Elizabeth Gormley

From the Sales Floor to the Search

Gormley began her career in sales, and like many recruiters, she says, she fell into the profession rather than planning for it. Sales led her to an agency, where she started out as a headhunter. It suited her. Cold outreach, persuasion and pipeline management were familiar terrain, but the part that caught her was less mechanical than that.

"I really fell in love with the idea of aligning talent with growing organizations and solving business problems through people," she says. That framing, people as the answer to a business problem rather than a headcount line, eventually made agency life feel too transactional. She wanted to see what she was building. Many years ago she moved in house, choosing one company, one team, and the long work of building those teams out. She has built her career there ever since, and describes the last few years of designing talent engines as a lot of fun, which is not a phrase most leaders reach for when describing the current hiring market.

AI, and the Speed Nobody Has Seen Before

Gormley spends real time comparing notes with peers, not only in Boston but with leaders running talent engines across different industries and company sizes. Her read on the moment is unsentimental. The speed of the technology and the speed of change are, she says, unprecedented, and not something most people in the profession have had the chance to see in their careers.

Her most interesting argument is that the second order effect matters more than the first. There is massive opportunity for AI to change how recruiting engines work. There is a bigger question in how those engines will have to respond to the businesses they support once AI reshapes those businesses. Talent leaders who only optimize their own workflow, in other words, are solving the smaller half of the problem.

She has watched the mood flip in twelve months. A year ago there was hesitation and uncertainty about what adoption would even look like. Today, among her own team and her peers, she sees a tremendous amount of curiosity about how to adopt automation responsibly, with the explicit goal of giving time back to the parts of the job that are most critical and most often squeezed out. That means drawing a clear line: where can we automate, and what has to remain human led. Rapid7 has built a number of tools internally, and the workflow reviews continue on a rolling basis precisely because the answers keep moving.

The candidate side has shifted just as sharply. Application tooling has made applying easier, so volumes have risen dramatically, and candidates now have more help in how they present themselves. More applicants is not the same as more signal. Gormley's team has always oriented around finding the highest quality candidate, and she is candid that AI has made that harder rather than easier. The consequence is that the way talent is interviewed and evaluated is changing, in her words, every day, and she is in the middle of rebuilding for it.

Stay Curious, Think Transformatively

Her advice to talent leaders is short and consistent with everything else about her. Stay curious. Be very open to thinking transformatively. Business overall is in the middle of significant change and talent acquisition is feeling it acutely, which makes incrementalism a poor bet. It is advice that traces directly back to her father's conviction that effort compounds and the habit of being pushed into unfamiliar rooms and trusted to think creatively once she got there. Twenty years in, Gormley is still doing exactly that, running the exercise again because the answer changed, and treating that as the fun part.

It is advice that traces directly back to her father's conviction that effort compounds and the habit of being pushed into unfamiliar rooms and trusted to think creatively once she got there. Twenty years in, Gormley is still doing exactly that, running the exercise again because the answer changed, and treating that as the fun part.