Christine Trykoski

A Job Fair and a Career She Did Not Know Existed

The pivot happened in a room full of booths. Trykoski went to a job fair with a science degree and no clear next step, and met a group of people who made her an argument rather than an offer. "If we can do it, you can do it. What do you think?" That was a little over twenty years ago.

What followed surprised her. Recruiting was not a fallback; it was a profession she had never been told about, and it turned out to fit. "Sure enough, turns out I found something I was very passionate about and a very exciting path that quite frankly before then I didn't even know really existed," she says. Two decades on, that origin story still informs how she treats candidates. She knows what it is to be talented, credentialed, and completely uncertain about where the talent goes next. She also knows how much a single conversation at the right moment can redirect a life.

It is a useful corrective in an industry that can reduce people to keyword matches. Trykoski came into talent acquisition as someone whose own trajectory turned on human judgment, and she has spent her career building teams that extend that same judgment outward.

Three Leaders, Three Different Lessons

Ask Trykoski who shaped her and she names three people quickly, each with a distinct lesson attached.

Andrew Spear comes first. She has worked with him and for him for roughly twenty years, and describes his influence on her career as monumental. Spear is a strategic thinker who is perpetually operating ahead of where the business currently sits. From him she learned to resist the gravitational pull of precedent. "He's who taught me you need to be looking ahead at how might we change to ensure that we are meeting the demand of the future, not just today," she says. That lesson shows up in how she approaches her team, how she plans, and how she interrogates any process whose only justification is that it is how things have always been done.

Trisha Gressley taught her something harder to teach: that warmth and authority are not in conflict. Gressley modeled female leadership that claimed a seat at the table and brought confidence to it, while caring deeply about the people she led. Trykoski calls that combination a juxtaposition, and it is one she has carried into her own leadership. You can care very deeply about your team and still lead the team. Many leaders pick one. Gressley showed her the pairing was available.

Donnie Dewey rounded out the education with rigor. Another leader she describes as phenomenal and genuinely invested in his people, Dewey pushed her toward evidence. He showed her how to use the data available today to determine what the organization should be preparing for tomorrow. "We can't see the future, but we can really work toward it by looking at the data that we have today," she says. Coming from a science background, Trykoski recognized the discipline immediately. It is hypothesis and measurement applied to workforce planning.

The Case for Embracing AI

AI is moving in leaps and bounds, and Trykoski is unambiguous about where Randstad Digital stands: the firm is embracing it fully. She is equally unambiguous about the emotional reality inside the profession. People are still afraid. The fear is specific and it is personal. It will take my job. They will use it to replace me.

Her answer is not reassurance but reframing. In her experience, AI does not hollow out recruiting work; it concentrates it. The tooling absorbs the parts of the job nobody misses and returns time to the parts practitioners actually love, which is talking to people and building relationships. "It allows us to have more impactful, influential, and insightful conversations," she says. A recruiter walks into a conversation with talent better informed. A salesperson walks into a first meeting with a customer better prepared to show exactly how they can help. The output is not fewer humans in the loop, it is better humans in the loop.

That distinction matters to how she leads. Trykoski frames AI adoption as an experience question rather than a headcount question. Where a human interaction is genuinely required, the goal is to make that interaction dramatically better than it could have been unassisted. Everything else is preparation.

Advice for Talent Leaders

Her guidance to peers is short enough to act on. Put the fear aside. Look honestly at what the technology can offer, then embrace it.

"Rather than being worried that it's going to replace people, embrace the fact that it gives you more insight to bring to the table when you talk to a talent," she says. The same applies to customers. Show them the ways you can help. Show them what you can offer by using AI well. Trykoski's argument is that the leaders who treat these tools as an amplifier of their judgment will out-serve the ones who treat them as a threat, and the gap between the two groups will widen quickly.

For someone who has spent more than twenty years largely behind the scenes, the recognition lands warmly. "We are kind of behind the scenes typically," she notes of the profession. It is precisely that work, done consistently and without an audience, that has made her the kind of leader others in the industry point to.