For professionals and leadership audiences
Play Your Career Hand™
How to recognize your leverage, read what the market is signaling, communicate your value, and make better career decisions without pretending certainty exists.
Hiring intelligence that holds a room
The hiring process has plenty of talking points. Rachel brings the part people actually want to talk about.
Rachel Hopper Grassi is a 20-year recruiting leader, career strategist, founder, and professional poker player who shows audiences how to read hiring signals, communicate their value, and make smarter moves when the stakes are high and the information is incomplete.
Invite Rachel to speak
Speaking experience includes
MizzouUniversity of Missouri
UNLVUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas
Full SailFull Sail University
TeamWork OnlineSports & entertainment careers
Insights to ActionKaty McFee · returning October 2026
Recruiter candor. Poker-player reads.
Not another presentation built from advice everyone has already heard.
Rachel has spent more than two decades inside hiring, including Google and Meta. Most recently, she led recruiting at TKO with direct responsibility for UFC, WWE, and PBR, while leading the company-wide early-career strategy and developing and running TKO’s internship program. She has interviewed thousands of candidates, reviewed tens of thousands of résumés and LinkedIn profiles, and watched strong people lose opportunities because the value was there but the signal was not.
Her sessions give audiences the recruiter-level context they rarely receive during a traditional job search, delivered with candor, humor, and the occasional poker analogy that makes an uncomfortable hiring truth considerably easier to remember.
Signature conversations
Choose the conversation your audience needs.
For hiring teams, candidates, and future-of-work audiences
Avoid the Hiring Bluff™
What candidates and companies are told about hiring versus what actually happens behind the scenes, and how both sides can make better decisions.
For conferences, panels, and executive communities
The AI Hiring Arms Race
What happens when employers use AI to evaluate candidates while candidates use AI to impress employers, and neither side knows whether it is seeing the real person.
For universities and early-career audiences
Hiring Is Like Dating
How to get companies swiping right by making résumés, LinkedIn profiles, outreach, and interviews feel specific, credible, and unmistakably human.
For current college students seeking internships
Turn “I Don’t Have Experience Yet” Into Evidence
How students can translate coursework, campus involvement, part-time jobs, projects, and early experience into a credible story that earns internship interviews.
For students and professionals pursuing sports careers
Break Into & Move Up in Sports & Entertainment
How to move beyond fandom, show evidence of fit, build relevant relationships, and position yourself for one of the most competitive career markets.
Previously delivered
Built for different rooms, levels, and moments.
- Play Your Career Hand: How to Break Into & Move Up in Sports & EntertainmentTeamWork Online
- The Unicorn Wrangler Perspective: What Recruiters & Hiring Committees Really Look ForInsights to Action · invited back for October 2026
- Hiring Is Like Dating: How to Get Those Companies Swiping RightEarly-career and university audiences
- Fireside chats, webinars, panels, and guest lecturesIncluding the University of Missouri (Mizzou), UNLV, and Full Sail University
Every session can be adapted to the audience, career stage, industry, and format. The point is not to squeeze every room into the same 47-slide deck and hope nobody notices.
Guest lecture spotlight
Hiring Is Like Dating: How to Get Those Companies Swiping Right
A career-readiness session designed to make the hiring process understandable, memorable, and much less painfully corporate for college students and early-career professionals.
Invite Rachel
Tell me about the room.
Share the audience, format, timing, and what you want people to leave understanding. This is an inquiry, not an instant booking. Rachel will review the details and follow up directly.
Prefer email? hello@uwrecruiting.com