Amplify talent. Amplify results. It’s a simple mantra, really. One that underscores the need for companies to empower and develop their talent. Amplify Talent provides strategic recruiting and talent attraction services that enable organizations to maximize their impact, and attract and retain top talent. The Amplify Talent blog explores the shifting talent landscape; exploring and sharing talent trends, best practices, social media, employer branding and talent attraction.
About The Founder
Lars Schmidt received his B.S. in Marketing and Multinational Business from Florida State University. After college he joined a technical recruiting and software services firm based in New York, Pencom Systems. After an intense six month technology and recruiting fundamentals training program, he relocated to Pencom’s Santa Monica office where he spent the next three years building technology teams for a variety of leading technology companies including eToys, NetZero, Goto.com and various idealab and eCompany organizations.
Lars then joined a startup, Yellowshirt, which had recently received funding from Kleiner Perkins to revamp their business model. He spent the next 20 months as a consultant with Yellowshirt building their technology teams, successfully hiring over 60 technologists and support staff. In 2002 Lars left Yellowshirt to join Ticketmaster. He began as a Senior Recruiter and gained increasing levels of responsibility over the next seven years before becoming Vice President, Human Resources in 2008. Some of Lars’s key accomplishments over that time include running global talent acquisition (managing a team of up to 14), leading employee development and engagement (including the turnaround of a flawed performance management system launch), and building an employee communications team from scratch (he was the sole individual responsible for the employee communication strategy of the $2B merger of Ticketmaster Entertainment and LiveNation). In 2010, Lars left Ticketmaster and took a consulting role with Magento, an industry-leading open source e-commerce company, where he helped them build recruiting infrastructure and grew their team from 30 to 110 over the next seven months; positioning Magento for an acquisition by eBay.
Lars relocated from Los Angeles to Northern Virginia and joined NPR in 2011, where he is currently Senior Director, Talent Acquisition & Innovation. He was hired in a turn-around situation and was charged with re-imagining the NPR talent function. With very limited resources and budget, Lars demonstrated his creativity and resourcefulness by leveraging social media and employment branding strategies to turn the NPR talent team into a progressive, proactive function. The talent strategy relied heavily on social media, and included the launch of a variety of platforms and campaigns including @NPRJobs, #NPRlife, #PubJobs, This Is NPR on Facebook and more. This evolution was chronicled in a variety of publications including HR Examiner, Wall Street Journal, Mashable, Washington Post, Social Media Examiner, Electronic Recruiting Exchange, SmartRecruiters, PBS MediaShift, SmartBlog on Social Media, Integrated Media Association, Poynter, Monster, LinkHumans, The Daily Muse and more. Lars was named a Top 100 Influencer by HR Examiner in 2012.
Lars lives in Reston, VA with his amazing wife Janet Ciciarelli and their adorable dog Mugsy. You can follow Lars on Twitter at @ThisIsLars or learn more about him on http://www.about.me/ThisIsLars.
