Andrea Barre

The Invitation That Never Left Her

Ask Barre about the people who shaped her and she does not start with an executive. She starts with a candidate. Early in her career she placed a woman in her fifties, mid to late career, into a role with one of her clients. The woman stayed a very long time. She also used the job to put herself through school, late in life, and when she graduated she mailed Barre an invitation to the ceremony. This job, she told her, is what allowed me to do this. This is something I wanted to do my whole life.

Barre still gets chills describing the moment she opened that envelope. For a young professional, the realization that a placement could carry that much weight in a stranger's life reset what the work meant. It is the standard she has carried into every leadership role since: the transaction is a job requisition, but the outcome is a person's life.

Seeing People's Highest and Best Selves

Barre believes everyone has a superpower, and she is unusually clear-eyed about her own. Hers is the ability to see what people are capable of before they see it themselves. "I've had the absolute joy and pleasure in my career to continue to give opportunities and help people really step into that for themselves," she says.

The proof is a track record of hires other leaders would have passed over. Years ago, her daughter's preschool teacher wanted to move back into the corporate world. Barre gave her an opportunity. Thirteen years later, after roughly four separate stints working together, that same person is one of the top performing leaders on her team, excelling with clients, with candidates and with the people who report to her. Barre lists the people she has worked alongside as an honor and a blessing rather than a resume line. She reserves particular admiration for her current boss, Brian Clark, whom she calls one of the kindest and most professional humans she has ever had the pleasure to meet, and she is quick to put forward Kim Kelly, who recently launched her own firm, as someone deserving of recognition in her own right.

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.