Talent Recruitment
All Eyes Are on This
How do you find the perfect Head of Accreditation or Director of Protocol? It’s two years away, but the enormous effort to staff up LA28 has begun.
March 02, 2026
A leader whose teams shepherd hundreds of thousands of people through accreditation. A manager charged with hiring legions of specialists to ensure that Wi-Fi networks and cameras operate seamlessly at venues. And a director responsible for shaping how fans see the Opening and Closing Ceremony.
Sports enthusiasts across the globe may be riveted by what unfolds on the world stage, but what they don’t see are all the professionals who make these moments possible—by executing them flawlessly. The process of building such a team can be daunting, and efforts are already underway for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games. In all, LA28 will have a workforce of nearly 5,000 people and as you scroll down the listings for these jobs, you can see the extent of the effort and the scope of the roles. “It has to be right,” says Rose Roseta, a recruiter at Korn Ferry working with LA28. “All eyes are on this.”
Right off, recruiters must face some key questions: How do you find, upskill, and manage thousands of people who may never have worked at LA28 Games? And how do you do it all in less than a couple years or so—a timeline that’s even shorter than it may seem? “It’s very different from corporate goals that may get pushed back to a different date, because this can’t be,” says Juliana Barela, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Korn Ferry RPO North America, and a veteran in the field of hiring top performers at scale.
Few fans, of course, will ever see or realize what it takes to run the LA28 Games. Who manages athlete logistics across Southern California venues that are miles and hours apart? How do you upskill and lead people who will need to work under the unique pressure of, say, securing and managing access for every athlete, official, volunteer, and credential-holder across one of the largest global events in the world?
For her part, Roseta says she has already been awed by the process of helping to fill roles. For instance, a former White House protocol expert was hired to be head of protocol. “I mean, what’s bigger than working for the White House—other than the LA28 Games?” she asks. She also says a deep pool of candidates who worked at prior Olympic Games are now returning again, including a married couple who met at the Rio 2016. Those people are surely familiar with the pressure they’ll be facing, but Roseta still pauses when she considers other roles she’s helped fill, like head of results technology. “I mean, you can’t get any of that wrong, can you?” she says.
All of which changes anyone’s perspective as a fan. “Previously, when I watched the Olympic Games I thought, ‘Oh, I’m just watching the Games.’ Now, if I’m gonna watch flag football, I’ll know exactly who put that together from the ground up, and just how every job is important,” she says.
For LA28, the workforce will coordinate logistics and ensure the perfect execution of the innumerable details of 51 Olympic and 23 Paralympic sports, 800+ competition events, and more than 3,000 hours of live action across 50+ venues. A particularly intriguing challenge—both for Barela and dozens of her fellow Korn Ferry recruiters—is to find the right people for specialized roles that have an end date. In today’s job market, workers are looking for security, and they’re jumping less from role to role (hence the emergence of the term “job hugger” last year).
While hundreds of newbies to the sporting world may raise their hand, recruiters say, the early critical jobs will likely be filled by people with experience in global athletic events—from world championships for gymnastics or track and field to the uppermost echelons of boxing and tennis. Those who have worked in sports at a high level, at past Games or elsewhere, often seek to move into fields like agency representation and sports management. “Show up on the world stage in a high-pressure environment,” she says, “and the door’s wide open afterward.”
In more specialized sports, she adds, many workers hope to use their LA28 experience to promote more participation in those sports. "Part of what we’re trying to do is ensure we’re upskilling a group of people who can take those skills and further impact their community,” Barela explains.
To be sure, recruiters also expect to rely on lessons learned while hiring peak performers at scale for short-term corporate events and conferences. Renee Whelan, North America market leader for Professional Search at Korn Ferry, says she once helped scale a workforce from 100 people to more than 1,000 in four locations in 13 weeks. “You’re putting together a mass of people from different backgrounds in a very short period of time,” she says. “There are a lot of bumps, and you can’t get upset over small issues.”
Find out more about Korn Ferry's role in powering the people who power the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
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