Amanda is CEO of CoderPad, the leading software platform for evaluating technical talent. She is a chief executive with extensive experience in product management and strategy, having helped to scale multiple technology startups to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.  At CoderPad, Amanda has grown the team from a handful of employees to nearly 100, driven four-fold revenue growth, and scaled customer count to over 4,000 in under three years.

Phil Yob joined Applied Systems as senior director of talent acquisition in January 2022.

Yob has spent all of his 17-year, post-graduate career in the talent acquisition space, spanning multiple verticals, including sales, marketing, ops, tech and healthcare. His most recent experiences are centered on the health and fintech spaces, specializing in global hiring initiatives and hiring solutions for vertical SaaS companies.

Yob has a BSBA management, HR, from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania and earned his MBA from the University of Illinois. 

I was born in Roseburg, Oregon, and enlisted in the United States Army two weeks before the events of September 11, 2001. I served 21 years in the US Army on Active Duty. During my first 13 years, I served as a Military Police Officer, My last 8 years I transitioned into U.S. Army Recruiting, where I achieved significant milestones. In 2016, I was recognized as the top recruiter in the United States across all five branches of the military, setting a record for the most enlistments in a single year by an individual recruiter with a total of 94 enlistments. Subsequently, I was hand selected as an instructor at the U.S. Army Recruiting College before advancing to serve as the Strategic Program Manager for Future Recruiting Initiatives during my final two years of service.

Following my military career, I did a brief stint on PayPal’s Global Talent Acquisition team, I then transitioned into the private sector as a Cleared Senior Technical Recruiting Manager. In this capacity, I managed recruitment for high-security roles within agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the FBI. A year ago, I assumed the role of Senior Technical Recruiter at O’Reilly Auto Parts, focusing on talent acquisition for a substantial IT department of approximately 1,200 personnel.

My direct and transparent communication style has been a key driver of my success in recruitment. In addition to my professional endeavors, I am an entrepreneur and manage my own business aside from my full-time job.

Julia Stone is a seasoned Technical Talent Leader and Strategic Talent Advisor with over 20 years of expertise in technical recruiting, retaining, and transforming teams across diverse industries. Throughout her career, Julia has achieved remarkable success in driving diverse hiring initiatives, enhancing employee satisfaction scores, implementing global automation, and leveraging talent data for strategic site selection advice.

With a strategic focus on talent movement, performance management, mentorship platforms, and neuroscience, Julia adeptly incorporates cognitive diversity into organizational design to build and enhance teams.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz at Work, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.