Built by someone who has done this for 20 years.
SeekerPitch exists because the people who built it have spent decades placing, evaluating, and losing sleep over the same frontline leaders you're trying to hire.
Why I built this
I have spent 20 years placing retail, restaurant, and hospitality professionals — and 16 of those years building the Reisner Group into a firm operators trust with their most critical leadership roles. In that time, I have watched the same failure repeat itself thousands of times: a recruiter and a hiring manager who never quite aligned on what "great" actually looks like on the floor, a process that moved at the speed of the most distracted person in the chain, and a hire that looked right on paper but fell apart in week three.
The gap was never the résumé. It was the behavioral signal — and nobody had a scalable, consistent way to capture it before any human time was spent. I also watched something else happen over those two decades: the soft skills that separate an average manager from a great one became harder and harder to find. Not impossible — but rarer with every hiring cycle, and more invisible to every traditional screening method.
Sophia is the tool I wish I had for every search the Reisner Group ever ran. We are not technologists who stumbled into hiring. We are talent professionals who built the technology to solve a problem we lived — and we built it with an engineering team that takes the accuracy of behavioral measurement as seriously as we take the operators depending on it.
Great talent exists. The process is what buries it.
After 20 years and thousands of placements across retail, restaurant, and hospitality, these are the four truths no one in this industry wants to say out loud.
Recruiters and hiring managers speak different languages.
A recruiter gets briefed once — usually by someone who is already stretched thin — and then goes to market with an incomplete picture of what "great" actually looks like on that floor. The hiring manager knows exactly who they need. But by the time they are in the room, six wrong candidates have already been screened in. The disconnect is not a people problem. It is a structural one.
The entire process is held hostage by distracted people.
Hiring managers juggle open locations, P&L pressure, and a team that needs them present. Scheduling is an afterthought. Candidates wait two weeks for a first interview slot. Callbacks don't happen. Great applicants take other offers. The average time-to-fill for a frontline management role in these industries runs 35–45 days — not because the talent doesn't exist, but because the process was designed for a world where everyone was available and motivated. They aren't.
Soft skills are eroding — and nobody is measuring them.
Each generation entering the workforce has had less exposure to in-person accountability, high-pressure service environments, and the kind of direct interpersonal conflict that operations leadership demands every single day. The baseline is lower than it was ten years ago. The candidates who have these skills are increasingly rare — and they are invisible on a résumé. A keyword scan does not find them. A 20-minute casual interview does not reliably surface them.
AI is automating everything except the one thing that matters.
In an age where AI handles scheduling, inventory, forecasting, and reporting, the only thing it cannot replace is human leadership — the instinct to hold a team accountable at 9pm on a Friday, to de-escalate a guest complaint without losing the room, to coach a struggling associate instead of writing them up. These are soft skills. They are the last defensible competitive advantage in frontline operations. And they are exactly what Sophia is built to find.
What we did about it
Sophia eliminates every variable that depends on a distracted person showing up on time.
Day 1
Every candidate screened the moment they enter your ATS — no scheduling, no chasing
100%
Recruiter and hiring manager aligned through a shared Job DNA model calibrated before the first screen
Hours
From application to behavioral shortlist — not weeks waiting on a calendar to open up
Bridging operations and engineering
Advisory Board Member
UCF Integrated Business Program
University of Central Florida — bridging academic talent pipelines with real operations leadership demands.
Advisory Board Member
MSOE CS/CE Program
Milwaukee School of Engineering — connecting software and computer engineering students with the companies building the future.
Board Member
TAS — Texas Association of Staffing
Texas Association of Staffing — shaping workforce standards and staffing industry practices across the state of Texas.
These aren't honorary titles. They represent an active role in shaping how the next generation of business and engineering talent understands operations — and how AI tools should be evaluated in real-world hiring contexts.
Domain expertise meets engineering depth
Sophia is not a wrapper on a generic AI model. It is a purpose-built behavioral screening system, built by a team that specializes in exactly this problem.
AI Engineering
Purpose-built models for behavioral signal extraction and scoring — not repurposed general AI.
Data Science
Our data engineers build and calibrate the Job DNA models that power every Sophia interview.
Product & Engineering
A focused development team shipping the integrations, dashboards, and tooling that operators actually use.
Talent & Operations
20+ years of front-line placement expertise baked directly into how Sophia thinks about candidates.
Our AI and data engineers build and maintain the behavioral scoring models that power every Sophia interview — calibrated against real location performance data, versioned per role, and continuously refined as hiring decisions flow back through the system. This is not a product configured by a non-technical team. It is engineered for accuracy.
"Soft skills are the last thing AI can replicate — and the first thing a bad hire destroys. After 20 years, I can tell you: finding someone who can actually lead a floor is harder today than it has ever been. Sophia doesn't make that problem disappear. It makes sure you stop wasting time on the people who were never the answer."
Ryan Reisner · Founder, SeekerPitch
Built by
Two decades of executive search, now running on every applicant.
SeekerPitch was built inside The Reisner Group, a 20-year operations recruiting practice. Sophia carries that bar into every screen — so candidates get a better experience and your team gets search-firm quality at full-pipeline scale.
The Gold Standard of Recruiting
Sophia is built on 20 years of placing operations leaders at The Reisner Group — the same rubric that filled GM and multi-unit seats, now run on every applicant.
A candidate experience they remember
Every applicant gets a real conversation, instant responses, and zero ghosting — a screening experience candidates rate higher than a typical first-round phone screen.
Search-firm rigor, on every hire
Role-calibrated behavioral scoring and transcript-backed evidence — the depth of an executive search, applied to your whole pipeline instead of a curated few.
Ready to see what Sophia finds in your pipeline?
Book a 30-minute call. We will show you the behavioral signals your current screening process is missing.