Elizabeth Diley

A Business Major Who Fell in Love With People

Diley was a first-generation college student. Corporate life was not something she saw modeled at home, and talent acquisition was not a profession she knew existed. She majored in business and then filled the margins of her schedule with psychology and sociology courses, drawn to organizational structure and to the mechanics of how people interact with one another. "I really fell in love with just the way people work," she says.

Her first job out of school was in operations, where hiring occupied only a sliver of her responsibilities: coordinating candidate schedules, writing those newspaper ads. It was enough. When a talent acquisition coordinator role opened at General Mills, she applied and got it, and started, in her words, at the very bottom, reaching out to candidates and booking travel. The passion arrived almost immediately. That entry-level job turned out to be the place where her business training and her fascination with human behavior finally met.

Responsibility compounded from there, year after year, until about a year and a half ago, when she left General Mills for Medtronic. It was a deliberate leap into unfamiliar territory: a new industry, a different talent profile, a differently structured early career function. "Kind of fell into it and haven't looked back," she says of the profession that found her.

The People Who Saw It First

Diley is unusually specific about the debt she owes. The first name she offers is Margaret Newhouse, a professor at her college who pushed her to consider a corporate career at a moment when she had no template for one. "She really pushed me to think beyond what I had known already," Diley says, which is precisely what a good mentor does for a first-generation student.

At General Mills, her early manager Sarah Beattie handled the more granular work of translation. Beattie taught her how to navigate an organization, how to write professionally, how to show up to a meeting, all of it new to someone without corporate reference points at home. She handed Diley progressively larger responsibility, pushed her to think differently about problems, and instilled a confidence Diley says she did not yet have. Diley describes that investment as holistic, and she still measures her own mentorship against it.

Stephanie Lilac, now CHRO at Mondelez, expanded the frame again. Lilac pressed her to look past her day-to-day and tie her work to the business, opening doors to business partners and executives across the company. The point landed permanently: a recruiter is not only recruiting. "You also are a business partner and a talent advisor," Diley says. Understanding the enterprise made her better at the hiring itself, particularly in early career, where the real questions are how to pipeline students into the positions the business needs and where a business problem exists that early career talent can solve outright.

Most recently, Mark Smith, VP of Talent Acquisition at Medtronic, has been the voice urging her to do things differently, to think beyond consumer packaged goods and beyond the programs she knew intimately. That challenge is what widened her industry perspective and brought her into medical technology.

One thread runs through all four relationships, and Diley names it plainly: each of these people saw something in her before she was able to see it in herself. That is now the standard she holds herself to as a mentor, pushing others to think differently and to genuinely self-reflect.

Talent Advisors, Not Task Managers

Diley sees AI reshaping talent acquisition from both directions at once, and she refuses to treat only one of them as the story. Candidates, especially the students she works with, are using AI to build resumes and cover letters and to rehearse for the conversations that follow. Where that rehearsal once required another person on the other side of the table, it no longer does. Her view is not defensive. Candidates should embrace those tools, she argues, the same way every generation of job seeker has embraced the technology available to it.

On the recruiting side, the shift is more consequential. The tasks that once defined her own first role, coordinating schedules, booking travel, sending turndown notes, preparing offer letters, are increasingly automated. That, to her, is the opportunity. "It has helped elevate recruiters to be more talent advisors versus task managers," she says, describing a change she has watched build over the past couple of years and accelerate sharply in the last year specifically. Freed from administration, recruiters can do the work that actually grows a business.

She is equally clear about what technology cannot replace. The candidate experience is, in her framing, the thing that matters most, alongside finding top talent for the organization. Much of the future will be technology-driven; the discipline is figuring out how to bring the human and the technological together so that the experience improves rather than erodes.

Looking Around the Corner That's Around the Corner

Her advice to other talent leaders begins with mindset. Growth versus fixed is not an abstraction to Diley, it is a diagnostic. "If you're battling technology, you really need to think about what that means and how you're showing up then for your leaders and for your team," she says. The leaders who stay curious, who keep educating themselves on what is coming, are the ones who will still be useful in five years.

That is where her favorite formulation comes in. Anticipation cannot stop at the obvious next step. You look around the corner that's around the corner, and then the one after that, and you prepare your teams now to embrace that future while protecting the human touch. She applies the same logic to people development, particularly for less tenured employees building careers in an environment shifting under their feet. What excites her about the years ahead is exactly what unsettles others: talent acquisition and HR operating models, she notes, keep evolving at a rapid speed.

The rest of her counsel is simpler. Do what you love, because that is where the great work comes from. Believe in yourself. Find mentors and sponsors who will help you reach not only your career goals but your life goals. Have fun doing it.

Ask what sustains her and she points to the moments that never appear on a dashboard: standing in front of a group of students, welcoming an internship class, sitting with someone on campus who has no idea what they want to do and helping them assess their own skills. "I get to help people find their dream job," she says. "I get to build teams that get to go out and educate students about companies, about jobs, and to help them think about their careers and their first jobs differently." She is convinced she has one of the best jobs there is. On the evidence, it is hard to argue.