Amy Johnson - CEO/Principal

​I've spent more than 25 years in recruiting — building and leading recruiting and sourcing teams, and hiring at every level across a range of industries.

Early on, I worked as a trainer with AIRS, where I developed a lasting interest in sourcing passive talent: finding the people who aren't looking, and matching the right person to the right company. That's still how I think about hiring.

The corporate years

I spent a majority of my career in corporate recruiting before starting my own firm. That's where I learned how hiring actually works from the inside — how requisitions get written, how applications get screened, who's in the room at a debrief, and why good candidates get passed over for reasons they'll never be told.

It's also where I built internship and rotational programs for Accounting and Finance talent for a global manufacturer from the ground up. That work is the reason The Hiring Blueprint exists. I've sat on the employer side of early-career hiring, and I know how little of it students can see.

AMJ Talent Solutions

In 2011 I founded AMJ Talent Solutions, a women-owned recruiting firm. I work primarily with manufacturing clients, recruiting across operations, sales, engineering, supply chain, human resources, and accounting and finance — with particular depth in finance and accounting talent at every level, from entry-level analysts through senior leadership.

The right person isn't always the one applying. Finding them means knowing a business well enough to recognize its fit when I see it.

The Hiring Blueprint™

A few years ago this got personal.

I have a child in college. I've watched friends' kids graduate and struggle — capable, hard-working students who simply had no plan, and nobody to tell them how any of it worked. They were doing everything they'd been told to do, and it wasn't working, and none of them could see why.

I could see why. I'd been the person on the other side of it.

So I wrote it down. The Hiring Blueprint™ is an early-career program that shows students what actually happens to an application after they hit submit — when it gets read, what a recruiter looks at first, what quietly disqualifies them before a person ever opens the file — and what to do about each of those things.

I'm not a career coach. My angle is the employer's side of hiring, because that's the side I've always been on.

Two sides of the same desk

These aren't separate businesses. Companies hire me because I understand what makes someone succeed in a role. Students and families work with me for the same reason, from the other direction.