Bronwyn White

From the Classroom to the Candidate

White did not treat the move as a break with her past. She cited the similarities between the two professions as a reason for making the switch. "It's about understanding what motivates students and candidates, helping them grow in their skills and expertise," she says, whether that growth happens in a classroom or across a career. Both jobs depend on reading a person accurately and then meeting them where they are.

There was a second motive. Technology at the time was going through what she calls a pretty strong evolution, and she wanted to be inside an industry that was moving. She was after the combination: the pace of tech, with the skills she had built teaching. Twenty-five years on, that pairing looks less like a career pivot than like preparation.

She is clear-eyed about what the function demands day to day. Recs have to be filled. People have to be brought into the company, and not just any people, but the best talent available. No amount of strategy exempts a leader from that arithmetic.

The Leaders Who Set Her Standard

Asked who shaped her, White does not offer a list of heroes. She starts with managers, both the strong ones and the ones she disagreed with, on the grounds that working under a style you would not choose teaches you a great deal about what you actually believe. The good ones were rare and specific: operationally strong and genuinely visionary at the same time. They kept the machine running while never losing sight of where it was headed.

There is a third quality she treats as non-negotiable, and it is the one that separates a competent manager from a leader people follow. Authenticity, and real empathy for the team. The best leaders she has worked with remove roadblocks and go all out to make sure the recruitment process actually happens rather than merely being described.

The name she returns to is Miranda Kalinowski, Head of Recruiting at Stripe, whom she calls probably the best talent acquisition leader she knows. Kalinowski, in White's telling, balances operational and cost efficiency with authentic leadership, and White is direct about how much she has learned from her. She is equally quick to credit her own bench. Her operations lead and her experience lead are, in her words, willing to adopt new technology and to look for new ways of doing things, operationally strong while carrying vision of their own. They have influenced her career as much as any manager, and they are people she enjoys working with.

The First Real Shift in Thirty Years

White is unsentimental about how static her industry has been. "The business of recruiting has remained the same for 20, 30 years," she says. There is an open role, there are candidates, there are resumes, there is a structured selection process, and then a company makes an offer. Tools were updated. Diversity and inclusion practices were built in. The fundamentals did not move.

AI, she believes, is different in kind rather than degree. It is a fundamental shift, and Harman is on that journey alongside everyone else. Her emphasis sits at the top of the funnel, where screening and sourcing can be handed to agents and smart tooling, and across the administrative layer that quietly consumes a recruiter's day. Recruiting requires constant documentation across a sprawl of systems. Technology can absorb a great deal of that.

What it cannot absorb is the part that makes candidates say yes. Her governing principle is that AI adoption has to run in parallel with a great candidate experience, not in place of it. Push too far and a company loses the personal touch candidates still enjoy. Research is already starting to suggest that candidates are growing tired of chatbots and would prefer to talk to a real person. The calculus also varies by who is on the other end. Millennials and recent graduates, comfortable with technology, will move happily through a largely digitised process. Executive-level candidates from a different generation, who are neither digital natives nor AI natives, expect more of a human touch. "It's not a one-size-fits-all," she says. The leader's job is to decide the moments that matter, and to lean in and be human at exactly those points.

Rewriting Hiring for an AI Workforce

Two ideas are currently on her desk, and both cut against convention. The first is to write AI into job postings directly, describing how the technology will be part of the role and how a hire might use it every day, so that the posting itself brands the company as one that works this way.

The second is bolder. Hiring managers have suggested to her that the company should prohibit candidates from using AI while being assessed. Her response is to ask why. If new hires will unquestionably use these tools once they come on board, and the company expects them to, then the selection process ought to reveal how comfortable and capable people are with them. Harman is now restructuring that process to incorporate the use of AI rather than fence it off.

She is candid that this is uncharted work. "I don't have the playbook on it yet," she says, adding that she is not sure any talent leader does right now. That admission is itself a form of leadership: a willingness to build in public while the ground is still moving. She has named the goal for the year plainly. Creating a balanced approach that keeps some of the process human while generating efficiencies and cost reductions through tooling is, in her words, the overall philosophy she is working on this year.

Advice for Talent Leaders

Her counsel to peers is compact and practical. Learn and understand what the technology offers, because it is not going away. Explore where it fits inside your own process, whether the gain is cost efficiency, time effectiveness, or even quality. Do the work, research it, investigate it, and then start small, inserting it in modest ways rather than attempting a wholesale conversion. "Don't make it too far of a pendulum swing so that your whole process is automated," she cautions, because she is not convinced the technology is all the way there yet. But embrace it.

Underneath all of it sits the lesson she carried out of the classroom and up through twenty-five years of talent leadership: people changing jobs is a human experience, and they want to feel it. Be prepared, she says, to lean in and create those moments that matter. The company that manages both, a process that is short, timely and efficient and one that still contains real, authentic human moments, is the company she expects to win. For White, the current upheaval is not a threat to be managed but the most interesting opportunity her profession has offered in a generation.