Chenae Erkerd

A Law Degree, Redirected

Erkerd finished law school with every intention of practicing. When the North Carolina bar exam did not go her way, she faced a question that would have flattened a lot of people: what can be built with a law degree when practicing law is not the path? She decided to find out, and then spent four years looking for the door that would open.

The door turned out to be Duke Temporary Service, the university's internal temp program, where thirty days of work converts a temporary employee into an internal candidate eligible to apply anywhere across Duke. Her first placement landed her, with a certain poetic symmetry, inside Duke's law school, working in the law clinic. Her second placement took her to the Duke Talent Identification Program, known internally as Duke TIP, where the compliance role and the invitation to learn recruiting arrived together.

She fell in love with the work quickly, and she is precise about why. Those four years of searching did not leave her bitter. They left her fluent in the emotional reality of the candidate: the waiting, the silence, the fatigue of starting over. "That's why I do what I do," she says, "because I get it."

The People Behind the Practitioner

Ask Erkerd to name her influences and she resists the exercise, not out of modesty but out of abundance. "I have such a community of people that are amazing," she says, "so picking two or three is difficult." Pressed, she names three, and she is careful to say they come in no particular order.

Denita Alston is the manager who asked the question in the first place, and the one who taught her the craft. Alston walked her through the ins and outs of candidate experience and, more importantly, taught her how to be a recruiter who understands the human experience underneath the transaction. That lesson is the foundation of everything Erkerd has built since.

Her husband gets equal billing, and for a reason she finds funny in hindsight: he is the one who got her into recruiting at all. Working entirely by old school methods, he handed her resume to one person, who handed it to another, who eventually handed it to the right person, who called her in for Duke Temporary Service. It was human networking doing exactly what a database cannot.

The third is her best friend Brittany, who taught her something no ATS training covers: the balancing act of showing up fully for other people while still living unapologetically as yourself. "You don't have to explain yourself," Erkerd says, noting that constant self-explanation is exhausting. It is a lesson that shows up in how she treats candidates, who also do not want to spend the whole process explaining themselves.

There is a fourth influence on the professional side. Jermaine Mitchell, a recruiting manager she has worked alongside on contract at Apollo, taught her go-to-market recruiting, and she credits him directly for much of her success in the GTM space. From Mitchell she learned to negotiate, to read resumes differently, and to understand what each company a candidate comes from actually does and how that experience connects to where they are trying to go next.

Efficiency Without Erasure

On artificial intelligence, Erkerd is neither an evangelist nor a skeptic. She sees the shift as twofold. On one side, the technology exists to help talent professionals navigate their jobs more efficiently, and she uses it frequently. On the other side, she is blunt that refusing to engage with it at all is a career risk. Her framing of the layoff conversation is characteristically unsentimental: AI is not the thing making decisions about jobs, companies are.

The cost she watches most closely is the human one. When the human aspect gets stripped out of the process, she says, it becomes daunting for candidates who simply want to talk to a real person. That is why she describes herself as genuinely relentless about follow up and communication in her current role. Candidates need to hear her, and she is a real person.

Her line on the limit is the sharpest thing she says all day. "If you allow AI to completely become your voice, then what's the point of your job in the first place?" No one, she argues, should let a system or a circumstance render their own role obsolete. Her verdict: "AI can definitely be a benefit. It can only be a hindrance if you let it."

The Promise

Erkerd is spiritual, and before she ever became a recruiter she made a promise she still treats as binding. She promised she would never forget what it felt like to be a candidate, and that she would never abandon her first love of spoken word and motivational speaking. Both halves of that promise are visible in the way she talks to her peers.

When she is asked to challenge the thinking of a talent acquisition professional, her answer never varies. Remember that you were also a candidate. "Be the recruiter you needed when you were a candidate," she says, "because that is exactly what I transformed into."

She understands why the reminder is necessary. Recruiting turns transactional fast, and rarely on purpose. There is always another req, always a backfill, always the next thing moving. But the drift has consequences, and she frames the stakes with a recruiter's sense of timing: everyone in this profession was a candidate once, and at some point everyone will be a candidate again.

A Name She Does Not Lend Lightly

That standard extends to how she talks about other people. Erkerd is protective of her own endorsement, and she says so plainly: she is a recruiter who makes sure that when she puts recruiters in front of someone, she is delivering a certain caliber. "I don't like to just put my name on everybody."

The names she does stand behind are worth noting, because vouching is its own form of leadership in a field this networked. She points to Christy Kennebrew, who works in recruitment marketing at FedEx, and to Bobby McNeil Jr., a talent acquisition manager at Enact Insurance who recruited for years before moving into leading recruiters. Alongside Jermaine Mitchell, they form the professional community she has built and continues to champion. It is the same principle as everything else in her practice. The people are the point.