Christine Sanders

The Three People Who Built Her

Ask Sanders who shaped her and she does not reach for famous names. She reaches for managers.

The first was her manager at Discovery Communications, who supervised her as an HR intern and then kept her on for a year after she finished school. Sanders describes being made a right hand in everything, taught everything the woman knew, and backed without reservation. That kind of early advocacy, she says, is disproportionately meaningful precisely because it arrives when a person has no track record to point to yet.

The second was, on paper, an unlikely mentor: the chief product officer at a startup where Sanders, roughly three years out of school, was part of the founding team standing up the talent acquisition function. He was not a talent professional at all, and that turned out to be the point. He was curious about her work, he trusted her to do it, and he gave her feedback about how to show up as a professional so her ideas would actually land. "It was really helpful to have that diversity of perspective," she says, noting that a peer inside her own field likely would never have given her the same coaching.

The third relationship is the one still running. She met him at Google, where he taught her to use data in her work and pushed her toward the kind of visible, high stakes projects that get a career noticed. He later recruited her into her previous role and managed her there for several years. They remain in regular contact, and she called him recently for advice on her latest role. It is, she notes, a living argument for the value of connections that compound across decades rather than jobs.

A Realist's Read on AI

Sanders has watched recruiting technology improve exponentially in the space of a single year, and she is specific about where. Natural language reporting inside Ashby, she says, is a genuine time saver rather than a demo trick. New entrants like Juicebox have raised the quality of what practitioners can reach for. In her own workflow, AI functions as an assistant: streamlining processes, managing her calendar, absorbing the friction that used to eat a recruiter's afternoon, and letting her teams operate at a higher tempo.

She is equally clear eyed about the cost. Candidates have the same tools now, and the result is noise. Her team spends real time vetting fraudulent resumes, a category of work that barely existed a few years ago. "It's good and bad," she says, refusing the easy narrative in either direction. What has changed most, in her telling, is not any single product but the fact that AI has stopped being a project and become simply part of life.

Why the Recruiter Survives

On the question consuming her industry, whether AI will replace recruiters outright within five years, Sanders is unhesitating. She does not think so, and her reasoning is not sentimental.

Recruiters, she argues, are an essential part of the talent acquisition ecosystem because of what a job change actually is for the person going through it. It is a major life transition, and navigating someone through one requires a form of human connection that she does not believe software will replicate. "I just don't see us going away," she says. Her advice to a profession currently talking itself into an anxiety spiral is more generous than most: give yourselves a pat on the back, and remember what the work is. "At the end of the day, we're people helping people."

The Discipline of Asking

Pressed for the single piece of advice she would hand another talent leader, Sanders answers immediately: be curious. Ask the questions you actually have. Do not be afraid to ask to learn about the businesses you support, and then understand them deeply.

It sounds soft until you look at what she means operationally. How does this work. Why is it built like this. What does this team really do. Can I sit in on one of their meetings. Those questions, asked relentlessly, are what she credits for most of her own growth. They also solve the credibility problem that quietly limits so many recruiters: a person who genuinely understands the business can represent it to candidates in a way no job description ever will.

"That's been a lot of the root of where my growth has come from," she says. "It has unlocked a lot of things for me." It is the same trait she once received from a chief product officer who was curious about her, and the same trait she now looks for in the people she hires. She is generous about naming it in others, too, singling out Charleo Laughlin, Head of Talent at SandboxAQ, as an inspirational leader and a driving force in a lot of people's careers, including her own experience of working alongside him.

The through line from that first internship to a leadership seat in AI is not ambition so much as attention: to how a business really works, and to the person on the other side of the table who is trying to figure out what happens next.