Tricia Bailey
Tricia Bailey
Leading Talent Acquisition & Executive Search, BlinkRx
Unlike many talent leaders who “fell into” recruiting, Tricia Bailey made a deliberate pivot into the profession—one guided by self-awareness and curiosity.
Tricia began her career as an attorney, spending five years practicing law, first in a firm and later in-house. While the role itself wasn’t the right fit, she noticed something telling: the part of the job she enjoyed most was looking for new opportunities. That realization sparked a pivotal question—how do I make a career out of this?—and ultimately led her into recruiting.
She began in true retained executive search at Heidrick & Struggles, gaining a rigorous foundation before transitioning in-house. Over the years, Tricia moved between search firms and internal roles, largely as an individual contributor, building deep expertise in executive hiring across industries and company stages.
Her first leadership role came at Twitter, where she was tasked with building and leading the global executive search function. Starting with just herself and one other person, Tricia grew the team to 11 and oversaw roughly 60 director-level and above searches per year across engineering, product, sales, and corporate functions worldwide. Her blend of search firm and in-house experience—along with a prior working relationship with Twitter’s Head of People—made her uniquely suited to scale the function.
She was later recruited to Chime to lead executive search during a critical growth phase. There, her mandate was tightly focused: build out the C-suite and senior leadership bench to support scale and an eventual IPO. With a lean team and frequent C-level searches, Tricia balanced internal execution with strategic use of search firms, remaining deeply hands-on throughout her three-year tenure.
Today, Tricia leads all of Talent Acquisition at Blink Health—a role that represents a dramatic shift in scope. While she continues to personally lead executive search, she also oversees high-volume hourly hiring for operational teams, along with corporate and technical roles. The contrast between executive search and volume hiring, she notes, isn’t easier or harder—just a different kind of hard.
What Energizes Her Most
Two things energize Tricia most in her current role.
First is partnering with Blink Health’s founders to build out the executive bench. Executive hiring remains a puzzle she loves solving—learning not just the business, but the working styles, preferences, and dynamics of leaders who will closely collaborate. That work continues to be deeply motivating.
Second is the opportunity to help shape the company as it comes out of stealth. Blink Health is a Series B company, and Tricia joined while it was still operating quietly. As the company emerges publicly, she’s energized by building employer branding from the ground up, refining how roles are marketed, and introducing greater process and sophistication into talent operations.
One of her most impactful initiatives has been implementing an RPO to support high-volume hiring. Because hiring demand fluctuates, the RPO model allows Blink Health to scale recruiting capacity up or down without overhiring internally or falling behind when demand spikes. Alongside that, Tricia is introducing AI sourcing tools and exploring flexible, candidate-driven interview scheduling for volume roles—innovation that improves both speed and experience.
How Recruiting Is Changing
Tricia sees AI primarily as an efficiency multiplier—not a quality replacement.
Sourcing and candidate identification have become faster and more automated, allowing recruiters to identify relevant talent more quickly. However, she’s clear-eyed about AI’s current limitations. While it can accelerate workflows, it hasn’t yet replaced the recruiter’s role in assessing soft skills, judgment, or a candidate’s ability to be truly impactful.
Where AI has made a meaningful difference is in candidate experience—particularly in high-volume environments. Used thoughtfully, it enables faster communication and more timely responses, reducing candidate frustration and improving overall engagement.
She’s also seen AI become a valuable tool for internal communication. From ghostwriting executive emails to matching writing styles, AI has helped recruiters support leaders more efficiently without losing authenticity.
For Tricia, the human side of recruiting remains irreplaceable—but technology, when applied intentionally, can remove friction and elevate the work.
Tricia’s Advice for 2026
As talent leaders move further into 2026, Tricia’s advice centers on empowerment and vigilance.
In fast-growing organizations, teams are often overextended, and it’s easy for broken processes or poor candidate experiences to become normalized. Tricia encourages leaders to actively empower their teams to speak up—flagging what’s making their jobs easier, what’s making them harder, and where candidate experience is suffering.
Equally important is listening. Leaders can’t see everything, especially during periods of rapid change. Candidate expectations, workforce dynamics, and hiring realities are evolving quickly, and what worked six months ago may no longer be effective today.
By creating space for honest feedback and acting on it early, talent leaders can get ahead of problems instead of chasing them after the fact.
That thoughtful, intentional approach—combined with Tricia’s rare blend of legal training, executive search depth, and operational leadership—is what defines her impact and earns her a well-deserved place in the Talent 100.
