Anthony Stough

From ROTC Injury to a Career in People

Human resources was not the plan. Stough entered ROTC in college with a different path in mind, then got hurt, and the injury redirected him. He stumbled into human resources and, to his own surprise, fell in love with it. He commissioned as an HR officer in the United States Army, and it was there that he learned the discipline of managing people at scale under real constraints, including the drawdown that reduced a thousand-person organization to 175 while redeploying the rest into new roles.

After leaving the military, he carried that skill set into the private sector and eventually landed his first official recruiter role with a healthcare company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a deep dive into full-time exempt recruiting for a very large health system, and it was relentless. He covered finance, legal, sales, marketing and nearly everything else on the business side of the organization, carrying an average of 75 to 85 full-time requisitions and closing roughly 10 to 15 fills every week. "It was a really, really turn and burn type of role," he says. It also built the reflexes that come only from volume: how to triage, how to move, how to keep quality intact when the queue never empties.

From recruiting he expanded into workforce development and became a diversity, inclusion and equity facilitator, immersing himself in the DEI space. That work sharpened the questions he now brings to technology decisions, particularly around bias, stereotypes and fairness in automated systems.

Prompt Quality Is the New Skill

Stough does not frame AI as a decision to be made. He frames it as a condition already in place. "It's already integrated into your systems regardless if you want to or not," he says. The only live question is how well a team uses it. His formulation is blunt and useful: prompt AI with a not-so-intelligent question and you get a not-so-intelligent answer, but prompt it with useful and resourceful questions and it becomes an extremely powerful tool. In other words, the constraint is no longer the technology. It is the thinking that goes into it.

His DEI background pushes him further than most on the risk side. He is candid that stereotype and discrimination concerns in AI are real possibilities, not hypotheticals, and that talent leaders need to interrogate the parameters of the tools they deploy. But he refuses to treat that as a reason to sit out. "We as early adopters of AI, we can also be part of that solution," he says, arguing that HR professionals should position themselves as the early consultants in these conversations rather than the last department to be informed.

Empathy as an Operating Requirement

Stough runs informal social experiments on himself. Periodically he tests his own network, on LinkedIn and off it, to gauge how active and how genuinely resourceful those connections still are. His verdict on the platform is unsentimental: LinkedIn has changed dramatically, the network effect has weakened, and the etiquette has inverted to the point where some influencers now post little but memes. His counsel is not to complain about it. "You've got to adapt to what LinkedIn has become," he says.

The bigger shift he sees is on the candidate side, and it is the point he returns to most forcefully. Post a job today and AI platforms scraping every site on the internet will deliver thousands of applications, many submitted by agents acting on a candidate's behalf. "That candidate has no idea that it just applied to thousands of jobs on their behalf," he says. The practical consequence for talent teams is that the old assumptions no longer hold. Applicants may not recognize your company name. They may not remember applying at all.

His advice for talent leaders heading into 2026 follows from that. Stop treating volume as intent, get to know the candidate, and understand what they are actually searching for. "I think we have to have a little empathy for candidates nowadays," he says, adding that people are struggling and simply looking for work. Coming from someone whose defining early assignment was finding landing spots for hundreds of people being transitioned out, it reads less as a talking point than as a professional standard.

Advocating for an Invisible Profession

Stough is clear about why recognition for this work matters. His observation about HR is delivered with a wry edge that any practitioner will recognize instantly: people don't see us until you get rid of us. It is the quiet frustration of a function that absorbs the hardest human moments in an organization, from drawdowns to hiring surges, and is most visible in its absence.

That is also why he pays the recognition forward. Stough put forward several colleagues in the field and offered to give each of them a personal heads up. It is a small gesture, and a telling one. The instinct to make sure the right people get seen is the same instinct that has organized his entire career.