President & Founder, Riverwalker Talent | Social Impact Recruiter | Fractional Talent Partner & HR Consultant | Candidate Experience, Equitable Hiring & People-Centered Leadership
The Hiring Process Reveals More Than a Résumé Ever Can
A hiring process can tell you a great deal about an organization before anyone accepts an offer.
It can reveal whether people are treated as individuals or reduced to résumés, whether stated values survive real decisions, and whether an organization has created enough capacity to treat people with care. For Jessye Kass Karlin, these are not abstract questions. They have shaped much of her professional life.
As President and Founder of Riverwalker Talent, Jessye helps purpose-driven organizations recruit exceptional talent, develop leaders, and address complex people challenges. But recruitment is only the visible part of her work. Beneath it is a deeper belief that organizations become stronger when they learn to truly see the people within them and the people they hope to bring in.
That instinct began at home.
Learning to See People Before Seeing Their Roles
Jessye grew up outside Boston, Massachusetts, with two parents who worked as therapists. Her father, a psychiatrist, built his practice around spending meaningful time with people and getting to know them deeply. Her mother, a licensed independent social worker, brought that same commitment to relationships into her private practice.
The influence was lasting.
“My parents taught me to see people.”
That lesson found an unusual classroom at Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, where Jessye attended from ages ten to fourteen. Students participated directly in decisions about budgets, staff salaries, discipline, and other matters affecting the school. A young student’s vote could carry the same weight as a founding staff member’s.
For Jessye, the experience made participation tangible. It taught her that people are more invested when they have a genuine voice, and that different perspectives can strengthen a process rather than complicate it.
Those early lessons would later become central to how she thinks about teams, organizations, and leadership.
When Good Intentions Require a Closer Look
At Brandeis University, where Jessye studied anthropology and African and African American studies, her interest in people became an interest in systems.
At nineteen, she founded a nonprofit in Ghana providing therapeutic art programs. She recruited volunteers, supervised staff, managed programs, and wrote grants. While completing her senior thesis on voluntourism, however, she began examining the power dynamics within the model she had participated in herself.
She eventually closed the organization.
It was an important early lesson in responsibility. Jessye recognized that good intentions do not automatically make an intervention appropriate. Her experience taught her to examine power, privilege, reciprocity, and her own position within the work.
“I learned to always come from a place of curiosity, trust-building and compassion.”
That habit of questioning assumptions followed her into years of direct human services work, including affordable housing, domestic violence services, HIV care, homelessness, and financial insecurity. She listened to clients, supervised staff, worked with leaders, and learned to pay attention to what people were experiencing beneath the immediate issue.
Later, as an Executive Director, she experienced organizational leadership from the inside. She understood how difficult it can be for leaders to conduct thoughtful hiring and management processes while carrying the demands of running an organization.
Those experiences would eventually converge in talent.
The Experience That Turned Into Riverwalker Talent
Jessye did not begin as a traditional recruiter. She spent roughly fifteen years working inside organizations before becoming an Executive Director, and then launching her own consultancy full-time. Through her consultancy, part-time and then full-time, she spent a decade coaching more than 400 job seekers.
Recruitment became a larger part of her business after a client asked her to conduct a search. The first attempt failed. The organization tried again, and the eventual hire has now remained there for nearly three years.
That experience revealed the value of Jessye’s broader perspective. She was bringing the experience of an executive, coach, organizational practitioner, and former job seeker into recruitment.
She had seen hiring from multiple sides of the table. She had also listened to what job seekers experienced when conventional processes left them feeling overlooked or reduced to a checklist.
Riverwalker Talent grew from that understanding.
Today, the firm works with nonprofits, NGOs, educational institutions, healthcare organizations, and purpose-driven businesses. Its services include full-cycle recruitment, fractional talent leadership, HR consulting, leadership development, conflict resolution, onboarding, and recruitment systems. The company describes its work as helping organizations build strong teams and people-centered practices that allow important work to thrive.
