Ashleigh Sabolcik

A Summer Job That Became a Career

Her entry into the profession was almost accidental. Growing up in Florida, she networked her way into a summer opportunity on the agency side of recruiting, a first taste of the work that stuck. After graduating she took a job in benefits administration, the more administrative end of human resources, and lasted about a year before deciding that recruiting was where she belonged. She returned to the agency world, this time in Charlotte, North Carolina.

"It was really just through networking and luck that I fell into recruiting," she says, an assessment that undersells what came next. Roughly a decade with a single technology company gave her the runway to move from lead recruiter into management and then into leadership, the kind of progression that rarely happens without someone willing to bet on an unproven candidate for the job. She has not forgotten the people who placed those bets.

The Three People Who Believed First

Ask her who built her career and she names three people without hesitation. Susan Biddick gave her her first chance to get into the world of recruiting at all, and remains a mentor to this day, a relationship that has outlasted every job title either of them has held.

Susan McConnell, at PayPal, taught her to think like a businessperson and a human being at the same time. That meant holding a commercial lens consistently while also asking a wider set of questions: not only how the recruiter is feeling, but how the candidate is feeling, how the hiring manager is feeling, how the whole system lands on the people inside it. It is a discipline Sabolcik still applies, and the reason she reads metrics as narratives. "There's always a story behind the numbers," she says.

Michael Kasich, now with Motive, opened the door to leadership within talent acquisition and paired mentorship with something harder to teach: an innate belief that she could do anything she put her mind to. She has also learned from leaders whose example told her how she did not want to show up, and those lessons distilled into a leadership code she can state plainly. Extend the benefit of the doubt. Believe in people. Seek to understand before you judge. Recruiting is dynamic in a way most functions are not, she points out, because the product changes every single day.

Why AI Should Make Recruiting More Human

Sabolcik has spent the last few years embedding AI into her teams and organizations, and she can chart the shift precisely. What once felt like a distant concept has moved squarely into the operational questions: what technology do we purchase, what do we actually use, and how does it live inside the day to day process.

Her read on where the value sits is unsentimental. Calendaring, sourcing support from large language models, the administrative layer that many organizations never invested in: that is where economies of scale are waiting. But she is clear that a great deal of the AI now in circulation is not indexed toward making recruiters more efficient at all. Candidates can robo-apply. Resumes can be engineered to look like an ideal fit. "There's more need for human oversight," she says, and more need for recruiters to get into the human dynamics so that quality of hire holds every time.

Which is why she expects a return to more in-person interviews and more in-person conversations, not fewer. If automation absorbs the administrative load, the time it frees should be reinvested in exactly the interactions machines cannot fake. Her phrase for it is a reset at the human level.

Intentionality Over Efficiency

Her advice to fellow talent leaders is a warning against speed for its own sake: curate your AI strategy with intentionality. Build the capability deliberately, bring the right skill sets and capacity together, then decide explicitly where automation belongs, where an AI chat interaction is genuinely fine, and where the experience needs to be human centered and human connected.

The test she applies is the candidate's point of view. "If we go too fast on the efficiency gains, you could really alienate key talent and key individuals that you're looking to attract to your company," she says. Done with judgment, the inverse is true: AI implemented thoughtfully can elevate an employer brand rather than erode it. The efficiency is available either way. What differs is whether the company still looks like somewhere a person would want to work.

Partners and Architects, Not a Machine of Efficiencies

Underneath the technology argument is a bigger claim about the function itself. Talent acquisition, in Sabolcik's framing, is not a machine of efficiencies to be optimized and measured only on hiring volume. It is an enablement function without which products do not ship and sales do not happen, and it earns the right to show up as a partner, an architect and counsel to the business.

She is direct about why that matters now. Since 2021 the industry has absorbed enormous disruption, driven in part by how quickly companies tried to scale, and a great many people have had a hard time. Her point to executives is practical rather than plaintive: a team that has been there, been strategic and helped a business grow represents institutional capability that takes a long time to rebuild. "You can't just hire that off the street," she says. "It's cultivated over time and through relationships."

That conviction is part of why she values where she has landed. Arm, she notes, is keen on experience in both directions, employee experience as much as candidate experience, and treats talent acquisition as a strategic part of the whole company strategy rather than a cost line. For a leader whose entire philosophy rests on the belief that people are the product, the alignment is the point.