Eileen Kovalsky

Thirty Years Inside One Evolution

The mid-90s staffing boom was, by her account, close to chaos. Demand outstripped supply, placements moved at speed, and the tooling was almost nonexistent. "There was no technology," she says of those first years. "There was a fax machine and a phone."

What kept her in the industry was not nostalgia for that period but the arc that followed it. She has watched the profession acquire the instruments it lacked: applicant tracking, sourcing platforms, CRM, analytics, automation, and now artificial intelligence. Each wave has done the same underlying thing, in her reading. It has freed recruiters to do the parts of the job that only humans can do, namely building genuine relationships with candidates, developing pipelines that hold up over time, and earning enough credibility with hiring managers to be treated as a strategic partner rather than a service desk.

That is the thread she follows, and she names it plainly. "I have so much passion around seeing this space continue to iterate and evolve," she says. It reads less like a platitude than like an explanation for why one person would give thirty years to a single function.

The Manager Who Took the Chance

Ask her who shaped that career and the first name comes quickly: Michelle Dominick, a manager Kovalsky had somewhat early in her career and, twenty years on, a close friend. Dominick was the first person to look at Kovalsky and see something not yet demonstrated on paper. She moved her into a new and challenging role, then helped her succeed in it.

"She saw something and took a chance," Kovalsky says. "Nobody else had at that point in my career, and so I'm forever grateful."

The debt has been converted into method. Kovalsky says the experience made her a better leader precisely because she now tries to reproduce it for the people on her teams: mentoring them, developing them, giving them the stretch assignment before they are obviously ready for it, and then watching them thrive.

She holds a notably generous definition of success in that work. If someone she developed eventually grows out of the role and leaves her team altogether, she counts it as a job well done. That is the closest thing to advice she offers, and it is worth sitting with, because it is not a costless position. Leaders who take it have to backfill their own bench and absorb the disruption of losing people they trained. Kovalsky treats that cost as the price of the thing being done properly.

Building a Function Before It Had a Name

The second formative figure is Chris Comiskey, who gave Kovalsky her first opportunity in talent operations, the discipline where she has now spent more than a decade of her career. The timing matters. A little over ten years ago, as she points out, the role of TA operations leader effectively did not exist.

Comiskey saw the structural logic early. His view, as Kovalsky describes it, was that the person leading day to day delivery should not be the same person accountable for everything that makes delivery possible: the technology, the process, compliance, candidate coordination support and the rest of the infrastructure candidates never see. Splitting those responsibilities sounds obvious now. At the time it was a bet.

She calls him a visionary for it, someone at the forefront of defining a role that is now standard at serious talent organizations. And she credits that early exposure with setting the direction of everything that followed. Delivery leaders inherit the requisition load. Operations leaders inherit the system itself, and Kovalsky has spent the past ten-plus years there by choice.

The AI Question

On the technology moment currently reordering the profession, Kovalsky is refreshingly unromantic. "Everybody wants something with AI," she observes, "but they often don't know what it is they want or why they want it."

Her assessment of the last few years is that the market went through a predictable adolescence. Two or three years ago, buyers were purchasing the shiny new thing because everyone else had it, or because a particular product or piece of functionality dominated conversation at every conference. Tools were bought, deployed and expected to deliver transformation with very little effort behind them.

What she sees now is more encouraging: buyers becoming savvier. Organizations are slowing down enough to ask the questions that should have come first. What is the gap we are trying to fill? What is the problem we are trying to solve? Purchasing is becoming strategic rather than reactive, and implementation is finally being weighed alongside acquisition. Her framing implies something the industry has learned expensively, which is that outcomes track the effort put behind a tool at least as much as the tool itself.

She does not claim to know exactly where this all lands. She simply says she is excited to find out, which from a practitioner three decades in is perhaps the most credible endorsement the field could receive.