A career recruiter who built hiring teams at big tech, now a critical care nurse.

David started in recruiting in 2003, as an in-house recruiter at Sierra Health Services (now part of UnitedHealthcare) and then Oriental Trading Company. In 2007 he founded Ricke Executive Search, then built UX Recruiters, a design talent agency that was later acquired, and consulted through Ricke and Associates. As an agency owner he worked with companies including Google, Apple and Netflix.

From 2014 to 2025 he led talent teams at Atlassian, Amazon Web Services, Facebook and Amazon. At Amazon he was most recently Chief of Staff for Talent Acquisition, running recruiting operations, sourcing and market intelligence for a business that hired thousands of people a year. Across those companies he served as a Bar Raiser, the interviewer trusted to hold the hiring bar, and he trained other Bar Raisers at Amazon, Facebook and AWS.

He has conducted more than 10,000 interviews from every side of the table: as an in-house recruiter, an agency recruiter, a recruiting leader and a Bar Raiser. His approach is simple: use data to make the hiring decision sharper, and treat every candidate with the compassion you'd want for yourself.

In 2025 he became a critical care Registered Nurse. Today he works in a cardio-thoracic ICU and in the emergency department of a Kansas critical access hospital, so he knows the units his clients are hiring for.

SNF Recruiter brings those two backgrounds together: structured hiring tools for skilled nursing leadership hires, and on-site help when a facility wants a hand running the search.