Ray Blakeney
This story is part of a series on the 2024 inductees into the Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame.
Ray Blakeney works for Microsoft, one of the key companies that has driven the technology boom of the past 30 years. But, when Blakeney was hired in the late ’90s, the 1989 Brookfield High grad, “didn’t actually know anything about technology.”
He was hired as a recruiter, which was similar to the previous jobs he had held in the admissions departments with the University of Dayton and the College of the Holy Cross in Worchester, Mass.
“Admissions is kind of recruiting,” Blakeney said. “You evaluate people.”
He started recruiting people to work on Microsoft’s Windows and Office products. A few years later, he was invited to take a meeting on a “passion project” that a bunch of Microsoft employees were working on the side, something that became the Xbox gaming system. He was managing Microsoft’s relationships with students at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time and was asked to try to get students interested in Xbox.
In 2007, Blakeney left Microsoft for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he led global development recruiting. He spent 10 years there, traveling around the world and “working on the world’s most basic problems – hunger, health, poverty.” In 2015, the foundation brought governments and private companies, particularly pharmaceutical companies, together to try to lessen the impact of an ebola outbreak in West Africa. The Gates Foundation offered to buy large quantities of vaccines, giving drug companies incentives to develop them, and governments had the infrastructure to get the vaccines to the people who needed them. While thousands died from the disease, the death toll was far less than the millions that had been predicted would die when the outbreak first occurred, Blakeney said.
“The system worked,” he said.
Blakeney left the foundation in 2017 and returned to Microsoft, and advises others working for foundations and government not to stay too long.
“It’s really easy when you work at the world’s largest philanthropy to sometimes get confused whether you are important or the foundation is important,” he said.
When he called someone in government or at large corporations, they tended to call him back quickly. “They’re not calling me back. They think Bill and Melinda Gates are calling and they’re calling them back.”
Blakeney is now global talent acquisition leader for Microsoft’s cloud and artificial intelligence efforts. As a manager, he tells his team members that failure is not possible.
“Everything that you do will be a learning opportunity,” he said he tells his team. “Things might go horribly wrong. You might learn, ‘We should probably never do this thing again,’ but that’s learning.”
Removing the fear of failure, “opens up a ton of possibility for you,” Blakeney said. “I will take as many of those risks, as many of those giant steps.”
Blakeney said he is cognizant that recruiting can do more than change the life of the person hired for the better, but also the lives of the people who will be impacted by the work that person does.
“The individuals we hire today will solve problems we do not yet know we have. What will become of technology in the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years you all will form,” he told a Brookfield High School math class. “In terms of how (people) use the technology and access the technology, I think we’re still early days on what tech will become.”
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The Brookfield Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame Committee has announced its next class of inductees: Morgan Bonekovic, Brookfield High School Class of 2008; Taylor Brooks, Class of 2009; David English, Class of 1982; Wardell Jefferson, Class of 1988; and Gary Lees, Class of 1967. A posthumous inductee will be Lucille Flemon Downs, Class of 1933.
The hall of fame honors Brookfield High School graduates who have reached a pinnacle of success in their chosen professions and have used that success to help others.
Inductees will be honored Sept. 19 and 20 with activities in the school and community. The formal induction ceremony will be held at 10 a.m. Sept. 20 at Avalon Squaw Creek, Vienna. Tickets for the induction ceremony, which is open to the public, will go on sale Aug. 1.
