Kristina McDougall is usually the one asking what you do, but if you ask her, she’ll land on the simplest true answer: “I lead a recruiting company.” As Founder and Managing Partner of Artemis Canada, she works with growing tech companies to hire hard-to-find people. She’s comfortable calling it what it is: “headhunting.” It’s not HR or staffing, “it’s actually closer to sales.” The work is about finding people, sharing the story of a company, and helping them see why it might be the right place to build the next chapter of their career.
Now that Artemis has scaled to a team of eight Executive Recruitment Consultants across Canada, Kristina spends far less time recruiting herself. Her role lives in relationships, staying close to founders, funders, and the broader tech ecosystem, understanding where Artemis fits, and making sure it’s the firm people think of “when the stakes are high and the hire really matters.”
Her path into tech wasn’t a grand plan so much as paying attention to momentum. Coming out of her MBA in 1998, between Y2K and the dot-com boom, nearly every “real job” being advertised was in technology. That’s where the opportunity and learning curve were, and where she wanted to be. New to Toronto from Sudbury, Kristina was eager to learn and be part of something interesting. Early on, she landed on a small team recruiting for software companies, including Waterloo-based Descartes, where the work felt “less transactional and more relationship-driven,” even at scale. Those early relationships compounded over time, with one of her first clients reappearing again and again across her career, including when she founded Artemis.
Looking back, she’d tell her younger self to be more confident and lean into curiosity: “When you don’t know something, being curious is the cure.” Recruiting, she learned, isn’t about having all the answers. "Trust is built by asking good questions, shutting up, and just listening".
One of the most formative challenges for Kristina, like many early stage founders, was learning to let go. Building a business as a single mom taught Kristina that real leadership doesn’t mean doing it all alone. “I never thought I was the smartest one in the room, or the most organized,” she says. The only scalable path was trust: “hire good people, put the right guardrails in place, and get out of the way.” The risk, she learned, is far smaller than the upside. That belief now shows up in how she advises founders, too. Thinking you have to be the smartest person in the room is a constraint, not a strength.
The leaders she admires most say the same thing: their real job is identifying who can do the work and giving them what they need to run. Just as important was an early decision to stay people-first. “If you focus on the transaction, it doesn’t serve the business very well,” she says. Recruiting shouldn’t be a volume game, it’s a human one, and doing good work for good people turned out to be a far more durable growth strategy than pitch decks and sales scripts.
Some of the best outcomes in Kristina’s career came from moments that didn’t go as planned, including the realization that she couldn’t build the thing she wanted inside someone else’s organization. Starting Artemis followed quickly after that clarity. “My first thought was, can I have this and stay where I am? And the answer was no.” She was able to ease into building the firm with a strong network, few restrictions, and a deep belief that this was always the long-term plan. Recruiting also offered something rare at a pivotal moment in her life: the ability to stay professionally ambitious while being present as a single mom. It was demanding work, but flexible in the ways that mattered, with uncapped upside and no artificial limits tied to title or tenure.
When she built Artemis, she built the firm she wanted to work in: real earning potential, flexibility to dial work up or down, strong infrastructure, and a true sense of belonging. Not a group of lone operators, but a team. The competition wasn’t internal, it was every other company trying to hire the same great people. “We all want us all to win,” she says. And if the role sometimes feels closer to talent agent than recruiter, that’s by design.
For Kristina, the leadership mindset that’s mattered most is knowing when to lead from the front and when to lead from the back. She’s active in making sure Artemis is known and trusted in the market, but she has no need to be the face of the company. She holds people and relationships as sacred, especially in an industry where it’s easy to chase short-term wins by cutting corners. “That’s never worth it,” she says. Instead, she operates with a set of clear values - do the right thing, and add real value, and decisions get simpler. You don’t have to overanalyze every move when your principles are doing the work.
That same lens shows up when she’s hiring for the Artemis team. Technical skill matters, but it’s never enough on its own. “If you don’t like the person, if they’re not kind, nice, or trustworthy, you don’t want to put them in your clients’ organizations either.” She looks for people who are smart, ambitious, and genuinely curious, with enough fire to be excited by the work. For Kristina, the combination of competence, character, and curiosity is non-negotiable, and it’s what sustains trust on both sides of the table.
If you asked Kristina to sum up her leadership style in three words, they’d be trust, transparency, and generosity, and I will confirm they’re words her team would use too. Trust shows up in a strong “let them” approach: hire great people, set the guardrails, and don’t over-direct. Transparency means being clear and direct, especially when it matters most. And generosity is in how she shows up, generous with her time, her attention, and her willingness to listen.
If Kristina could wish one piece of technology into existence, it would be a teleporter. Not for novelty, but for presence, removing the friction of time and distance so people could spend more moments with family, see more of the world, and simply be together. Even at work, she sees the same truth: being in person isn’t the issue, getting there is.
When it comes to what’s most exciting in tech, she’ll admit it’s AI, less for the automation and more for what it may reveal. As more becomes synthetic, the human things start to matter more: real art, real music, real connection. And when she thinks about legacy, Kristina keeps it simple. She doesn’t care about recognition or awards. What matters is having played a small, yet very big part as the connector. A mix of introductions and long-built relationships that bring the right people together at the right moment, build companies that succeed because of who’s in the room, and setting careers in motion through a career defined by making well-timed, game-changing connections.
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Founded by Kristina McDougall in 2013, Artemis has grown to become Canada’s most trusted boutique executive search firm for startups.
We recognize that our work takes place on the traditional lands of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas of the Credit. We honour Indigenous stewardship and commit to embedding reconciliation into our work, holding ourselves and our clients accountable.
