Artificial intelligence is reshaping recruiting, but Jason Miller is proving that the most interesting work is happening far away from glossy vendor decks and polished conference keynotes. Jason is the Head of People Intelligence & AI at Natera, a genomics company where the stakes are literally life and death, and he is quietly building a different kind of talent machine inside a deeply complex business. Before Natera, he led recruiting at companies like Roblox, Cloudera, and VMware, giving him a rare vantage point across consumer tech, open source, and high‑growth enterprise environments. That mix of places in the volatility of the last few years in recruiting has shaped his conviction that this is the first moment in history where talent teams can finally build their own tools instead of waiting for someone else to sell them a partial solution.
In this episode, Jason and I dig into what it actually looks like to turn that belief into working systems. We walk through the “paper cuts” that drive recruiters crazy. Think chasing feedback across six different channels, rebuilding the same outreach flows, trying to find signals in fragmented data. Jason’s team is attacking those problems with custom AI instead of more headcount or more software. Rather than chasing a monolithic platform, they are building narrow, high‑impact tools: internal talent pools, bespoke agents that learn from specific competitor orgs, and outreach engines that speak the real language of oncologists, ML engineers, and clinical operations professionals. The outcome isn’t just efficiency, though. It’s a different posture for recruiting teams, one where they move from order‑takers to product builders embedded inside the business. Talk about becoming a talent advisor.
A big through line in the conversation is identity. Both Jason’s online and in the craft itself. Jason talks about how a simple visual backdrop and a now‑famous “AI robot” video on LinkedIn turned into a calling card that made strangers feel like they already knew him. That small experiment opened doors: more conversations with talent leaders, more interest in his ideas, and eventually a growing community of recruiters who wanted to learn how to build things, not just use them. I unpack why that kind of visible experimentation matters right now, especially for recruiters who grew up in a bull market and are facing a completely different landscape in 2025.
Community shows up again and again in this conversation, Jason’s truly one of those fast friends. And he describes how casual DMs and one‑off calls evolved into a Slack space where recruiters swap prompts, share half‑finished tools, and push each other to ship instead of over‑polishing. Out of that space came projects like DevScout, built by another incredible recruiter/builder Viet Nguyen to source directly in GitHub. Crazy how this problem is something engineers never prioritized solving for recruiters. You’d think they’d figure that out to you know, get discovered and get hired. But here we are…
I connect that energy to a broader frustration: conferences have become echo chambers of vendors and senior leaders, while the next generation of recruiters, (the three‑to‑five‑year players who will actually run AI‑driven teams in a decade) are mostly missing from the room. Together, we argue that inviting those people into the conversation, and giving them access to both tools and networks, might be the single most important investment talent leaders can make.
This conversation was important to me because it validated what I’ve been up to as a recruiter, making a fast friendship, and keeping my head in the game. It’s important. Recruiting isn’t some sexy job. It’s the grunt work, day-in, day-out that makes a recruiter great. And Jason is funnily honest about being the “old guy yelling at clouds,” while quick to defend newer recruiters who never had to hunt talent without great software.
He champions curiosity over cynicism something I’ve been harping on. Like starting by asking how your systems actually work, where your time really goes, and which annoying task you could remove this week with a scrappy script or agent. I layer in my own hope, that more recruiters will see paths beyond traditional leadership roles, into RecOps, talent intelligence, and AI‑powered experimentation. And if they keep showing up long enough for those bets to compound they’ll make it in recruiting.
If there is a thesis to this episode, it is that the future of recruiting will belong to the people close enough to the work to feel the friction, and brave enough to build into it.
Episode 012 of Building the Talent Machine is out now 🔊
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Follow Jason here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason4linked/
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