Andrew Caraballo

The Accidental Entry Point

"Nobody goes to college and is like, I'm going to be a recruiter," Caraballo says. He is not an exception to that rule so much as a case study in it. As the first in his family to earn a degree, he had no map for what came after graduation, so he did what the map in front of him suggested: he went to a campus career fair, took a job in Target's store operations program, and got dropped into a store to rotate through departments and learn how a large retail business actually runs.

The management experience was real. Hiring, staffing, coaching, running a floor on duty, and understanding the economics of a nine figure operation at an age when most of his peers were still learning to build a spreadsheet. But retail management was not the career he wanted, and after about a year and a half he adopted a strategy that would be familiar to any recruiter reading this: he started answering every single LinkedIn InMail that came in.

One of them was from Roth Staffing. Caraballo had no idea what staffing was. "I didn't know the industry existed," he says. "I thought people got their jobs through career fairs or from applying online, because that's how I got my job." The pitch was simple and, for him, decisive: you get to talk to people all day, and you will never work another Christmas Eve. He had interviewed for five or ten roles by that point. Roth was the first offer he received, and he took it.

The instinct turned out to be right. Colleagues tell him he has the gift of gab; one candidate told him he could sell ice to an igloo. "I like people, and so getting to connect people is where I feel like I'm pretty much the strongest," he says. Nearly a decade in, that is still the part of the job he would not automate away.

The Mentor Who Did Not Want to Go to Lunch

Ask Caraballo who made him a recruiter and he does not start with a training program. He starts with Stacy, a colleague at his first staffing firm who was roughly twice his age and had a reputation for being tough. People in the office were a little afraid of her. In his first week, Caraballo announced they were getting lunch. She told him she did not want to go to lunch with him. He walked over, grabbed her jacket, and told her they were going anyway. Over that meal she told him nobody had ever done that.

She became his mentor, though she was never his manager. She taught him everything she knew about recruiting, and more importantly she taught him the parts that do not appear in a playbook: empathy, and how to handle people in genuinely difficult situations. It mattered that she modeled the opposite of the stereotype the industry sometimes earns. Their manager at the time was a classic hard sell operator, the kind of figure Caraballo believes gives staffing its bad reputation. Stacy showed him there was another way to do the work and still win.

They are still in touch. He calls her for advice on tricky situations; she calls him for advice when she is looking for a role. "I don't think I'd be the recruiter today if it wasn't for her," he says, and he tells her so regularly.

The second name on his list is his current manager, who has given him something rarer than instruction: room. No one breathing down his neck, no manufactured urgency, just a standing offer of help when he asks for it. Nearly seven years into working together, Caraballo puts it plainly: as long as that leader is at the firm, he is not going anywhere. It is a quiet endorsement, and in an industry with notoriously high turnover, it is also a business result.

A Practitioner's Field Report on AI

Caraballo has integrated AI across essentially all of his workflows, and he is refreshingly unsentimental about which tools earn their keep. He was resistant to ChatGPT at first, then converted the moment he watched it produce a candidate write up in 15 seconds. He has since moved to the paid version of Claude, which he found meaningfully better, and uses it for the volume work of the job: cleaning up a resume in about three seconds rather than routing it to an admin for manual formatting, and drafting write ups that used to take five minutes and now take one. He calls it roughly an 80% time save. He also always edits the output, because, as he notes, it still reads as AI.

Not everything gets a pass. He tried LinkedIn Hiring Assistant and stopped using it, concluding he is simply more efficient sending InMails himself. The AI matching bot in Bullhorn, which is meant to pair candidates with open roles, he rates at two or three out of ten for relevance. He makes a pointed observation from that: LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, an enormous amount of money is being poured into these products, and the results are still uneven. "I don't think we're as close to replacing our admin as we think," he says, while allowing that the next couple of years will close much of that gap.

He is also honest about the limits of trusting output you have not checked. He once planned a vacation with an AI assistant, skipped verifying the reviews himself, and ended up in a hotel that did not live up to its billing. His wife has not entirely let it go. He tells the story as a working recruiter's reminder: the tool gets you the bones, the human still has to do the diligence.

What Survives, and What Has to Adapt

Caraballo is neither an alarmist nor a cheerleader. "I'm not scared of AI. I think it's just something that's inevitable, and either you're going to embrace it and get better," he says, adding immediately that predictions of wholesale replacement strike him as dramatic. Most of the tools he uses today, he notes, cannot replace him.

What he is watching closely is client capability. If a company deploys the right software, 100 applicants should reduce cleanly to three genuine matches, and he is already seeing employers get more effective, aided by a job market where candidates are applying directly in volume. He offers a data point that stopped him cold: a client recently filled a cost accounting role, by far the hardest search in his niche, entirely on their own with no external recruiter involved. "Which never happens," he says.

So he holds two views at once. Over the next five years, he does not expect the fundamental shape of his work to change much: a company calls, he places somebody. Over ten years, he thinks the external recruiter's role is a genuine question mark, while the internal recruiter's is not, because someone will always have to run the screens. If the market demands a pivot, he is prepared to make one, whether that means moving in house or into a different kind of sales. What he is betting on is not a job description but a durable truth about the work: "People will always want to work with people."

It is a conviction earned the long way, from a store floor where he managed 85 people before he was old enough to know what staffing was, to a mentor who taught him empathy is a technique, to a career built on the belief that connection is the one part of recruiting no one is going to ship in a software release.