Looking Beyond the Job Description
The numbers give substance to the model. Riverwalker Talent reports an average time to hire of 71 days, a 90% offer acceptance rate, and a talent network of more than 25,000 people across LinkedIn, its newsletter, and its Talent Pool. The firm also emphasizes reaching beyond conventional talent pools and identifying transferable skills that can be overlooked when organizations focus too narrowly on titles or industry experience.
For example, a marketing manager may be ready for nonprofit development work, since both depend on knowing an audience and making a case that moves them. Someone without the exact title listed in a job description may already possess the judgment and capabilities needed to succeed.
Someone who has worked in homelessness, for example, may have skills that transfer to climate work. Someone without the exact title listed in a job description may already possess the judgment and capabilities needed to succeed.
“My entire career has been about learning what goes wrong in hiring and then building the solution.”
That perspective is important because it places her work beyond simply matching candidates to vacancies. Years of working inside organizations have given Jessye a practical understanding of where hiring processes become unnecessarily narrow, where capable candidates are missed, and where organizations need help translating their values into actual practices.
Candidate Experience Is Also a Business Decision
Jessye’s view of candidate experience is equally practical.
She has received more than 100 responses from rejected candidates who thanked her for the recruitment process. For her, that response is not merely evidence that candidates appreciate kindness. It reflects a broader understanding of the relationship between hiring and organizational reputation.
“Candidate experience is really something we prioritize and it’s not just for the candidates’ sake. It’s also for the organization.”
A candidate may eventually become a volunteer, donor, funder, customer, supporter, or critic. The hiring process can therefore become part of how people remember an organization and its brand.
The same thinking extends to retention. Compensation matters, but Jessye does not see it as the complete answer. She points to transparency, culture, flexibility, workload, support, and an organization’s willingness to listen to the people who are already there.
“People often forget to bring staff into the process.”
At Riverwalker Talent, that belief can mean involving large groups of employees in executive searches because the people who will work alongside a new leader have valuable insight into what the organization actually needs.
Turning Care Into Something People Can Experience
There is a philosophical idea underneath Jessye’s work that ties these pieces together.
She does not believe organizations necessarily overlook people because leaders do not care. Often, people are overloaded. Resources are limited. Workloads expand. Managers may not have the time or support needed to communicate well, develop employees, or conduct a thoughtful hiring process.
That distinction changes the question. Instead of asking whether an organization has good values, Jessye asks whether it has created the conditions to practice them.
Her own standard is practical: clear expectations, clear agreements, transparent communication, meaningful support, and enough attention to understand the people involved.
Her favorite quote from bell hooks captures the philosophy particularly well:
“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”
For Jessye, care is therefore not simply an intention. It has to appear in the way candidates are communicated with, employees are heard, transferable skills are recognized, and decisions are made.
That philosophy also explains why Riverwalker Talent extends beyond recruitment into talent strategy, fractional talent leadership, leadership development, conflict resolution, and organizational support.
The Values You Claim Are Tested in the Process
Jessye’s career began with learning to see people. It developed through experiences that taught her to question systems, examine power, listen carefully, and understand how organizations affect the individuals inside them.
Today, those lessons inform how she helps purpose-driven organizations build teams.
Her work suggests that hiring is not separate from culture. It is one of the places where culture becomes visible.
An organization can write empathy, transparency, inclusion, and collaboration into its values. But eventually, a candidate will receive an email, an employee will raise a concern, a hiring manager will make a decision, or a team will welcome someone new.
That is where values become real.
For Jessye Kass Karlin, seeing people is where better hiring begins, and where stronger organizations grow from.
Jessye Kass Karlin, MBA, is the President and Founder of Riverwalker Talent, based in Ballston Spa, New York. She leads a talent consultancy that helps purpose-driven organizations recruit exceptional people, develop leaders, and address complex people challenges through people-centered talent practices. To connect with Jessye or learn more, visit her LinkedIn profile or Riverwalker Talent.
