Adam Meekhof

One Phone Call, Twenty Years

Meekhof is refreshingly unsentimental about how he found the profession. "It's a tale as old as time," he jokes. "I woke up when I was five and wanted to recruit the rest of my life." The truth is simpler and better. Out of college he was selling door to door, and it did not take him long to understand that this particular kind of selling was not going to be his life's work. A former colleague who had left the company had stayed a close friend, and she happened to be a recruiter.

So he called her. "I don't know what you do, but I need a job. Is that something you know about?" Her firm liked competitive, sports-minded people. She thought he could get an interview. He did, and he got the job, launching his career at the staffing agency Aerotek, part of the Allegis Group, in its Atlanta office. That friend, he notes, is family to him today.

What followed was twenty years of deliberate range. He started as a recruiter, moved into sales, discovered sales was not his calling either, and worked his way back to the craft that suited him. Corporate recruiting followed, then a six-year run as a consultant advising companies on recruiting, then the move into leadership at Marksman Security. Along the way he built a rare industry breadth: technical hardware and software, embedded engineering, healthcare, fintech and manufacturing, each with its own talent market and its own definition of a hard-to-fill role.

The Three Who Shaped Him

Ask Meekhof about the people who made him, and the list arrives quickly. The first is Ayman Hamid, the Director of Business Operations for Aerotek's Atlanta office and his early boss. "He saw potential in me and held me accountable," Meekhof says. What Hamid gave him went beyond recruiting technique. He taught him how to operate inside a business at all, how to carry himself as a professional. Two decades on, Meekhof still calls him one of the most influential people he has ever worked for.

The second is Joanna Bernstein, now Joanna Luth, his former VP of HR at the software company Aptean. She gave him the confidence to build his career around the thing he actually believed in, which was people. "See the person across from you at all times," is how he distills what she drilled into him, along with the recognition that a single conversation, handled well, can change the trajectory of someone's life.

The third is Trent Cotton, and Meekhof has never worked with him. They met at industry events and became friends. Cotton taught him to believe in what he stands for and to be confident enough in it to let it guide both his career and his conduct in the business. "That guy is on the cutting edge of everything," Meekhof says. "It blows me away how good he is at it."

The Case for a More Human Function

Meekhof's read on the past year is that the shift has been substantial and uneven, varying industry by industry. The dividing line he sees is not between companies with AI and companies without it, but between practitioners who treat the technology as a tool and those who do not. The ones who have embraced it, he argues, have bought themselves back the parts of the job that machines cannot do.

"AI is taking a lot of our tasks that are inundating our days," he says, whether that is automating a step in the hiring life cycle or simply gathering the numbers and telling you what the report says. What that buys back is presence: better conversations with hiring managers, with current employees, with candidates. In his framing, the technology is not a threat to the human element of recruiting. It is what finally makes room for it.

Slow Down and See the Person

His advice for talent leaders heading into 2026 runs deliberately against the tempo of the moment. Because the tech is changing so fast, he says, leaders have to slow down: slow down enough to assess where a tool genuinely belongs in their recruiting life cycle, and slow down enough to actually see their own teams.

He believes the period from 2019 to now will go down as one of the most studied stretches in modern history, and that the residue of it is uncertainty. Recruiters are watching new tools launch weekly while hearing, from people who often do not understand what the tools were built for, that those tools will replace them. "Even if they are doing good work, in the back of their mind, how long is it going to last before tech replaces me?" That anxiety is a leadership problem, and Meekhof's answer is the lesson Joanna Luth gave him, applied inward: see the person across from you.

His second piece of advice is structural. As technology absorbs more of the task-driven work, the profession has to claim a larger seat at the business. Talent acquisition is not order-taking, he argues. It is internal consulting: solving business problems through people, in every department the function touches. And the responsibility does not stop with leaders. "We can't be the only ones that have the voice and the consulting ability and the ability to influence," he says. "Our whole teams have to." Teaching recruiters how to consult, not just how to fill requisitions, is in his view the central leadership task of the next few years.

The People He Points To

For someone with twenty years and a department of his own, Meekhof spends a striking amount of his time talking about other people's strengths. He praises Benjamin Mena, who runs his own business and built a podcast into a full community with a large following: "He's able to build a community like I have never seen." He points to Kevin Hunter at Stanford Healthcare, a leader he worked alongside during his consulting years, singling out the way Hunter cares for his team and absorbs more and more responsibility while handling it with grace. He names Michael Goldberg among the people he considers genuinely exceptional. And he returns, again, to Trent Cotton, one of the most influential people he has been around and, by his own admission, someone he has to work to keep up with.

It is a consistent theme in a career built on a single idea: the person across from you is the point. Meekhof learned it from a friend who answered the phone when he needed a job, and he has spent twenty years passing it on.