People · Talent · Workforce
Building the human capability behind consequential companies.
I build the People strategy, leadership, organizational systems, and workforce required to turn ambitious plans into something real. I am available for the right full-time leadership role and for immediate fractional, advisory, and search engagements.I help ambitious companies build the leadership, talent systems, and workforce required to scale. Available for full-time and fractional work.
How I work
Inside the company. Alongside the company. Ahead of the question.
I am most useful when a technically ambitious company needs someone to translate what it is trying to build into the organization and human capability required to deliver it.
Inside · People leadershipI am open to the right Head of People or VP of People role with a company building something consequential.
Alongside · Advising and searchPeople strategy, organizational design, workforce planning, and executive and technical search for companies in moments of scale or transition.
Ahead · Manufacturing intelligenceTracking industrial investment, hiring demand, training capacity, and the workforce constraints emerging beneath ambitious build plans.
Why Darla
A recruiter’s eye. An operator’s perspective.
I built the People function at JetZero while the company prepared to scale its workforce, production capability, and manufacturing footprint. That work reminded me how much I love being inside the problem: working across the business to build the organization and human capability required to make an ambitious plan real.
Across more than 20 years in recruiting and People leadership, I have helped startups, public companies, and mission-driven organizations build leadership teams and the operating infrastructure required to grow. Today I advise companies facing those transitions, and I am open to joining the right organization as its Head of People or VP of People.
More about DarlaIndustrial operating experience
Earlier technology and mission-driven work
Separate research venture
A context engine for human capability.
The instruments we use today are titles, résumés, credentials, historical hiring patterns, and, in most cases, a modern interview process that rewards presentation over demonstrated capability. They flatten people into proxies and tell us almost nothing about capability in context.
Susan is a distinct, active research venture exploring how to index human capability from evidence of real work. It grows from the same workforce questions, but it is separate from The Hire Good's Manufacturing Intelligence and client work.
Explore Susan and the private briefExpertise is not a data point to extract. It is a human capability formed in relationship with an environment.
Manufacturing Signals
What is changing beneath the build?
Current evidence on industrial investment, production growth, workforce demand, training capacity, AI, and the talent constraints shaping aerospace and advanced manufacturing.
Daron Acemoglu + David Autor · MIT
Can AI be designed to create new human capability?
Darla's readAcemoglu and Autor push beyond job-loss forecasts toward a different design question: whether AI will primarily automate existing work or help people, including those without four-year degrees, perform valuable new tasks.
Alex Karp · Palantir
AI may increase the value of vocational capability
Darla's readKarp argues that AI will put pressure on some credentialed white-collar work while increasing the relative value of vocational, technical, and highly specific forms of capability. It is a provocative claim that deserves evidence and debate.
Chris Power · Hadrian
A new workforce is part of rebuilding defense manufacturing
Darla's readIn a conversation about the submarine industrial base, Power connects software-driven factories with the need to build far more manufacturing capacity and a workforce able to operate and improve it.
Jensen Huang · NVIDIA
AI infrastructure could create more work before it replaces it
Darla's readHuang presents a more expansionary view: AI becomes infrastructure, raising productivity while creating demand across energy, construction, chips, data centers, skilled trades, and new digital work.
Katherine Boyle · a16z
Rebuilding America requires more than software
Darla's readBoyle’s American Dynamism thesis connects technology investment to the physical institutions, industrial systems, talent, and operating capacity required to build in the real world.
Manufacturing Intelligence
From investment signal to workforce reality.
Living intelligence on where industrial demand is forming, which capabilities it will require, where people can learn them, and whether regional systems are ready to respond.
What is changing
The evidence, voices, investments, and production changes worth following.
Read Manufacturing Signals 02What must be built
Where capital, contracts, facilities, and hiring point to the capabilities companies will need.
Explore demand 03Where preparation happens
Where critical capability is being built and where training capacity is constrained.
Explore the map 04Who can respond
Which boards and regional partnerships are responding to industrial demand, and what the rest of the system can learn.
Explore the watchlistContribute to the inquiry
Where did you become the expert?
Tell me about the project, mistake, mentor, machine, team, or environment that changed how you work. These stories help make visible what résumés and job titles leave out.
Share your storyWriting beyond the signal