Building a hiring function that actually grows with your business takes more than posting job descriptions and hoping for the best. Companies often find themselves drowning in resumes while struggling to fill critical roles, especially during periods of rapid expansion. Rachel Blanton, founder of Ignite Talent Company and fractional VP of talent acquisition, has spent over 15 years solving this exact problem for fast-paced early stage companies and multi-billion dollar global brands.

When Rachel Hilary Blanton stepped into a high-growth SaaS company undergoing rapid scale, she encountered a familiar challenge: skyrocketing headcount without the infrastructure to support it. Hiring pipelines were fragmented, job architecture inconsistent, and onboarding lacked cohesion. “People are your business, they are the engine,” Blanton says. “If your talent function is misaligned, the business itself stalls.” Today, as founder of Ignite Talent Co., she parachutes into early stage companies and mature enterprises alike, bringing C-suite fluency and hands-on recruiting precision to help leaders turn disjointed hiring into a lever for growth. The consultancy builds systems, introduces AI-enabled workflows, and balances global hiring agility with a human touch, a model that has attracted clients across tech, consumer, and professional-services sectors.

From paper files to AI-powered platforms, Rachel Hilary Blanton has seen recruiting evolve firsthand, and she believes today’s tech can dramatically speed up hiring while bringing back the human touch. With over 20 years of experience in corporate recruiting, Rachel Hilary Blanton has lived through every era of hiring, from manual systems to digital databases, and now, intelligent automation. “When I very first started, there wasn’t AI, there weren’t applicant tracking systems. Everything was done manually,” she says. That journey gives her a unique perspective on what’s possible today.

This time last year, I found myself laid-off, on a pre-paid family cruise, thanking the skies for the all-inclusive buffet. Clocking the endless ice-creams my kids were devouring was one worry I could take off my list.

This picture may look posed and "insta-grammy" but it was not. My Husband (who's deathly allergic to social media) caught me staring out at the ocean and snapped the shot. If it was a mind-reading camera it would tell the world that I was thinking "well cr*p, what do I do now?" Being in the recruitment industry, I knew all too well the challenging job market I was facing.

I got home and did what I had to do. Updated my resume, applied for jobs, tapped into my amazing network of fabulous contacts, put the green banner up then down and up again (don't get me started on that debate)......but alas, still no job. So, after taking a break over the Holidays to gain clarity, I told myself that if the next round of interviews led nowhere, I was drawing a line in the sand and starting my own thing.

After another 3 month long interview process, I received the “I'm sorry, but budgets are cut and we're not hiring for this role anymore" message. And so that line was drawn.

"Buckle up hubby we're boot strappin my business!"