Matt Schalsey

Director, Enablement

As CEO of PerfectHire, I lead a cutting-edge Talent OS designed to simplify and enhance the recruitment process. Our innovative, AI-driven solutions empower recruiting teams to identify top talent, generate tailored interview questions, and streamline hiring timelines by up to 50%.  

With over a year at the helm of PerfectHire, I remain focused on delivering impactful, results-driven hiring solutions that eliminate inefficiencies and enable controlled growth. By leveraging automation and workforce intelligence, PerfectHire supports organizations in achieving smarter, faster, and more human-centered hiring outcomes.

Director of Revenue Enablement and Business Development 

- Built a Advantive's first Onboarding Program
- Created Product Masterclass (certification) for 14 different products at a Introductory, Fundamentals, Master and Expert Levels.
- 85% CSAT for Enablement Training
- Three Sales Kickoffs and launch Presidents Club
- Enhanced and optimized the Sales Process to make our Lead Process 12% more efficient
- Grew our BDR team from 2 to 6 and raised our booked meetings from 8 a month to 55 a month
- Built out the first iteration of our GTM Play process and creation

Big shoutout to everyone who made the 𝗧𝗔 𝗪𝗲𝗲𝗸 𝘅 𝗝𝘂𝗿𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰 𝗛𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗔𝗳𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘆 such a fun and memorable way to pump up the week! 🦖
 
From the inflatable dinosaur and amazing food to even better conversations, it was the perfect blend of creativity, community, and connection.
 
Huge thank you to Conor Kline and the Pin.com - AI Recruiting team along with Evan White from Purple Acorn for hosting and bringing the vision to life, 
 
Events like this remind me why I love the talent community. So many great people, ideas, and moments packed into one night.
 
Already looking forward to the next one!

p.s. Joel Lalgee can attest how great the food was! 
 
#TAWee #jurassicHire #TalentCommunity #Networking

CEO at PerfectHire | Rewiring Recruiting for Results | GTM Award Winner

Winner, winner, chicken dinner. PerfectHire wins the 2026 "Best Innovative or Emerging Tech Solution" from the Lighthouse Tech Awards sponsored by UNLEASH ! 

This goes out to our insanely bad a** and hardworking team, plus the customers we've had that leverage the platform and collaborate with us on improving it daily to meet their needs. 

Quotes from the panel 
"I had a chance to look at the PerfectHire entry and I was really intrigued by their approach, some of the way they're talking about the problems of recruiting.

For me it's fun because I go back to my time where I was a recruiter and I think about some of the challenges and issues that I faced then, you know, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, are still the problems and challenges that a lot of companies are struggling with now. They seem eternal or evergreen and PerfectHire's like, why don't we have to take it as a face value? Why don't we turn that upside down and break some of those things we think we have to do and change that up in a dramatic way. So congratulations to them for being our best innovative emerging tech solution.

Really good work there." - Ben Eubanks

“PerfectHire's TalentOS is a platform that transforms reactive staffing into proactive workforce management for frontline organizations, offering faster hiring and stronger retention by directly connecting recruiting, workforce planning, and retention. It is uniquely differentiated by its unified approach, which has helped customers achieve a 26% reduction in time-to-hire and a 40% improvement in employee turnover, alongside prompt-free AI embedded directly into execution.”

– Lighthouse Research & Advisory Awards Judging Panel 

If you want to level up your ATS from 2009 to what's number 1 in 2026, shoot me a message and let's find time to chat.

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Being able to measure team capacity against direct load and forecasting changes the conversation and allows leadership to actually talk through what is happening.

Tim Sackett, SCP  🟦

The ATS went live, the implementation was “successful,” and hiring still feels exactly the same.

A lot of teams assume the work is done once the system is configured. Roles are open, workflows exist, and the platform technically works.

What’s missing is ongoing thought around how hiring should actually operate as the business changes. Volume shifts. Roles evolve. Interview plans need to change with them.

Without a partner to pressure-test decisions and adapt the process, teams get stuck with setups that worked once but don’t anymore.

Better hiring doesn’t come from implementation alone. It comes from continued partnership and visibility into what’s actually happening.

The role moved forward, interviews got scheduled, and leadership wasn’t looped in until it was too late.

I’ve been part of hiring processes where the system didn’t clearly show who was advancing candidates, what approvals had happened, or when leadership needed to be involved.

Nothing was malicious. The system just didn’t surface what mattered at the right time.

Speed wasn’t the issue. Visibility was.

When leaders can’t see how decisions are being made or what each stage represents, problems compound quietly and show up later in more expensive ways.

