Tyler Knell is a technical recruiter turned builder who has spent nearly a decade operating across agency, startup, and large technology environments, including recent work supporting technical hiring at Meta and multiple stints at Okta.
Tyler is now transitioning into a Talent Engineer role and building recruiting tools full time. His perspective sits at the intersection of recruiting operations, automation, and the evolving relationship between recruiters and technology.
He and I caught up to talk about:
What recruiting actually looks like across startups and large tech companies
Why agency recruiting creates strong operational instincts
And the emerging role of the Talent Engineer
I appreciate Tyler’s perspective on how recruiters can evolve into more technical problem solvers, while maintaining the human connection that ultimately drives hiring decisions. Thanks for talking the time to sit down and talk Recruiting, Tyler, rooting for you!
Connect with Tyler: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-knell/
Timestamps
3:00 Tyler’s journey entering recruiting, and why speaking publicly about the industry matters
5:00 Startup vs. big tech recruiting and breaking the myth that recruiters cannot operate in both environments
10:00 Boomeranging back to Okta and the importance of strong recruiting leadership and talent density
12:00 Nonprofit experience, empathy in recruiting, and why humility shapes better hiring outcomes
14:00 The origin of HireScribe and why Tyler started building tools for recruiters
18:00 Offline AI tools, privacy concerns, and why recruiters should own their data
20:00 Lessons from agency recruiting including urgency, discipline, and time management
22:00 Operational differences between startup recruiting and large scale hiring organizations
23:00 Defining the talent engineer mindset and solving hiring problems through systems thinking
24:00 Why human connection will remain central to hiring even as automation increases
27:00 AI capturing organizational decision making and the next layer of recruiting data
29:00 How AI may challenge traditional ideas of what makes a good hire
32:00 Proof of work hiring models and the potential shift away from resumes and job descriptions
35:00 Entrepreneurship, portfolio careers, and the decentralization of work
37:00 The limits of labor market data and why practitioners must interpret hiring trends carefully
40:00 Recruiters as arbiters of truth aligning hiring teams around data and judgment
__
Shout out to our sponsor, Rooster.
Rooster is a native interview scheduling platform built inside Workday Recruiting that eliminates back-and-forth and gives recruiters and candidates a clean self-scheduling experience.If you want fewer scheduling errors, faster coordination, and a smoother candidate experience, visit rooster.us to book a demo.
