Lars Schmidt

Building Organizations for the Next Era of Work

Talent

Progressive HR executive with 25 years of transforming how companies hire, grow, and thrive.

TALENT STRATEGY AND ADVISORY

Lars is a trusted advisor to industry-defining companies. He partners with founders, CEOs, and HR leaders to tackle complex talent challenges and build high-impact people strategies. From hyper-growth tech startups to Fortune 500 companies, he provides executive coaching, HR strategy design, and change management to align talent with business goals.

Insights featured in:

An overview of the strengths and skills I’ve built over my career.

My Spikes

    • Mergers & Acquisitions

    • HR Transformation

    • Global Talent Strategy

    • Internal Communications

    • Executive Recruiting

    • Digital Talent Strategy

    • Founder Amplify Talent

    • Cofounded HR Open Source (non-profit)

    • Founded and led Amplify Talent Community

    • Launched and scaled Redefining Work podcast

    • Led global people, recruiting, and talent teams across companies from 50-2,500 employees

    • Led corporate teams, including recruiting, employee experience, performance, talent development, and internal communications

    • Former IESE School of Founders Guest Instructor

    • Created one of the first culture recruiting hashtags (#NPRLife)

    • Led first global use of Periscope for recruiting

    • Created industry first AI employer brand original series - The Quest

    • Led NPR's digital talent transformation

    • Designed first employer brand playbooks for NPR, SpaceX, Hootsuite, Duo Security, Calix, Plaid

    • Host, Redefining Work Podcast (part of the LinkedIn Podcast Network)

    • Fast Company contributor since 2017

    • Author, Redefining HR (Kogan Page) and Employer Branding for Dummies (Wiley)

    • Created a globally trending open-source resource to help business navigate the onset of Covid.

    • Verified social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn

Trusted by and Partnered with:

The events of the last several years have not just altered where, when, and how we work; these moments have obliterated outdated, post industrial-age work paradigms, ushering us into a new chapter—a chance to redefine work for a generation.

What I Believe

Where I’ve Been

My professional timeline

  • Working with Agrovision as interim Head of Talent to build out their global recruiting infrastructure, systems, and team. Responsibilities include ATS selection and implementation, developing global recruiting frameworks including interview scorecards and competency-based hiring, employer branding, and supporting executive searches across data science, AI, engineering, finance, and people teams.

  • Founder & CEO

    Amplify connects, develops, and empowers the next generation of transformative people leaders.

  • Sr Director, Talent & Innovation

    In this turn-around role, I was brought in to lead the rebuilding of the talent acquisition function across NPR as part of a broad HR organizational rebuilding effort. My focus is providing leadership and advocacy for company-wide talent acquisition initiatives that align with NPR’s strategic mission and core values. We achieved this by re-imagining and revamping the NPR recruiting model from a reactive transactional approach that was based on job postings, to a progressive proactive model leveraging social media, recruitment marketing, brand advocates, and employment branding.

  • Head of Recruiting (Contract)

    Responsible for full life-cycle recruiting for a broad range of technical and corporate roles and developing sustainable talent acquisition, development, and branding strategies and procedures. Helped scale the team from 30 to 100+ over that time, helping position Magento for an acquisition by eBay.

  • VP, Human Resources

    Prior to the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger, leading teams responsible for recruiting, employee engagement and development and employee communications across Ticketmaster and its related entities. Following the Live Nation-Ticketmaster merger, responsible for developing and leading employee communications strategies and vehicles for the newly formed Live Nation Entertainment as well as various HR projects.

  • Senior Recruiter

    Hired by CTO to create and execute recruiting process in support of a changed business model after they secured their 2nd round of funding from Kleiner Perkins. Hired 40+ technical employees in the first 18 months.

  • Account Manager/Sr Technical Recruiter

    Responsible for account management and recruiting for this 25 year old software services and technical recruiting firm.

A collection of notable open-source and non-profit projects I’ve led.

Special Projects

  • An open-source resource to help founders build high-performing people teams based on an IESE School of Founders workshop I led in 2023.

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  • A crowdsourced open-source resource I built to support businesses and people teams navigating the first year of the pandemic.

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  • A rapid response toolkit I developed to help companies navigate the fallout of SVB’s collapse.

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  • A global non-profit I cofounded in 2015 to accelerate openness and innovation in HR. Grew to 10k+ members in 100+ countries before closing in 2022.

  • An open-source resource I created to help business leaders make informed RTW decisions.

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Connect

Washington, DC Metro · Remote

lars@amplifytalent.com