Andrea Barre
AgileOne
“I do believe that it is helping us be more human in the process.”
Andrea Barre has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 leaders in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are nominated by peers or found by committees that look for excellent work wherever it happens, then chosen for the depth of their craft and their impact on hiring. This is Andrea's story.
In a college course on urban economics and development, Andrea Barre worked through a case study about staffing agencies migrating from one side of Chicago to the other. She remembers the question she asked herself at the time: what, exactly, is a staffing agency? Eighteen months later she was working for one. More than twenty years on, she is a recruitment process outsourcing leader at AgileOne, running teams that place people for a living and building the technology that lets those teams do it better.
She is candid that almost nobody plans this career. "There are very few people I know who did not just fall into it," she says, noting that in two decades she has met exactly one person who grew up knowing they wanted to do this work, and that person's mother was in the industry, which Barre considers cheating a little. What kept her was not the mechanics of the business but the culture of the first company she joined out of school. Their slogan, she points out, translated correctly into any language in the world, grammatically and in syntax. For a self-described language and culture nerd, that detail said something real about how seriously the organization took people. She stayed, and the career escalated from there.
Technology That Gives the Job Back to the Recruiter
Barre frames artificial intelligence through the founding logic of her own industry. Recruitment process outsourcing exists to optimize and specialize, so that every team member spends their time on what they are genuinely great at. Then reality intervened. Through COVID and the financial pressure of recent years, the ability to staff five recruitment coordinators, three searchers and a bench of recruiters disappeared. "It all got loaded back onto the recruiter's desk again," she says. AI, in her reading, is what finally restores the original promise.
She has a working example. Her team built a note-taking agent that listens while a recruiter interviews candidates, captures the notes and drafts them into submittal form for the hiring manager. The recruiter using it is not measuring the benefit in ROI or in hours reclaimed. She measures it in relationships. Her submittal-to-interview ratio is higher and her overall success is higher, but the reason is that she can finally look at the person in front of her instead of typing, and instead of composing hiring manager language in her head mid-conversation. In her words, this is what she got into the business to do, to be with people, and the technology is letting her help them. Barre puts it more simply: the recruiter is learning to love recruiting again.
She is not naive about the risks. There are horror stories and there are great stories, and she expects both to keep coming. She compares the moment to the steam engine or the arrival of the internet, a shift that fundamentally changes the way work happens. But her conclusion is unambiguous. The tool, used properly, makes the process more human, not less.
Do Not Build on Sinking Sand
Her advice to talent leaders heading into 2027 is a warning dressed as a construction metaphor. Adding powerful tools to a weak foundation, she says, is like building a house on sinking sand. If you do not know your process, if you cannot articulate what good looks like, if you have not decided what you should be measuring, the technology will not rescue you. It is the reporting principle applied to automation: garbage in, garbage out. "You're never going to get to B. You're going to get to negative five."
So she counsels patience before purchase. Know your process. Know where you want to go. Be methodical about what you bring in. Build the operational rigor that lets you tell the story of how the tool is helping, and be ready to speak to the return. And define that return honestly, because as she is careful to note, ROI is not always dollars saved. Sometimes it is a recruiter falling back in love with the job. For someone who has spent twenty years watching what a single placement can do to a person's life, that has always been the number that counts.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Andrea. We are honored to welcome Andrea Barre to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Andrea. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.
