution, and entertainment. Connect with John on LinkedIn.

Will Self is the Workforce Strategy and Analytics Leader at Mercer. As the global leader of Mercer’s Workforce Strategy & Analytics business, Will has the opportunity to work with clients at the unique intersection of data science, artificial intelligence, workforce strategy, and human resources. He is passionate about building HR functions that create value through advanced strategy, actionable insights, and unique sources of competitive advantage. The WSA team consists of data scientists from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds, including labor economics, I/O psychology, computer science, and statistics. They are united in their desire to help clients develop people AI, drive productivity, and enhance the employee experience. Connect with Will on LinkedIn.

About Your Host

Vince Holt is the founder and CEO of Management Recruiters of Mercer Island. With 35+ years industry experience, he is the only MRINetwork team member to win CSAM of the Year, Person of the Year and Lifetime Achievement Awards. In addition to spending time with his wife, children and grandchildren, Vince has raced motorcycles for over 50 years, winning 5 National Championships.

Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm so our show reaches more people. Thank you!

Week after week on Talent Hunters, our host Vince Holt has brought out powerful insights from guests across every corner of the business. From former governors to top-tier doctors and seasoned recruiters.

But today, we’re switching things up. Vince is stepping out of the host’s chair and into the spotlight.

With over 35 years in the recruiting industry, what does he believe is the key to long-term success?

How can recruiters and franchise owners stay focused on the fundamentals instead of chasing every shiny new trend?

In an era of hiring freezes, layoffs, economic uncertainty, and ever-evolving tech, recruiting can feel more complex than ever. But the truth? The formula for success hasn’t changed.

At its core, recruiting is a sales job. You’re either selling yourself, the opportunity, or the candidate.

The secret? Listen, identify pain points, and offer solutions. Everything else is either a tool to support that or noise to tune out.

So, how do you get out of a slump? What separates good recruiters from great ones?

In this special episode, Vince is joined by HireQuest’s marketing manager, Ashley Smith.

He reflects on his journey, shares lessons from industry legends, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s been like to host Talent Hunters.

Guest Bio

Ashley Smith is the Head of Marketing at HireQuest Inc. She is a seasoned marketing executive and powerful relationship cultivator with 30 years of experience in the entertainment, staffing/recruiting, and sports industries. Ashley has a track record of developing marketing strategies that generate effective reach, drive digital conversations that translate to customer conversions, and grow brand awareness. She has expertise in partnership development and execution, marketing team architecture, and integrated marketing campaigns. Ashley is an innovative leader with experience overseeing $40M+ marketing and media budgets, achieving revenue growth, and fostering team excellence. Visit http://hirequest.com/ to learn more.

About Your Host

Vince Holt is the founder and CEO of Management Recruiters of Mercer Island. With 35+ years of industry experience, he is the only MRINetwork team member to win CSAM of the Year, Person of the Year, and Lifetime Achievement Awards. In addition to spending time with his wife, children, and grandchildren, Vince has raced motorcycles for over 50 years, winning 5 National Championships.

Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm so our show reaches more people. Thank you!