Andrea Marston

Sales First, Then a Suggestion That Stuck

Marston began her career in sales straight out of university, and it did not take long before she was looking for something new. The suggestion came from someone else: look at recruiting. She did. She joined a recruitment agency, then moved into executive search and headhunting, and worked her way across that landscape through the late 1990s and beyond.

The fit was immediate and, in retrospect, obvious. Recruiting gave her the commercial edge of sales and something sales could not: the satisfaction of actually making something fit. "It kind of just spoke to me," she says. She has been in talent acquisition ever since, long enough to have seen the profession reinvent itself several times over.

The real click came later, when she moved from agency to in-house. By then she had also run her own business for a considerable stretch, and that combination proved unusually powerful. She understood revenue, operations, and what it costs a founder to make a hiring mistake, and she understood the other parts of an organization from the inside rather than through a client brief. That blend of commercial fluency and functional depth is what makes her credible with the business today. In-house, she says, was the perfect fit, and talent acquisition remains, in her judgment, the most fun part of HR.

The Two Women Who Shaped Her

Marston is precise and generous about who taught her what. Her first mentor came in her first recruitment role, coaching her back in 1999 and 2000, when formal training in the industry barely existed. What that mentor did was break the whole process down until it made sense, piece by piece, in an era when nobody was handing out playbooks. Marston calls her truly inspirational, and more than a quarter of a century later, the two are still in touch.

The second was an HR director at AOL who hired Marston into a talent acquisition leadership role. She was not a TA specialist, and that was the point. What she modeled was a way of leading that Marston has carried ever since: she was unashamedly herself, refused to squeeze into anyone else's mold, did things her own way while adding tremendous value, listened a great deal, and never pretended to know everything. Instead, she deliberately surrounded herself with people who complemented her and made the team stronger for it.

That relationship has aged into something unusual. AOL became Yahoo, and Marston's former boss is now chief people officer there. The two still see each other at least once a year. Marston still says she was the best boss she ever had. Her old boss still says Marston was the best hire she ever made. "There's a lot of love," Marston says.

From Recruiters to Talent Advisors

Marston has spent her career in tech partly by choice and partly by temperament. The industry, she notes, is simply more open to trying new things and less frightened of them, and technology has reshaped her function dramatically over the past decade regardless of what anyone thought about it.

But she draws a sharp line around the past twelve months. A year ago, she says, everyone was still playing: experimenting, testing what was possible, trading prompting techniques. The genuine break came only in recent months, with agentic AI. Suddenly every individual could have a sidekick, one that understands the work, crunches the numbers, helps prepare, and reframes a problem from an unfamiliar angle.

For a leader trying to raise the floor across a company of 8,000 to 9,000 people, that is not a productivity story, it is a scale story. "Trying to get everyone to do the same thing is always difficult," she says. Agents change the math, because good practice no longer has to be funneled through managers who become bottlenecks by definition. So Marston had her team build their agents first, then pushed them into daily use. Some now reach for them constantly. Others still need the occasional reminder that they have a tool they did not have six months ago.

The payoff she is chasing is not speed. It is altitude. Freed from the mechanics, her recruiters can be much more strategic and operate as true talent advisors rather than recruiters, and that lift compounds upward. "The more I can elevate my team to working more strategically, the more strategic I can be as a business partner as well," she says.

Be Curious, and Never Treat a Candidate as a Commodity

Asked what she would tell someone entering the profession, Marston does not reach for anything tactical. Be curious. Keep learning. Nobody knows everything, everyone is still discovering this, and the advice is identical whether you are one year in or twenty. Stagnation, in her diagnosis, arrives the moment someone decides they have done it all and settles into churning out the same work. Her prescription is deliberate and annual: ask yourself what you are learning this year that will be genuinely game changing for you.

She rejects the whole framing of arrival. "The destination is not the goal," she says. What matters is what you got out of today, this week, this year, how you grew, and what you did for other people along the way. If it feels like the journey is ending, in her view, you simply have not turned the corner yet.

That philosophy has a hard edge to it when she turns to candidate experience. Marston is blunt about the industry's worst habit: treating candidates as a commodity, because candidates are not the ones paying the bills. She considers that both wrong and strategically foolish. "We are one big circle," she says. Candidates should leave as your biggest ambassadors and your biggest assets, talking about your business and the opportunity they had. The real test, in her telling, is what happens after a rejection. If the person you turned down is still telling people you are a great company and that they want to work there, you have done the job properly. "That's where you want everyone to be."