Akbar Karenga

Full Circle, Thirteen Years Later

He started agency side, which meant the job was really two jobs stitched together: winning the business first, then delivering the recruitment service afterward. That commercial grounding never left him, and it explains a title that blends talent with revenue rather than treating them as separate disciplines. Selling and hiring, in his experience, are the same muscle applied to different problems.

The neatest detail in his career arc is a person, not a promotion. The first boss he ever had is now one of the investors in the company where he works. Careers in this industry rarely run in straight lines, and his has closed a loop instead.

The Managers Who Accelerated Him

Two managers, Ian and Ashton, come up when he talks about the people who shaped him, and the setting was a long way from where he started. He had moved to China and ended up staying three and a half years, running a recruitment process to land international people. What stayed with him was not technical coaching. It was the speed of their belief in him.

When a conference in Bali needed running, several thousand people in attendance, the offer came to him even though he had never done anything like it. The answer from his managers was, in effect, absolutely fine. One of them made a habit of asking every single quarter what he wanted to do next. Karenga is precise about why that mattered: they were not obstacles to be worked around, they were an accelerant. It is a standard he now carries into how he thinks about developing other people, and a reminder that the fastest way to grow someone is to hand them something slightly too big and then get out of the way.

Why AI Should Dehumanize the Right Things

"AI has the power to make you average instantly," he says, and he means it as a genuine observation rather than an insult. The floor on most everyday competencies has risen. You no longer need years of practice to become a passable marketer; you need about an hour. That resets what skilled work actually is.

His real interest is assessment, where he argues human judgment has always been the weakest link. He points to the analysis of judges whose sentencing decisions shift measurably depending on how close they are to lunch. That, he notes drily, is the human assessment experience. Against it he sets the Schmidt and Hunter research on selection methods, evidence that has existed for decades and that hiring processes largely ignore. Used properly, AI can de-bias for risk, hold processes to fact-based decision making, and it never gets tired. He calls that an opportunity to dehumanize cognitive bias in a positive way.

He is not naive about the guardrails. He tracks the class action litigation involving Workday and Eightfold in the United States, and finds it encouraging that the checks and balances are arriving through two pieces of legislation from the 1970s, forcing the industry to ask whether it is leveraging these tools correctly or simply accelerating what it was already bad at. He watches the EU AI Act for the same reason. On the technology itself he is both an early adopter and a skeptic of monoculture: he remembers when AI was uncool, rates robust natural language processing in note-takers and scheduling as genuine low-hanging fruit, and suspects large language models represent only one possible route toward general intelligence rather than the only one.

Top of funnel is where his enthusiasm stops. With candidate pipelines already climbing up and to the right, he questions the logic of tooling that adds still more volume to a system straining under what it already has.

Community and the Black Recruiters Network

Alongside the day job, Karenga is a co-founder of the Black Recruiters Network, which he describes as one of the largest HR and recruitment communities of people of color globally. He built it with two co-founders, Ibrahim and Asima, and when the subject of who else in the industry deserves recognition comes up, he names them before he names the organization.

The Everyday Hygiene Problem

His guidance for talent leaders arrives blunt, and his own sanitized version of it amounts to this: be less bad. Candidate sentiment is on the floor, feedback is close to nonexistent, salaries stay opaque unless legislation forces transparency, and processes keep getting longer. So before investing in new people or new processes, he says, handle the everyday hygiene of a decent candidate experience.

He draws a straight line from that neglect to the industry's standing internally. The way candidates feel about recruitment is mirrored in how leadership sees it: a cost center, something to do less of where possible. His verdict is unsentimental. The function has not deserved to be listened to, because it has not been giving good service either. And good service, he stresses, does not always mean saying yes. When leadership asks for a given number of hires, the job is to ask why, to understand the reasons it can and cannot be done, and to have a view on who should actually be hired.

That is also why he thinks the narrow specialist recruiter profile is becoming less and less viable. The future belongs to generalists who can speak both above and below themselves in the value chain, fluent in the commercial logic of the business and in the mechanics of assessment. It is, not coincidentally, the exact career he has built.