Ashley Shaeffer.
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Talent Acquisition and Operations

Building hiring systems that are by design.

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Ashley Shaeffer

I’m Ashley Shaeffer, a recruiting and talent operations leader with more than a decade of experience turning ambitious growth plans into thoughtful, scalable hiring practices across teams, markets, and borders.

Strategy ↔ Execution

People ↔ Systems

U.S. ↔ International

Selected impact

Better systems.
Measurable momentum.

My work sits at the intersection of hands-on recruiting, operational design, and executive partnership—from first search to global scale.

Time to hire 70+ → ~40

Days: reduced average time-to-hire through automation-enabled recruiting and onboarding.

Global leadership 5 countries

Built and led a global talent acquisition team with shared KPIs and operating practices.

Talent integration 4 acquisitions

Supported talent integration while partnering with Finance and executives on workforce plans.

Leadership hiring 20+ leaders

Recruited management hires for Google Express in a highly competitive talent market.

Areas of expertise

Recruitment is a system.
Every part matters.

Select an area to see the questions, practices, and tradeoffs I help teams navigate.

  • Global talent acquisition
  • Executive search
  • Talent operations
  • International recruitment
  • U.S. hiring compliance
  • Workforce planning
  • Structured interviewing
  • Candidate experience
  • Inclusive hiring
  • Recruiting analytics
  • ATS & Greenhouse
  • New-market launches
  • Acquisition integration
  • Leadership development
  • Change management
  • Job architecture
  • Headcount strategy
  • People operations

My approach

“The best hiring systems create clarity for the business and dignity for every candidate.”
01

Start with the business question

Define the outcome, the capability needed, and what success will look like before opening the search.

02

Design for consistency

Give hiring teams a clear process while preserving room for judgment, local context, and human connection.

03

Measure what improves decisions

Use data to expose bottlenecks, test assumptions, and improve quality—not simply to produce more dashboards.

Selected experience

From the search
to the system.

A career spanning full-cycle recruiting, global TA leadership, people operations, change management, and business operations.

Infinite Commerce

Senior Manager, Global Talent Acquisition

Led U.S. and global executive searches, launched recruiting in new markets, built a talent acquisition team across five countries, and owned the systems that made quality hiring repeatable.

In their words

Testimonials.

Catalina Zhu
“Her leadership style has profoundly influenced my professional growth and redefined what exceptional leadership looks like.”
Catalina Zhu Infinite Commerce · Former direct report · Global Talent Acquisition

A better way to hire

Thoughtful systems create stronger teams.

Email me Connect on LinkedIn

Area of expertise

What strong teams consider

    Questions worth asking

      About Ashley

      About Me

      I'm California born and raised, and got my start in the Bay Area with a B.A. in Political Science from San Francisco State University. I'm now based in Austin, TX. Outside of work, I'm an avid animal rights advocate — a cause that keeps me just as invested in fighting for the underdog as I am in the office.

      I've spent the last decade building people infrastructure for companies that had none, and some that had too much — and along the way, I figured out where I want that skill set pointed. I love the building: the systems, the frameworks, the process design. But I want to apply it through a talent acquisition lens, in service of the part of the job I love most — the recruiting itself.

      I started my career the way a lot of great recruiters do: in the trenches. As a recruiter at Google, I ran the company's first-ever three-day hiring sprint for UX designers and built out a management team of 20+ hires for Google Express in one of the most competitive talent markets around. Before that, at Betts Recruiting, I managed a fully self-sourced pipeline from first outreach to signed offer, and ended up building an entirely new go-to-market recruiting vertical for the firm. Those early years taught me the craft: how to source people who aren't looking, how to read what a hiring manager actually needs (which isn't always what's written in the job description), and how to close.

      From there, my career took a turn toward building rather than just executing. At companies like GoPro, Instagram, eBay, and Snowflake, I worked as an operations and people consultant, helping leadership teams design compensation frameworks, budget strategy, and change management practices. Then at Infinite Commerce, I built a global talent acquisition function from the ground up — implementing Greenhouse across the organization, standing up a recruiting team spread across the US, Costa Rica, China, and India, and supporting the integration of four acquisitions across multiple jurisdictions. I got time-to-hire down from over 70 days to under 40, and I did it by staying close to the actual mechanics of hiring rather than managing from a distance.

      That's the thing I kept relearning: I'm at my best when I'm in the work, not just overseeing it. Even while leading a team, I kept my own book of business for executive and specialist searches, because I genuinely like the process — understanding what a hiring manager needs, building a pipeline of people who aren't actively looking, and guiding a candidate through what's often one of the biggest decisions of their year. Watching that connection land, for both sides, is still the most satisfying part of my job.

      So I'm bringing that back into focus. I'm looking for a role where I can put strategy and infrastructure experience to work in service of hands-on recruiting — sourcing, closing, and building relationships with candidates and hiring managers, without the distance that comes from managing a function from the top. I know how to move fast, build a real pipeline, and get people through a process that respects their time and treats them like more than a line in an ATS. When I'm not deep in a search, I'm usually thinking about how to make the next one better.

      Experience
      10+ years
      Global scope
      5 countries
      Focus
      People + systems