Lars Schmidt

Where he works now

According to his personal website, Lars Schmidt's current position, dated from 2026, is in recruiting transformation at Anthropic, where he says he is driving how the company's recruiting teams work with Claude. The same page places him in the San Francisco Bay Area and describes him as a talent leader, author and podcast host. The title on The Executive List reflects his earlier life as the founder of Amplify, which his own timeline now treats as a chapter that ended in 2024.^[1]

His site also publishes a set of practical tools under a Labs heading, including an interview guide generator and audit worksheets for applying AI and automation to HR and talent acquisition, which fits the theme of his current work.^[1]

Early career: from dot-com recruiter to Ticketmaster and Magento

Schmidt started out as a technical recruiter in New York and Los Angeles during the late-1990s dot-com boom, a path he described in a 2018 interview with Greenhouse. He then moved in-house at technology companies, and an interview with Oyster in 2022 says he ran global talent at Ticketmaster and led talent at Magento before relocating to northern Virginia. NPR's 2013 departure notice, published by Current, adds that he held a vice president of human resources role at Ticketmaster and worked at several startups.^[4][3][2]

His website sums up the Magento stretch as a hypergrowth assignment in which the open-source commerce company grew from roughly 30 people to more than 100 before it was acquired by eBay.^[1]

NPR: recruiting as marketing

Schmidt joined NPR in February 2011 as senior director of talent acquisition and innovation, a role his site summarizes as moving recruiting from a reactive function to a proactive one built on employer brand and recruitment marketing. Current reported that he expanded NPR's online recruiting, turning the @NPRJobs Twitter account and the #pubjobs hashtag into central resources for people looking for work in public broadcasting. He also co-founded the Generation Listen audience-engagement initiative and led an effort to pay NPR's interns year-round.^[2][1]

He told Oyster that the NPR job came as the organization was moving from broadcast toward digital, and that he left at the end of 2013 after planning the move for about a year and consulting an informal board of entrepreneurs. Current's December 2013 report quotes him saying he felt a growing hunger to follow in his father's footsteps and launch a business.^[3][2]

Building Amplify

The company he started, first called Amplify Talent, was announced as a way to bring marketing and social media practices into recruiting. In the Oyster interview he described it as having begun as a strategic consultancy on employer brand and recruiting optimization for technology clients such as SpaceX, Hootsuite, Dashlane and Plaid, and as having grown into three parts: an executive-search practice for companies building next-generation people teams, an accelerator for future chief people officers, and a media arm that includes the Redefining HR podcast, a book and a Fast Company column.^[2][3]

His own site lists the Founder and CEO tenure as 2013 to 2024 and names SpaceX, Plaid, Hootsuite, Vimeo, Duo Security and Guild among the companies he advised on attracting and keeping talent. The accelerator, which he called his most rewarding work, ran three cohorts in 2021 with more than 100 participants worldwide, including a four-week peer program supported by courses, a community and a job board.^[1][3]

After Amplify, his site shows a 2024 to 2026 position as vice president of talent acquisition and innovation at Fruitist, where he is credited with building the global recruiting function, including structured hiring frameworks and talent systems across international operations.^[1]

HR Open Source and the book

In 2015 Schmidt co-founded HR Open Source with Ambrosia Vertesi, borrowing the idea of open collaboration from software. The Oyster interview says it was piloted inside Hootsuite, then spun out and grew to more than 10,000 members in over 100 countries; he has since stepped back and handed it to an operating board.^[3][4]

He is the author of Redefining HR, which his site lists among his books, and hosts the Redefining Work podcast. His website lists coverage in TIME, Forbes, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal and NPR, and says he keynotes and moderates at events including LinkedIn Talent Connect and the NBA Summit, with talks on talent transformation, AI and automation in hiring, and career resilience.^[1]

How he thinks about the work

In the Greenhouse interview he put trust at the center of the recruiter and hiring-manager relationship, arguing that once trust exists managers are more open to a recruiter's advice, so it is worth building early. He also said he was watching diversity and inclusion closely, noting that some companies embrace it fully while others want to but do not know where to start.^[4]

On community, he told Oyster that open sharing is among the most transformative forces in people operations and that practitioners should stop working in secrecy. He avoids the phrase best practices because what works depends on each company's culture, resources and context, and he argued that strong communities need deliberate design, rituals and trust built over time. He also described a failed 2020 experiment, a short daily live video podcast that drew no audience but shaped later video formats.^[3]

Why he matters

Schmidt is one of the people who pushed corporate recruiting to borrow from marketing and open-source culture, and who then built the surrounding infrastructure: a boutique search and advisory firm, a practitioner community and a body of published work. His move into recruiting transformation at an AI company suggests the same instinct applied to a new tool set. Published sources do not list his education or board seats, so none are given here.^[1][3]

On The Executive List

Lars Schmidt is ranked No. 64 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Human Resources Officers discipline. Schmidt's own site lists his Founder and CEO role at Amplify as running from 2013 to 2024 and shows a later position at Fruitist and, from 2026, one at Anthropic, so the Amplify title on the list is no longer his day-to-day role. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.