People leadership / Advising / Search / Workforce
I work with founders and leaders when the company they are building has outgrown the way they hire, organize, or lead. I bring a recruiter's eye and an operator's perspective to the people decisions that shape whether the work gets done—as an internal People leader or an embedded advisor.
Ways to work together
I am open to the right Head or VP of People, Head of Talent, or high-context IC recruiter role with a company building something technically difficult, physically consequential, or genuinely new. I am at my best when the role operates across the business and close to the work, not simply inside a single function.
Practical counsel for leaders navigating scale, change, or a new chapter. This can include workforce planning, organization design, People strategy, hiring architecture, leadership transition, and fractional or interim People leadership.
High conviction search for leadership and hard to hire capability across engineering, manufacturing, product, data, research, and technical operations. The work starts with what the role must accomplish, not a recycled job description.
Hands on recruiting leadership when a company needs immediate capacity without building a full internal team. I can recruit, strengthen the process, train interviewers, and leave a better operating system behind.
Help seeing the workforce behind a growth plan, new facility, or production target. I connect demand to critical capability, regional labor supply, training partners, and the places where knowledge or capacity could constrain the build.
About Darla Horn
I have spent more than 20 years building teams, People functions, recruiting operations, and leadership groups from the ground up.
Most recently, as VP of People at JetZero, I worked inside the challenge of turning an ambitious aerospace vision into an operating company. I built the People function while the organization prepared to scale its workforce, production capability, and manufacturing footprint.
That work reminded me how much I love being inside the problem: working across the business, translating what the company is trying to build into the organization and human capability required to make it real.
Before aerospace, I supported startups, public companies, and mission driven organizations through growth and transition. I have completed more than 100 retained searches and worked as an embedded partner to more than 15 organizations.
Today, I advise companies facing those transitions, lead executive and technical searches, and continue my research into the workforce required for American reindustrialization. I am also open to joining the right organization as Head or VP of People, Head of Talent, or as a high-context IC recruiter—particularly one building something technically difficult, physically consequential, or genuinely new.
I am at my best when the answers do not already exist: a new company, a new production system, a new labor market, or a workforce requirement that cannot be solved by adding more requisitions.
Board and executive perspective
I bring experience working with boards and executive teams on leadership, succession, compensation, organizational risk, and the human capability required to deliver the company's strategy.
Selected work
Defining and finding the leaders a company needs for its next chapter.
Building teams across engineering, product, data, research, and technical operations.
Connecting ambitious build plans to the scarce capability required to deliver them.
Creating the systems, process, and judgment behind repeatable hiring and healthy scale.
Mapping demand, regional talent, training capacity, and the risks between them.
Helping leaders navigate growth, organizational change, and moments when the old model no longer fits.
Selected organizations I have supported
How I work
What must the company accomplish, and what is getting in the way?
What knowledge, judgment, and leadership does the work actually require?
Where does that capability live, and what will make the right people move?
Solve the immediate need while leaving the organization stronger.
When I am most useful
That may be an organization looking for a People executive to own the work from inside, a founding team making its first critical leadership hires, a company preparing to scale a technical organization, or a leader who needs an experienced partner through a period of change.
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