Rachel Hopper Grassi
Studied at University of Houston-Downtown
Hiring Manager at TKO Group Holdings,
Successful clients at
Available tomorrow at 12:30 AM UTC
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About Rachel
I’ve spent more than 20 years inside hiring rooms, first as a recruiter and now as a career strategist and executive search leader. My career has taken me from Google and Meta to leading recruiting across UFC, WWE, PBR, and IMG. Along the way, I’ve interviewed more than 5,000 candidates, reviewed over 25,000 résumés and LinkedIn profiles, and helped hire more than 1,000 people. I’m also a professional poker player, which may sound completely unrelated until you realize that poker and hiring are both games of incomplete information. Employers study the evidence, look for patterns, and decide whether the story you’re telling matches the hand you’re representing. The best candidates don’t always get hired. The candidates who communicate their value most clearly often do. That’s why I created my approach, Play Your Career Hand™. I help professionals understand the hand they already have, identify what makes them different, and position their experience in a way that hiring teams can quickly understand. Whether you’re pursuing a leadership role, changing industries, returning to the workforce, or wondering why you keep getting overlooked, I’ll help you figure out what’s really happening and what to do next. My coaching is direct, practical, and grounded in how hiring decisions are actually made. I won’t give you generic advice, bury your personality under corporate jargon, or tell you everything looks great when it doesn’t. You’ll leave with honest feedback, a clearer story, and a strategy designed to help you become the candidate they actually choose.
Why do I coach?
I coach because I spent more than 20 years watching talented people get overlooked, often for reasons no one would explain to them. Inside recruiting, I knew why one résumé moved forward, why an interview answer created doubt, and why a qualified candidate lost to someone who communicated their value more clearly. Outside the hiring room, candidates usually received a generic rejection email and were left to guess. I wanted to give people the honest feedback and hiring intelligence companies rarely provide. Coaching matters to me because the right advice can change more than a résumé. It can help someone recognize the value of their experience, advocate for themselves, and make a career decision with confidence instead of fear. I can’t promise everyone the perfect hand, but I can make sure they know how to play the one they have.
Work Experience
Head of Recruiting
TKO Group Holdings,
April 2023 - July 2026
Hiring Manager
At TKO, I led hiring across UFC, WWE, PBR, and IMG. I partnered with executives and hiring managers to define what they actually needed, translate that into a clear search strategy, assess the market, and identify candidates who could succeed in both the role and the organization. I managed the process from intake through offer, including shaping job descriptions, sourcing, interviewing, calibrating candidates, advising on compensation, and helping leaders make confident hiring decisions. I also created and led TKO’s Summer Internship Program, building the program from the ground up and overseeing the recruiting, selection, onboarding, and intern experience. The goal wasn’t simply to bring in a class of interns for the summer. It was to give them meaningful exposure to the business while building a stronger early-career talent pipeline for the organization. A big part of my job was separating what hiring managers said they wanted from what they truly needed. Sometimes that meant challenging an unrealistic wish list, identifying the two or three factors that would actually predict success, or showing them why the “safe” candidate wasn’t necessarily the strongest hire.
Recruitment Manager
Meta
March 2019 - November 2022
Hiring Manager
At Meta, I led recruiting for the Global Operations organization, managing a recruiting team responsible for hiring across operations leadership, program management, business operations, workforce and vendor management, analytics, policy, integrity, risk, and customer support. These were the teams responsible for turning strategy into scalable operations across Meta’s global platforms. I also led recruiting for Meta’s Global Partnerships organization, hiring partnership leaders, strategic partner managers, and business development professionals who built and managed relationships across media, entertainment, sports, creators, technology, and other major partner ecosystems. The work ranged from finding senior leaders who could shape global partnership strategy to hiring the people responsible for growing and managing those relationships day to day.
Executive Search
WRANGLERS
March 2015 - Present
Interviewer
As Chief Unicorn Wrangler, I work on both sides of the hiring table. I help companies find and evaluate the people who are difficult to find, harder to assess, and too important to get wrong. That includes executive search, recruiting strategy, candidate assessment, market intelligence, and helping hiring leaders get clear on what they actually need before they start interviewing everyone with a LinkedIn profile. I also coach professionals who are qualified for great opportunities but aren’t always positioning themselves in a way that makes their value obvious. I help them understand how recruiters and hiring managers will read their experience, identify what differentiates them, and build a clear story across their resume, LinkedIn profile, outreach, interviews, and negotiation strategy. I call this helping candidates “play their career hand.” It isn’t about bluffing or pretending to have experience they don’t. It’s about understanding the cards they already hold, reading the table, and knowing which evidence to put forward so the right people can see why they’re the right hire. Great candidates are overlooked every day because they expect hiring teams to connect the dots for them. I teach them how to connect those dots themselves.
Corporate Recruiter/Trainer
Meta
January 2015 - March 2019
Interviewer
At Meta, I joined as a Senior Corporate Recruiter focused on Recruiting for Recruiting, or R4R, hiring the recruiters and recruiting professionals responsible for supporting Meta’s continued growth. I was quickly asked to expand beyond R4R and support several other critical functions, including Finance, Legal, and Operations. Each group required a different recruiting strategy, candidate profile, and understanding of the business. I learned the organizations quickly, partnered with leaders to clarify what they actually needed, and adapted my approach across highly specialized roles. That ability to move between functions ultimately led to me supporting and leading recruiting for Meta’s Global Operations organization.
Sr. Recruiter / Recruiter
September 2013 - January 2015
Interviewer
At Google, I was hired to support recruiting across the Marketing organization, partnering with hiring managers to find talent for a range of marketing roles. I also owned creative hiring for Google Brand Studio, recruiting the people responsible for bringing Google’s brand to life across campaigns, content, design, and creative experiences. That work required more than matching keywords on a resume. I had to understand how each candidate thought, the role they played in producing the work in their portfolio, and whether their creative approach could succeed inside a highly collaborative and complex organization. I partnered closely with hiring leaders to clarify what great looked like, evaluate both creative talent and business impact, and build teams that could protect one of the world’s most recognizable brands while continuing to evolve it.
Recruiting Lead
Pentair
June 2012 - September 2013
Education
University of Houston-Downtown
Associates Degree
4 Reviews
Overall Rating
5.0
Rachel has helped clients get into these companies: