When you take yourself, the recruiter, out of the picture, that’s when real change and positive impact on people’s lives happen. My life’s work is to bring back the focus of recruitment on the people—both candidates and employers.

As far back as I can remember, I was very people-oriented; I had an entrepreneurial mindset and a knack for sales. As a young law school graduate, I started working for a law firm and quickly realized it wasn’t a career I wanted to pursue. My deepest desire was (and is to this day) to make a difference in people’s lives and businesses. I knew early on that I had this innate ability to identify people’s needs and companies’ needs and link those together. So, recruitment was a natural career path for me.

I feel lucky to have found my vocation at a young age. But it was not a smooth ride. In 2009, I joined a recruitment firm in London that did overall technology recruitment. I was focusing on the infrastructure space. While the technology side was undoubtedly exhilarating, I was disheartened to notice a lack of interest in building relationships beyond making the placement pervading the recruitment industry. The dissonance between my vision of recruitment and the reality I operated in almost pushed me to quit the industry altogether.

Yet here we are today, more than ten years later, taking recruitment at a whole new level. Things completely changed for me when I moved to San Francisco in 2015. That’s when I truly fell in love with recruitment. I was thrilled to discover that Silicon Valley had a high appreciation and respect for the profession, and that came from clients and candidates. Not only did I find real value in my work and the opportunity to accomplish my ambition to change people’s lives, but I also witnessed this embryonic space, the DevOps space, gaining more and more attention. I immediately understood that there was a market there to be explored, and it needed specialized recruitment.

Driven by my entrepreneurial mindset, I decided it was time to focus my skill and passion for recruiting on the then-evolving DevOps world and build a niche business around it. So, in January 2017, I started Harrison Clarke with the clear goal to dominate the DevOps and SRE space and redefine how recruitment is done.

To be successful in any walk of life, one must be disciplined and devoted to their vision. Motivation is less than 1% of what fuels what I do. My perseverance and success in this space are due to great discipline, and that’s what keeps me going at 4-5 am when I could easily switch off. Passion, upheld by a relentless effort to deliver their best work, drives people to succeed, not the focus on the financial aspect. I love sales and am proud to be working in this sector, but sales should be about adding value and building relationships, not fostering transactional engagements.

I firmly believe recruitment should be done based on respect, trust, and integrity. Recruitment is not about you, the recruiter. It is about the client, and it is about the candidate. There may be different recruitment processes, but fundamentally it all boils down to finding a client and a candidate and putting them together. It’s how you execute the process that makes a difference. Financial success is a by-product of adding value to clients and candidates, not the end goal.

At Harrison Clarke, we’re so passionate about DevOps and SRE that we’ve built our organizational culture around the same principles of continuous improvement, continuous collaboration, and transparency. We are constantly looking for errors and inflection points in our business. The last three and a half years have been an incredible journey, working closely with only the most exciting tech companies in Silicon Valley, top engineers, and Tier 1 venture capitalists. As an investor myself, my long-term goal is to support Harrison Clarke’s continued growth and mission to reshape the recruitment industry.

But the impact I want to make would not be possible without sharing what many others have shared with me, what I’ve learned by working with so many amazing people, without sharing my expertise in recruitment in the fast-expanding DevOps and SRE space. I had the privilege to work with the most impressive and most amazing people in the DevOps and SRE space and the most incredible Tier 1 venture capitalists, which allowed me to add worth and build a business that supports these fantastic people and their goals and dreams. So, to create this impact is a huge accomplishment!

I believe my approach to recruiting talent for my clients differs from any recruiter I have ever worked with outside of Harrison Clarke. I value my clients and candidates, and I believe my network is my net worth. Throughout my career, I have gathered so much knowledge in recruiting and specifically within the DevOps and SRE field that I feel I have so much to offer outside of placing engineers in companies. I believe that I can share my insights to help both my clients and candidates.

Welcome to a new era of recruitment in the technology world.