Hiring systems should surface decisions, not hide them. Better hiring starts with seeing clearly, not moving faster.

An ATS Plus is not another rip and replace with a new feature.

It comes from seeing how sales enablement actually supports teams and realizing recruiters were not getting that same level of support, even though recruiting and sales move through pipelines the same way.

So we took the ATS framework, broke it down completely, and rebuilt it from the ground up.

The difference between your last hire and your runner-up was razor thin, and that context disappeared the moment you clicked “no.”

Most systems treat a rejection like the end of the story. Once someone is declined, the context is gone.

In a multi-location organization I worked with, that meant every new opening started from zero. Even if someone had made it to the final stages before, there was no easy way to see who they were or why they were passed over.

Most hiring decisions aren’t clean yes or no calls. They’re close. Timing changes. Roles shift. That information matters.

Once teams could actually see who made it to the final stages and why, hiring changed. When roles reopened, they could re-engage people they already trusted instead of starting over.

Search time dropped, quality stayed high, and recruiters stopped redoing work they’d already done well. Strong hiring systems don’t forget decisions. They preserve context so future hiring is faster and more intentional.

The teams that get the most out of this are the ones that really care about results.

They are focused on optimizing their own workforce and their own TA process, especially in frontline, shift based, SMB and mid-market environments.

You’re hiring a floor nurse and a CFO through the same stages and pretending that makes sense.

Most legacy ATSs expect every role to move through the same workflow in the same order. That kind of rigidity might work for payroll, but it breaks down quickly in hiring.

Different roles require different stages, evaluations, and decision points. Forcing everything into one process creates friction and hides where work actually slows down.

The way I think about it is flexibility with accountability. Build the stages that make sense for the role, measure each stage clearly, and still give leadership clean visibility into what’s happening.

Hiring works best when the process fits the role, not when the role is forced to fit the process.

Recruiting only shows up in leadership conversations after something breaks.

Most Heads of HR aren’t intentionally neglecting Talent teams. They’re measured on comp, benefits, and policy, so recruiting sits in the background, assumed to be handled.

What happens next is predictable. Talent gets treated like an operational checkbox instead of what it actually is, a revenue function. Recruiters work in isolation, problems surface late, and leadership never connects hiring decisions back to productivity or growth.

TA becomes something leadership doesn’t think about until hiring misses start showing up in the business. By then, it’s already expensive and hard to unwind.

Recruiting is sales and sales is recruiting. The minute you stop resourcing and measuring Talent the same way you do revenue teams, the business feels it. Slower hiring. Lower productivity. Lost revenue that never shows up in HR dashboards.

Strong companies don’t treat recruiting like background noise. They treat it like the growth function it actually is.

The interview starts and the hiring manager realizes they never planned what they’re actually evaluating.

I call these shower thought interviews. You remember you have an interview today and scramble to come up with a few questions on the fly. It feels harmless, but it creates inconsistency, wasted time, and weak signal for both sides.

Interview questions should be intentional, role-specific, and consistent across the company. When every location or hiring manager runs a different interview, there’s no standard to measure against and no way to compare outcomes.

The impact goes beyond one hire. In multi-location environments, inconsistent interviews create brand risk. People move between facilities and suddenly nothing feels familiar.

Strong talent teams don’t invent interviews in the moment. They design them ahead of time, so decisions are based on signal instead of improvisation.

Most hiring manager frustration comes from not knowing what is actually happening.

When they can see where roles are, how they are progressing, and what the pipeline really looks like, the conversation changes and they can engage with clarity instead of guessing.

I got pulled into this space because of a hire that went sideways, and at the time I couldn’t tell if the recruiter failed me or the system did.

This was a very niche role I owned. I wasn’t a hard yes on the person, more of a medium pass, but the role progressed anyway. The ATS didn’t give visibility into my manager’s manager, the CRO, and it didn’t notify me when things moved forward. I asked my recruiter what was happening and was told interviews were still ongoing. Then I found out an interview with the CRO had already been scheduled.

At that company, getting in front of the CRO meant the hire was basically done. I hadn’t approved it and I hadn’t moved them forward, but the system allowed it to happen. Leadership wanted the role filled, and the decision got made without the right context.

Once the person started, the real issues showed up. I went back and listened to every interview. Not one meaningful question had been asked about the actual work. The interview questions were bad, and the people interviewing weren’t equipped to evaluate that role.

That was the moment it clicked for me. This wasn’t about hiring harder or moving faster. It was about visibility, structure, and asking the right questions before decisions get made. When a system lets roles slip through the cracks, the cost shows up later, and it’s always more expensive.

