Beth Wolfe

The Job She Didn't Get

Wolfe's entry into the profession is a small masterclass in what good recruiters actually do. Many moons ago, as she puts it, she applied to be a receptionist at a defense contracting company. She did not get the job. What she did get was a conversation with the recruiting manager, who had spent the process watching her and reached a different conclusion than the requisition called for. There would be no receptionist offer, the manager told her, but there was an opening on her own team for a recruiting coordinator, if Wolfe was interested.

She was. "Let's see what this is about," she remembers thinking, and then she jumped in full force. Recruiting had never been on her radar. It turned out to fit her almost exactly. "I just have a heart for people and have a lot of empathy for both candidates and hiring managers," she says, and that dual empathy, for the person hoping and the person hiring, has been the through line of everything since.

Three years in that first coordinator role gave way to three years in the agency world after a move from Florida to Birmingham, Alabama. Then came Daxko, where she started as a talent acquisition specialist and where, this summer, she will mark twelve years. Over that stretch she has grown from specialist to director to senior director without ever needing to leave to move up, a rarity in a profession where advancement usually means a new logo.

Let AI Take the Minutiae

Wolfe is unsentimental about artificial intelligence and unimpressed by the fear surrounding it. The recruiters who hold back, worried the tools will, quote, steal their jobs, are in her view forfeiting the best deal the profession has been offered in years. Offload the redundant administrative minutiae to the machines, she argues, and what remains is precisely the work that made people fall in love with recruiting in the first place.

"Let's do more connecting," she says. Vet candidates more deeply. Build genuinely strong relationships with hiring managers, so the shortlist is sharper and the feedback is real and timely. The alternative, she notes, is a talent team that spends its days on what amounts to behind the scenes paperwork. That is not a future worth protecting.

Take a Breath, Then Be Strategic

Her advice to other talent leaders heading into 2026 begins with an instruction that sounds counterintuitive in a moment defined by urgency: pause. Take a breath, take a step back, and honestly evaluate where your team creates value today and where you actually want it to create value. Only then start steering the tools, the decisions, and the processes toward that destination. Adopting technology without first answering that question is how teams end up automating work they should have stopped doing altogether.

The reason to be deliberate now, she argues, is that the window is unusually wide open. For much of the past fifteen years, recruiting flew under the radar and drew little attention from the rest of the business. That is no longer true. Candidates are talking about the profession. So are executives. "There's just so much opportunity to be really impactful if we will take the time to be thoughtful and strategic about what we do next," she says. Much of that is AI, but a great deal of it is simply partnering closely with internal stakeholders to understand what they need and to deliver the best hires in the most efficient, most seamless way possible.

A Community Person

Wolfe's investment in the profession extends well past her own requisitions. She served on the Birmingham Recruiter Network, and the peers she admires most are the ones who pull others in rather than build moats. Those she points to include colleagues known for their integrity, generosity, and forward thinking, the same qualities a recruiting manager once spotted in a candidate who had applied for the wrong job entirely.

It is a telling list. Integrity, generosity, forward thinking: the same qualities a recruiting manager once spotted in a candidate who had applied for the wrong job entirely.