Alan Henshaw

The Interview That Became an Offer

The agency he visited was working a sales requisition. After the conversation, the recruiters there asked him a question he had not anticipated: had he ever considered recruiting? "I have no idea even what recruiting is," he told them. He had a friend in the business, called him, talked it through, and took an offer to get his feet wet.

His first four or five years were spent in finance and accounting recruiting. He was good at it, but he is candid that the subject matter never fully caught him. It was a job rather than a calling. That changed in 2011, when he moved into technology recruiting and immediately recognized the difference. "I consider myself a tech nerd, but not like an engineer or anything," he says. "I just love technology." The market he was suddenly working in rewarded exactly that instinct, and the long-term career he had not planned on came into focus.

A Farm, a Football Field, and Two Leaders Who Told the Truth

Henshaw grew up on a large farm in the middle of nowhere with his mother and his older brother, five and a half years his senior. With their father out of the picture, his brother filled two roles at once, older sibling and father figure, teaching him sports and, more durably, how to go about his business. Work ethic, Henshaw says, was instilled early and reinforced later on the field, where he played Division III football. Both experiences gave him a template for effort and accountability that he still applies to how he approaches work.

Professionally, two managers stand out. The first was a leader at AWS. Henshaw had already spent years in management roles by the time he joined the company, but he came in as an individual contributor before that leader brought him in to build a new team. What made the relationship formative was not the promotion. It was the honesty. He was among the first managers to say plainly what Henshaw was great at, what he needed to work on, and how they would close the gap together, always attaching the reasoning to the feedback. It pushed Henshaw to think more strategically and to think differently.

The second was Matt Conant, who passed away a few months ago after an illness. Henshaw remembers him as the first leader whose mind worked the way his own did, which meant Conant could reshape a conversation or reframe an enormous initiative in a way that landed instantly. Henshaw still credits him with changing how he approaches big, ambiguous problems.

Teaching a Model to Grade a Skill

Ask Henshaw where AI has actually earned its keep in recruiting, and he starts with the unglamorous parts of the life cycle. Preparation, he says, is where the gains have been clearest: better intake meeting templates, sharper questions for hiring managers, more rigorous probing of the skill set itself so a recruiter genuinely understands the role before sourcing begins. Candidate correspondence has gotten faster too. His teams use ChatGPT like everyone else, but Henshaw's ambition is further out. He is pushing toward agent to agent conversations, where process flow runs on the back end and recruiters can step back from the mechanics.

His most consequential recent project sits at the intersection of talent acquisition and internal mobility, a boundary many organizations still treat as someone else's problem. Booz Allen, like most large employers, talks constantly about skills and upskilling. If software engineers need to learn more about AI, the answer is to enroll them in programs. What the company lacked was any way to measure proficiency. Employees could list their skills in Workday, and their work history offered clues, but nothing assessed whether a person was a beginner in Java programming or an expert.

So Henshaw helped kick off the build of an LLM on the back end that ingests the employee data the company already holds and returns a proficiency rating on a five point scale, beginner through expert. Crucially, it shows its work: the model explains the reasoning behind each rating and which data it weighed. Accuracy, he reports, has been strong. The practical value is immediate. If someone is already highly proficient in a technology, there is no reason to route them into training for it. Find the gap that actually exists instead. The system is, in his words, "making a large impact already."

Curiosity, and the Room You Are Lucky to Be In

Asked for advice to other talent leaders, Henshaw lands on two things. The first is natural curiosity, and he means it literally. He walks into work talking about the CEO interview or panel he watched the night before. Lately that has meant a run of conversations about AI and what the future holds, including the rising cost of running these models and how that economics will play out. Very little of it is talent acquisition content, and that is the point. Understanding the ebbs and flows of the market and of business in general is what shapes the conversations he has internally and what lets him think in a different way.

The second is a reframe of a meeting most recruiters treat as administrative. Recruiters, he points out, are fortunate enough to sit in rooms with extremely smart leaders, and intake calls are the clearest example. His guidance to teams is to walk in excited rather than procedural. "Use it as like an opportunity to fill in gaps of your knowledge bank," he says. Too often recruiting arrives at the intake with a script: this is the process, this is what we do, this is how it will go. Henshaw argues for the opposite posture, an assumption that you will learn something in that call you did not know before.

There is a business case underneath the humility. Talent teams tend to assume hiring managers understand recruiting and know the process, and they usually do not. Building the relationship first, hearing what has worked and what has not from the manager's side, is what makes it possible to explain why the process will be effective. Open-mindedness, in his telling, is not a soft skill. It is how you earn the right to be listened to.