Dave Bui

From the Agency Floor to the People Function

Bui started at the entry level on the agency side, learning the trade the way most durable recruiters do, by carrying a desk and supporting a rotating set of client organizations with whatever they needed. That grounding gave him range. He eventually moved in-house on the talent acquisition side, and from there kept widening the aperture, expanding beyond recruiting into the other facets of HR that determine whether a hire actually succeeds once the offer is signed.

Today he is Director of People at ChangeMakers, a PR, marketing and social impact consulting firm. He is candid that he is not personally running requisitions at the moment, but the talent acquisition instinct has not gone anywhere. It now operates a level up, in the architecture behind the hiring rather than the transaction itself. "There is a lot of still impact behind the scenes from the talent acquisition standpoint that I'm involved into," he says. It is the natural endpoint of a career that moved from filling roles, to owning the function, to shaping the conditions the function works inside.

Two Managers, Two Very Different Educations

Ask Bui who made him, and he goes straight to the beginning. His direct manager in his first role was, in his description, "a little bit on the harder side," a demanding operator who did not soften the standard. Bui does not flinch from the memory or resent it. He credits it. A great deal of the technical skill set he still relies on, he says, is attributable to that manager.

The second education came at a digital agency, from a leader with an entirely different approach: humanistic, empathetic, oriented toward the person on the other side of the process. Bui recognized it immediately as closer to his own instincts and to the kind of work he wanted to do. Between the two men sits the whole tension of the profession, rigor on one side and humanity on the other, and Bui came away holding both rather than choosing.

He is quick to note that his list of formative managers is short by design. Over more than ten years he has stayed with relatively similar people and relationships, a rare kind of loyalty in an industry known for churn. Beyond direct managers, the leaders he holds up are those who look past the surface of diversity, equity and inclusion, past what can simply be seen, and engage with intersectionality and what it actually means for a team.

The Hot Topic Cycle

Bui's read on AI in recruiting starts with pattern recognition. He has seen the tooling proliferate quickly: resume screeners, process-oriented applications, a widening set of places where AI has begun to attach itself to the hiring workflow. He has also seen how fast the ground moves. "Something that was hot three months ago is maybe not as hot nowadays," he says, and that pace creates a genuine problem for working practitioners. Real fluency demands real time with the technology, and time is the one thing a full-time operator does not have in surplus.

He expects the boom to continue and intensify, and he expects it to bring its own costs. "With any type of solution that's created in this world, there's always problems that are also created as well," he says, pointing directly at ethics as the terrain that will shift most as adoption accelerates. His view of who struggles is unsentimental: the people not privy to change, the ones who cannot adapt. His counsel is to embrace it early and hold your own work loosely. What you do today, he notes, might be obsolete a year later, and the healthiest response is to be genuinely okay with that.

What the Machine Still Cannot Read

For all that, Bui draws a firm line. His advice to fellow talent leaders is to adapt to AI and build it into the process, but not to lean on it. "Don't rely on it," he says. He does not believe the technology replaces people; he believes it changes how people work and how organizations operate, and improves the processes underneath talent acquisition.

The reasons are specific. Body language in an interview is a huge signal, and reading it is not yet something a model does. Neither is the judgment to press further when an answer lands short of satisfying, to dig for what a candidate has not quite said. And then there is the domain closest to his convictions. Deciphering diversity, equity and inclusion is difficult for AI, he says, because it is difficult even for skilled recruiters: understanding what it means for a company, for an organization, and what intersectionality actually looks like for a particular team requires context no screener holds.

That is his real argument, and it is more than a technical one. The industry moved on from DEI as its headline topic the moment AI arrived. Bui thinks that was a mistake of attention, not of substance. "Although it's on a hot topic today, it's something that's still really important," he says of the work that fell out of the spotlight. Adapt to the new tools. Do not let them decide what matters.