People / Search / Workforce
I work with founders and leaders when the company they are building has outgrown the way they hire, organize, or lead. I bring a recruiter's eye and an operator's perspective to the people decisions that shape whether the work gets done.
Tell me what you are buildingWays to work together
Practical counsel for leaders navigating scale, change, or a new chapter. This can include workforce planning, organization design, People strategy, hiring architecture, leadership transition, and fractional or interim People leadership.
High conviction search for leadership and hard to hire capability across engineering, manufacturing, product, data, research, and technical operations. The work starts with what the role must accomplish, not a recycled job description.
Hands on recruiting leadership when a company needs immediate capacity without building a full internal team. I can recruit, strengthen the process, train interviewers, and leave a better operating system behind.
Help seeing the workforce behind a growth plan, new facility, or production target. I connect demand to critical capability, regional labor supply, training partners, and the places where knowledge or capacity could constrain the build.
About Darla Horn
I have spent more than 20 years building teams, People functions, recruiting operations, and leadership groups from the ground up. Most recently, as VP of People at JetZero, I worked inside the challenge of building an aerospace company and the workforce infrastructure around it.
Before aerospace, I supported startups, public companies, and mission driven organizations through growth and transition. I have completed more than 100 retained searches and worked as an embedded partner to more than 15 organizations.
Today, I am especially interested in consequential technology, hardtech, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, and the human capability required to turn a plan into something real.
Board and executive perspective
I bring experience working with boards and executive teams on leadership, succession, compensation, organizational risk, and the human capability required to deliver the company's strategy.
Selected work
Defining and finding the leaders a company needs for its next chapter.
Building teams across engineering, product, data, research, and technical operations.
Connecting ambitious build plans to the scarce capability required to deliver them.
Creating the systems, process, and judgment behind repeatable hiring and healthy scale.
Mapping demand, regional talent, training capacity, and the risks between them.
Helping leaders navigate growth, organizational change, and moments when the old model no longer fits.
Selected organizations I have supported
How I work
What must the company accomplish, and what is getting in the way?
What knowledge, judgment, and leadership does the work actually require?
Where does that capability live, and what will make the right people move?
Solve the immediate need while leaving the organization stronger.
When I am most useful
That may be a founding team making its first critical leadership hires, a company preparing to scale a technical organization, or a leader who needs an experienced partner inside a period of change.
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