I've been building AI-powered recruiting tools since 2022 — before it became a talking point in the TA industry. The distinction I draw is important: I don't use AI as a shortcut. I use it to automate the parts of the job that don't require a human, so I can spend more time where it actually matters.
What does that mean in practice? It means hiring managers can draft JDs and generate Alignment Guides without me in the room. It means I have real-time visibility into every search without building manual tracking spreadsheets. It means candidates sit in offer conversations where I can visualize their total wealth creation scenario live, not two days later after someone ran numbers in a spreadsheet.
Executive recruiting is fundamentally a relationship business. The only thing that can close a VP Engineering candidate against a Google competing offer is a recruiter who has spent months building genuine trust, understands what the candidate actually cares about, and can construct a narrative about why this is the right moment to make the move.
AI can't do that. But AI can absolutely handle the process overhead that used to eat hours of my week — the first-draft JDs, the intake document population, the pipeline status rollups, the compensation scenario modeling. Every hour I recover from those tasks is an hour I can spend on the relationship work that actually drives 93% offer acceptance.
That's the principle I've applied since 2022: use AI to protect time for the work that requires a human.