Seven Years, Seven Lessons

When shelter-in-place orders began in the spring of 2020, the effects on the job market were immediate and dramatic. Layoffs happened fast, and unemployment systems buckled under the volume. Among the first people Tangerine placed — just months after we incorporated — were COBOL programmers helping repair California's unemployment portal as it strained under an unprecedented number of claims.

Then hiring came back. Companies figured out remote work, customers still needed support, and the market accelerated hard. By 2021 and 2022, we were in the era of the Great Resignation, the war for talent, and endless LinkedIn debates about quiet quitting.

Then it shifted again. The boom gave way to widespread tech layoffs — first as a correction to years of cheap capital and aggressive growth, and more recently as companies reconsider hiring altogether through the lens of AI.

Through every cycle, we've kept helping companies find the people they need to build, operate, and grow. Along the way, we've learned a lot. Here's the longer version of the seven things that stuck.

1. The people who champion you are rarer than you think. Ask anyway.

We've supported clients as they raised new rounds of funding, gained market share, earned industry recognition, and were acquired by major technology companies. We've also outlived some startup clients — a natural part of working in a risky, experimental ecosystem where not every company makes it to year seven, let alone raises a next round.

What has lasted, through both outcomes, are the relationships. We've watched leaders leave one company and go found another, and followed them there. We've supported people through new roles, new ventures, and entirely new chapters, sometimes years after the search that first connected us.

Early on, that meant pushing past a lot of shy awkwardness at networking events, on cold calls, in rooms where we weren't sure we belonged yet. What we didn't expect is how impossible it is to predict, in advance, who becomes a real champion of your work. The people who do are precious. You only find them by showing up and asking.

2. Retrospectives make you sharper, not just tidier

We've become believers in slowing down to examine what worked, what failed, and where an experiment broke down — for a placement, a process, or the business itself. It's easy to move immediately to the next search, the next client, the next idea. But honest reflection is how you move forward on purpose instead of by accident.

The harder skill is holding those takeaways loosely. A strategy that failed once might work under different market conditions. A process that worked for years can stop working as the ecosystem around it changes. The goal isn't to build a permanent rulebook — it's to keep learning without becoming rigid about what you learned last time.

3. You cannot do this alone

No founder or leadership team can be expert in everything. Over seven years, we've come to rely on the people around us who aren't in our core business but are essential to it: legal partners, financial advisors, marketers, operators, and trusted peers who understand what we're building.

That same belief is why we've grown well beyond placing candidates. A new hire tends to surface every question underneath it:

• Is the team structured right?
• Are managers aligned on what success looks like?
• Is compensation competitive?
• Does the interview process actually produce useful signal?
• Do the policies keep pace with growth?
• What happens after someone accepts the offer? 

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Hiring is rarely the whole conversation; it's usually the beginning of one. That's a large part of why we launched Fractional HR Services to support the infrastructure that has to exist around a good hire, not just the hire itself.

It's also why we've kept showing up for job seekers directly—sharing insights, hosting workshops, and being honest about what we're seeing from the hiring side so people navigating their own search have better information to work with. 

Partnership runs in both directions, or it isn't really partnership.

4. Say the plain thing, especially when things are shifting

During periods of change, implicit communication breaks down fast. Clear expectations, definitions, ownership, and deadlines matter with internal teams, candidates, clients, and outside partners alike. This sounds simple. It's also one of the most consistent differences we've seen between companies that keep moving smoothly through change and companies that lose momentum in it.

The same holds true in candidate experience. In a hiring environment where a lot of job seekers feel demoralized, timely updates and honest communication stand out more than they used to. It's never been easier to differentiate on employer brand and simple human connection is most of what it takes.

5. Disruption is also freedom

We've now recruited through a pandemic, a talent shortage, widespread layoffs, and the rapid adoption of AI, watching entire industries reshape themselves and the skills companies need shift almost overnight. The lesson hasn't been learning to predict the next shift perfectly (nobody does that reliably). It's been staying curious, adaptable, and close to the people actually experiencing the change.

Every one of those swings felt destabilizing while it was happening. Every one of them also opened space for creativity, experimentation, and new ways of working that a stable market never would have forced.

6. Technology should sharpen judgment, not replace it

AI isn't new to Tangerine. Since our earliest days, we've recruited experts in machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing for companies advancing medical care, energy efficiency, supply chains, autonomous vehicles, and more.

Today, AI is also reshaping the hiring process itself. Recruiters are managing far higher application volume with less reliable signal. Fraudulent profiles and job scams are increasing. Trust is down on both sides of the table. We use technology to reduce friction, improve sourcing, and make workflows more efficient, but human judgment still has to make the actual call. 

Technology can help surface information. People should still make the decisions.

7. It's always been about the people

Over the last seven years, Tangerine has placed hundreds of talented technical and operational professionals, helped clients scale through hyper-growth, and supported companies through new funding rounds, expansion, and acquisition. We've won multi-year engagements while competing against some of the largest firms in our industry, kept investing in diverse and inclusive hiring even as broader corporate attention has fluctuated, and launched and scaled Fractional HR for startups, nonprofits, and cooperatively owned organizations.

We've worked across robotics, medical technology, proptech, cybersecurity, retail, banking, fintech, and other emerging industries, with companies including BEAM Circular, Keystrike, R-Zero, Astronomer, and many more.

But the common thread has never been a specific industry or technology. It's been the people: the ones building innovative products, the ones making hard leadership decisions, the ones looking for their next opportunity, and the ones working to make companies better places to be.

Thank you for trusting us, referring us, challenging us, and growing with us. We're excited for what the next seven years will bring.

🧡

– April and the Tangerine Team