Charna Westerhold

The Desk She Never Applied For

Westerhold is candid that she fell into talent acquisition the way many practitioners do, through a door she was not looking for. What distinguishes her story is what happened next. She stayed in agency recruitment for six years, working across a couple of firms, learning the discipline of a market where results are measured daily and relationships are the only durable asset.

Then came the move in house, and it stuck. The last 18 years at Microsoft have given her a vantage point few in the profession share: long enough to have watched job boards rise and fall, LinkedIn arrive, remote work reorder everything, and now generative AI compress the entire operating tempo of recruiting. Twenty-four years in, she still talks about the work with the enthusiasm of someone who found the right room by accident and decided to stay.

The People Who Saw It First

Ask Westerhold about the leaders who shaped her and she does not hesitate. "It's the people who see you before you see yourself," she says, describing mentors who supported unconditionally and challenged relentlessly, particularly at the moments that felt uncomfortable. Discomfort, in her reading, is simply where growth is located.

The first is Morris Couchman, her manager during the agency years, who gave her her first step into management. He pushed her in ways she did not think were possible, saw possibilities she had not yet claimed for herself, and under him she became a people leader within high street agencies. The second is Elke Gorenz, her manager at Microsoft, who repeated the pattern in a much larger arena. Westerhold joined her team to do one thing and was continually encouraged to do more: take this on, try this role, apply for that next opportunity. Under Gorenz she built a breadth of skills she had not believed she possessed, and felt real confidence at Microsoft for the first time.

That confidence has been amplified by Renata Norman, her current manager, whom Westerhold describes as an exceptionally supportive people manager and an inspirational leader, notable not only for who she is but for what she does and how she does it. Norman's habit is to set an ambitious destination and hand over the route. I'd like to get here, she will say, how do you get me there? For Westerhold, that kind of trust is not replicable. It creates the psychological safety to fail forward, which she defines precisely: the thing did not quite work, but she is more knowledgeable because of it, and she has progressed.

Powered by AI, Not Replaced by It

Westerhold has little patience for the doom narrative circulating in her profession. Her framing is the opposite. AI strips out the drudgery, the administrative load, the mechanical work that used to consume a recruiter's calendar, and what remains is the part that only a human can do: the consultative conversation, the market read, the deep understanding of a business and the people inside it.

The trade, she is quick to note, is a higher bar. "There's more expectation for recruiters to be knowledgeable," she says, because the tasks that once filled the day have gone away. The profession has to become genuinely specialist. Talent acquisition, in her view, must operate as broad spectrum talent management expertise, fluent in the business it serves and in the marketplace it hunts in. Her conclusion is unfashionably optimistic and hard to argue with: recruiting is coming out of this stronger.

Pace Over Perfection

Asked what advice she would offer the profession heading into 2026, Westerhold reframes the question. Job boards rising, job boards falling, LinkedIn, remote work, AI: what that list actually describes is evolution, and the only rational response to evolution is to evolve with it.

She reaches for an image she has clearly used before. Recruiters are trees. A tree that stays rigid against the wind and the weather breaks. A tree that moves with the wind and the rain keeps standing. Watch the marketplace, watch what is coming, decide what has to change, and then move.

The tempo she sets for her own team is deliberate and demanding. Before AI, she tells them, if something took you a year, now it should take you a month. If it took a month, a week. If a week, a day. If a day, an hour. Decisions have to be made quickly, which means choosing pace over perfection: make the adjustment, see how it lands, improve continuously, stay aligned with the business you support. AI is changing the terrain not yearly but monthly and daily, and being left behind is a choice.

She is careful to add that the answer is not uniform. What adaptation looks like in executive search is very different from what it looks like in early in careers hiring. The discipline is the same, though. See the signals. Adjust what you are doing and how you are doing it. Keep moving.