Meet Claire🌐

Claire did not set out to work at Terac. She joined as a contributor and quickly noticed that the hardest part of running a verified-expert network was not the technology; it was the sourcing. The audiences researchers actually needed were the kind of people no recruiter could find through a LinkedIn search.

So she started referring people she knew personally: friends, friends of friends, niche operators inside industries she had spent years adjacent to. Quietly, methodically. A few of those referrals turned into the kind of long-running contributors every panel wants.

“I started by referring people I trusted into the panel, friends, friends of friends, the niche operators no recruiter could find,” Claire says. The pattern repeated: every time the panel needed a hard-to-source slice (a particular type of clinician, a sector specialist, an operator from a specific region), the best path was a warm intro from someone already in the network.

After a few months of doing that, Terac called and offered her a full-time role running Talent Ops. The pitch was simple: do what you have been doing, but for the whole network.

Today Claire leads the team responsible for the supply side of the platform. That means building the systems that let referrals scale: how people get invited, how their credentials get verified, how studies get matched to the experts most likely to do them well.

She still spends a meaningful chunk of her time on the same activity that got her hired: making warm intros. The difference now is that the whole team is structured around that motion.

“The community grew the company, and the company grew me right back,” Claire says. Over 240 hires have been sourced through the referral system she helped formalize, and a good portion of Terac's most active experts joined through a personal vouch.

Her advice for anyone thinking about referring someone they know: do it carefully. A network is only as good as the trust running through it.