That experience is what pushed me to focus on interview playbooks, visibility into decision making, and systems that don’t rely on memory or assumptions. One bad hire is all it takes to see how broken the process really is.

Perfect Hire automates the admin work that slows recruiting down.

Scheduling happens automatically, interview questions are ready for every round, and interviewers show up prepared, instead of making it up as they go.

When hiring lives in notebooks and side spreadsheets, leadership thinks things are running smoothly.

What I see most often isn’t a recruiter problem. It’s a systems problem.

In a lot of ATSs, the day-to-day work lives in someone’s head, a notebook, sticky notes, or an Excel file. The system doesn’t show tasks, follow-ups, or what needs to happen next, so everything becomes memory-based.

That works until it doesn’t. Things get missed, context disappears, and problems only surface after candidates drop or roles stall.

Strong recruiting infrastructure isn’t about asking people to work harder. It’s about removing the need to remember everything.

When the system becomes the note taker and the reminder, nothing slips through the cracks. Recruiters stop managing chaos and get back to doing the work that actually improves hiring decisions.

Great candidates are getting filtered out before a human ever sees them, and nobody’s tracking how often that happens.

In many ATSs, hiring decisions are made by a simple filter. Did the resume use the exact words from the job description?

On the surface, that feels objective. In reality, it creates blind spots most teams never see. Someone can have the right experience and describe it differently, and they never make it past the screen.

The problem isn’t applicant volume. It’s how experience gets interpreted.

Better hiring isn’t about more automation. It’s about evaluating meaning, not vocabulary, so strong candidates stay in the process instead of getting filtered out for cosmetic reasons.

The right teams are comfortable with accountability and want to be successful because of it.

Having data and dashboards is not enough if it does not clearly show who is actually individually performing really well.

I see this situation more often than people expect. One recruiter managing all corporate hiring on their own.

They regularly carried around 20 open roles. There was no backup and no one to bounce ideas off of. Most of the work lived in their head or across systems that didn’t connect. A lot of the day went into scheduling interviews, sending follow ups, and trying to remember what needed to happen next.

That kind of workload doesn’t collapse all at once. It erodes. Candidates drop off. Things get delayed. The recruiter feels overwhelmed but can’t point to a single failure.

What changed was visibility into the day. Scheduling and follow ups were handled automatically. The recruiter could log in and see tasks, calendar, and pipeline in one place.

The workload stayed heavy, but the chaos didn’t. With fewer things slipping through the cracks, they could focus on screening and real conversations. That’s how one recruiter can manage 20 plus roles without burning out or lowering the bar.

Your recruiters don’t miss follow-ups because they’re careless. They miss them because the system never told them what was next.

Most hiring problems aren’t recruiter problems. They’re system problems.

In a lot of ATSs, the actual work of the day lives in someone’s head or in a notebook on their desk. Maybe it’s a sticky note. Maybe it’s an Excel file. Follow-ups, interview notes, hiring manager questions, all of it depends on someone remembering to remember.

That’s when things start slipping. A strong candidate doesn’t hear back. A hiring manager asks the same question twice because there’s no context. A recruiter knows someone was close but can’t remember why, so they move on.

When the system doesn’t show you what needs to happen next, forgetting becomes part of the workflow. Recruiters spend time backtracking and piecing together what already happened instead of moving hiring forward.

That’s why I care so much about putting the entire recruiting day in one place. Calendar, tasks, candidates, notes. Not so people work harder, but so the system carries the memory. When that happens, recruiters get to spend their time on screening, discovery, and better decisions instead of managing chaos.

You’ve already vetted strong candidates, but every new role still starts from zero.

In a lot of systems, once someone is declined, that information disappears. There’s no record of who made it close, why the decision was made, or where that person might fit in the future.

Most hiring decisions aren’t a hard yes or no. They’re close. That context matters.

When teams can see who reached the final stages and why, they move faster the next time a role opens. This matters even more in multi-location environments, where visibility across locations prevents teams from redoing the same work or missing strong talent.

Strong hiring systems preserve context so teams can build on past decisions instead of starting over.

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WhyWear

Mission to raise money for pediatric cancer research at the University of Iowa Children's Hospital.

Co-Founder

I help large companies make smarter decisions by turning their data into a strategic advantage. As a leader in data and AI initiatives, I specialize in building key partnerships and leading complex projects that solve large-scale data challenges across high-tech industries.

Outside of work, I’m an amateur endurance athlete, golfer, and avid outdoorsman who enjoys spending time in the mountains.

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