Introducing our Newest Advisor: Andrea Henderson, Partner at DHR Global
We are excited to welcome Andrea Henderson as our newest Advisor.
Andrea is a Partner at DHR Global, working across the Life Sciences, Healthcare, Diversity, and Board & CEO practice groups out of the New York office. She has spent more than twenty-five years helping organizations match talent, and held roles previously at Genentech, Pfizer, Novartis, Trinity Health, and SUNY Downstate before she moved into search.
Her work goes well beyond the search itself. She is certified in private company board governance and sits on the Audit Committee of the Private Directors Association, she mentors founders through the Miller Center accelerator at Santa Clara University, and she invests both as an angel and as an LP in a female-focused venture fund.
Why we asked her
Andrea sits on the client side of the business every day. The searches run through her team while she is steering the relationship and making sure what reaches the client is appropriate. She is also in the rooms where the rest of the industry compares notes. Between panels, podcasts, and the search groups she is a part of, she hears what is actually working and which approaches firms have already tried and quietly set aside.
Most of all, Andrea has been making the case for a while that AI keeps getting pointed at the wrong part of work, reducing a whole profession to its admin work and missing the judgment work underneath it. Her view is that the recruiter should keep the judgment and the decisions, and technology should handle everything else. That is the point we have also been making since the day we started Nummo, and hearing the same conviction was a large part of why we wanted her to join our board.
Why she said yes
When we walked Andrea through what we were building, what stood out to her was the range of our product's capabilities. Most tools in this industry are built for one level of a firm, either the partner running the relationship or the associate doing the coordination. Andrea was impressed that the same system was useful to people at every level involved in recruiting, and she told us plainly that range is hard to build and rarely done well.
She also sees Nummo as a way to fix what she considers one of the biggest complaints in search, which is that people spend too much of their time on the process and not enough of it on the people.
“Most tools I see are built for one level of a firm, which is usually why they get abandoned. What convinced me about Nummo is that the same system is useful to all levels; a partner running a client relationship and to an associate two months in. In an ideal world, my time goes to the conversations with clients and candidates, not to the administrative work that surrounds them. Technology should be carrying the process, not the judgment.”
What's next?
Andrea sits in conversations many startups do not have access to. She is with board members and executive leaders as they work out what their organizations actually need, and she is with other search leaders as they figure out how to run their firms in a market that is changing underneath them.
She will push on the roadmap, tell us what she is hearing, including the parts that do not flatter us, and open doors where she thinks the fit is right. We are lucky to have her, and we are glad to have her on the team.