Chris Ross

The Path In

Ross played Division I college hockey at Merrimack College and expected to turn pro. That plan lasted about a month. He started taking meetings for sales roles instead, working through an agency, which landed him an offer at Bayer Pharmaceuticals. Then, before he could accept it, the agency made him a different pitch: come work here, on 100 percent commission, and you will out-earn a pharmaceutical sales rep.

"I said, absolutely, sign me up. Let me go for it." He has not looked back since. The route matters because it explains how he runs teams today. Ross came into the profession through the sales door rather than the HR door, and he has never stopped treating the two disciplines as versions of the same job.

A Field That Resets Every Six Months

Ross had an early seat at the AI table. Johnson & Johnson brought in HiredScore around 2017 or 2018, well before most talent organizations were thinking in those terms. "We didn't even call it AI. We called it just machine learning software at the time," he says. When 300 people applied to a role, the tool surfaced the strongest ten resumes, then went a step further and flagged five people already sitting in the system who matched the profile. It was, in his view, the first real glimpse of what was coming.

Now, in 2026, with every company asking how to modernize TA, he describes a landscape that resets roughly twice a year. The reversal on AI interviewing is the clearest example. He had been enthusiastic about it, especially for high volume roles, until candidate fraud arrived at scale. Companies are racing to build fraud detection and eye contact analysis into their tooling, he notes, but in his own processes the safeguard that worked was a person. "Had we not had a human kind of at the helm interviewing, that has made a big difference."

He is no skeptic of the technology itself. Anything administrative he wants augmented aggressively, from scheduling through sourcing and the teeing up of candidates for recruiters. He does not build a deck or send a note without asking AI whether it could be written better or made to look sharper. What he wants is the human conversation reinforced by better tools: fraud detection running quietly alongside it, and note-taking software preserving the impeccable record that automated screening genuinely does produce. "It's going to be interesting to see how I feel six months from now," he says, which is less a hedge than a working method.

Why the Human Stays in the Chair

Ross gives two reasons for holding that line, and the second reveals how he thinks. The first is evaluation, the judgment call a person still makes better than a model. The second is commercial. "I view all recruiters for a company basically like sales reps for the company," he says. Every conversation with a candidate is a selling opportunity, a chance to carry the employer value proposition to someone who is quietly deciding whether this place deserves them. That exchange does not happen with an AI on the other side of the screen.

His counsel to other talent leaders follows directly from that split: augment aggressively everywhere the work is administrative, and defend the interview. Automate the scheduling, the pipeline building, the note capture, the first pass through 300 resumes. Keep humans evaluating and selling. It is a coherent philosophy rather than a slogan, and for a leader whose first recruiting job was pitched to him as a sales job, it is also the argument he has been making his entire career.