Jeff Midland is an operator, investor, and the host of The Unlocked Professional. He spent 17 years in enterprise staffing, building and managing talent programs for Meta, Google, and other major tech companies as a primary staffing partner. He ran the recruiters, the strategy, and the spend, and generated over $100M in revenue over his career. A lot of the recruiters he managed and mentored went on to FAANG companies, OpenAI, and Anthropic. He knows how those teams think because he helped shape how they think.

Then he pivoted and started building companies of his own. That meant hiring his own people and designing his own systems from scratch, with no enterprise budget and no team to inherit. That’s when the AI question stopped being theoretical. He went deep into the tools, automated what he could, and kept going until he understood what was actually coming. Then he started making content about it, because most people couldn’t see it yet. That became Unlocked Professional.

Talent acquisition pulled him back in. Seventeen years in it will do that, and the timing was too interesting to sit out. The work now is using that experience across tech, HR, and recruiting to help talent organizations build something better than what they inherited.

He has sat on every side of the table. The agency side, the vendor side, and the client side when hiring goes sideways. That’s why the conversations on the show go somewhere. He isn’t interviewing from the outside.

Jeff is a Bay Area native and still based here, which isn’t incidental. He built his career inside the hiring machines of the companies that set the pace, the ones everybody else eventually copies. The work now is bringing that standard to teams that don’t have a thousand-person talent org behind them.

The Unlocked Professional is a conversation with the people actually rebuilding hiring. Talent leaders, agency owners, and the founders building the technology they’re evaluating. Every episode is a working session, not a panel. What’s real, what’s noise, what changed this quarter, and what a talent organization should do about it.