The Woman Who Changed the Way We Hire
Walk into most job interviews and the ritual is familiar: a handshake, some small talk, a few questions about strengths and weaknesses, and then a hiring manager decides based on vibes. Colleen Gallagher built a career on proving this is expensive nonsense.
As CEO of Textio since January 2026, Gallagher runs one of HR tech's most intellectually serious companies - an AI platform that started by eliminating gender bias from job descriptions, then tackled performance reviews, and now, with its March 2026 Lavalier launch, is targeting the sacred cow of hiring: the unstructured interview. She did not arrive here by founding the company. She arrived by doing every hard finance and operations job it needed done, and then taking the wheel when it was her turn.
Before Textio there was Premise Data. Before that, BetterUp. Before that, ProQuest. Before any of it: PwC, then a decade at FTI Consulting, then an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. And before all of that - before the spreadsheets and the board decks and the go-to-market strategy - Colleen Gallagher served in the US Navy.
That military foundation is not just biographical color. It shows up in how she talks about leadership. "You manage things," she says. "You lead and care for people." The Navy makes you understand the difference at a cellular level.
"Most people get the job because they're likable, not because they can actually do it. Likability may matter but, when you've got hundreds of candidates clamoring for every role and you're trying to uncover top talent, hiring someone charming who can't deliver isn't just a miss - it's expensive."- Colleen Gallagher, CEO, Textio
What Textio Actually Does
Textio was founded in 2014 by Jensen Harris, a former Microsoft engineer and linguistics researcher who noticed something uncomfortable: the language companies use to describe jobs predicts who applies - and it's usually biased in ways the author never intended. The word "competitive" in a job posting attracts fewer women. "Collaborative" shifts the gender balance back. These patterns are invisible to human readers, but they're readable at scale.
Textio turned that insight into software. First, Textio Recruiting - a tool that rewrites job descriptions in real time to attract broader, more diverse candidate pools. Then Textio Feedback - a platform that surfaces bias in performance reviews before they go out. Companies including Bloomberg, Cisco, Johnson & Johnson, Samsung, and Spotify use Textio to manage how they communicate with their talent.
Then came Lavalier, launched in March 2026 under Gallagher's watch. The name is a nod to the lapel microphone - a subtle thing that captures everything in the room. Lavalier is an interview intelligence platform that helps recruiters, hiring managers, and leaders structure their interviews, track questions in real time, and surface evidence about candidates instead of impressions. Angela Martin of Bloomberg Beta described it simply: "I loved how it actively helped me track questions and suggest new ones while I was interviewing candidates."
Jensen Harris, Textio's founding CTO: "Lavalier is the most innovative and powerful software we've ever built at Textio."
Gallagher's framing of the problem is characteristically blunt: "Most teams are still evaluating candidates the same way they've always done it: inconsistent interviews, subjective opinions, and no real evidence. That gap is where you lose the people who would have actually transformed your team."
"Most teams are still evaluating candidates the same way they've always done it: inconsistent interviews, subjective opinions, and no real evidence. That gap is where you lose the people who would have actually transformed your team."- Colleen Gallagher, CEO, Textio
The Long Game From Navy to CEO
Gallagher's career is not the story of a founder who bet everything on a moonshot. It's the story of someone who built credibility by solving hard problems in unglamorous roles, at companies nobody thought to call cool - and who ended up at the intersection of AI, fairness, and the future of work anyway.
At FTI Consulting, where she spent nearly a decade, Gallagher worked in forensic finance - finding problems in the numbers, often in adversarial situations. That sharpens a particular kind of analytical discipline. At ProQuest, she moved into tech-adjacent finance. At BetterUp, she was part of the early team building a coaching platform before it became a household name. At Premise Data, she became CFO.
When she joined Textio as CFO in 2022, it was not a lateral move. It was a choice to put operational skills in service of a mission she believed in. By 2024, her remit had expanded to include the entire go-to-market function as COO. By January 2026, the board made her CEO.
Stacey Bishop, partner at Scale Ventures and Textio board member, put it this way: Gallagher brings "a deep history of building and operating companies" and "the operational rigor and passion for customers that will accelerate the business."
On AI, Bias, and the Uncomfortable Truth About Hiring
Gallagher is not a techno-utopian. She does not believe AI fixes everything automatically. What she believes is more specific and more interesting: AI, when built responsibly, can be structurally better at fairness than humans are, because humans carry bias they cannot see.
"AI has a huge role to play in doing better than people have done when it comes to bias," she has said. The key word is "doing." Not describing bias, not raising awareness about it - doing the work of removing it from language, from feedback, from interview questions, from the moment a job posting goes live to the moment an offer is extended.
This is Textio's actual product: not a dashboard of DEI metrics, but software that changes what managers write and say in real time. The feedback loop is immediate. The intervention happens before the damage does.
Gallagher has also been direct about the economic argument. Bias in hiring is not just unfair - it's expensive. When you select for likability over capability, you lose the person who would have been transformative and gain the person who interviewed well. For a company trying to hire in competitive markets, that is a compounding error. She frames it as a business problem because it is one.
The Gallagher Quotebook
"I used to think that team culture was an important thing. Now I think it's the only thing."
"You manage things; you lead and care for people."
"AI has a huge role to play in doing better than people have done when it comes to bias."
"Hiring someone charming who can't deliver isn't just a miss - it's expensive."
Recruiters on the Rise
As CEO, Gallagher hosts "Recruiters on the Rise," a podcast exploring the work, lessons, and stories of talent leaders across industries. The show captures candid conversations about how people find careers they love - and how the professionals who help them get there navigate their own.
The podcast launched alongside Lavalier, Textio's interview intelligence platform, and reflects Gallagher's belief that recruiting is a craft that deserves serious public conversation. It is sponsored by Lavalier and hosted on Ringmaster.
Listen: Recruiters on the Rise podcast - candid conversations with talent leaders about work, lessons learned, and helping people find careers they love.
The Details That Don't Fit Anywhere Else
- ⚓Before Excel models, there was the US Navy. Gallagher's military service predates every finance title on her resume, and she has spoken publicly about that transition at veterans' events in New York City.
- 🎓Her MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is one of the most rigorous finance programs in the world - the same school that trained multiple Nobel laureates in economics.
- 🎙️She launched a podcast. As CEO. Because running a 71-person HR AI company apparently leaves some scheduling room for hosted conversations about talent philosophy.
- 📍She is based in San Francisco while leading a Seattle-headquartered company - a reminder that the post-pandemic geography of tech leadership is still being negotiated.
- 🏆Textio has appeared on Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies, Fortune Impact 20, Forbes AI 50, and CNBC Disruptor 50 - four different lists measuring four different kinds of good.