Elizabeth Lee

The Class of 2008

Lee graduated in 2008 with a degree in psychology, fully intending to become a therapist and help people work through the problems of their lives. The Great Recession had other plans. What opened up instead was an opportunity to provide recruiting and temporary staffing services alongside permanent placement, at precisely the moment when an offer letter meant everything to the person receiving it.

She still describes the reaction she encountered in those moments as the thing that redirected her career. "The happy crying that would happen when you give someone an offer during such a critical time was something I found to be incredibly rewarding," she says. It turned out the psychology degree had not been wasted at all. She had simply found a different room in which to help people with the problems of their lives. She invested full steam into talent acquisition after that, and the through line has never really changed. She is still in the business of making people's dreams come true, now at scale and at the executive level.

Human First, AI Underneath

Lee has watched the past year of AI adoption in recruiting and concluded that the shift has made good practitioners more purposeful and more intentional rather than less. Relationship recruiting, in her assessment, has not gone anywhere.

Her own toolkit reflects that balance. She leverages AI to handle calendar coordination, to draft communication templates, and to support the initial selection and evaluation criteria her team applies. What she has drawn a hard line around is decision authority. AI does not make calls on her behalf or on her team's behalf, and no candidate at her organization is routed to a video avatar in order to earn the right to move forward. "There's a lot that you can get from the human experience of communicating and being able to see what a person's bringing to the table," she says.

Where she is genuinely optimistic is data. She is watching the emergence of AI note-taking tools that capture not only the substance of a hiring conversation but sentiment, and that can relay that signal back to hiring teams so they understand how they are showing up and where the candidate experience can improve. Her enthusiasm comes with a condition many vendors have yet to satisfy. She wants confidence in the integrity of the underlying data, and confidence that the way these tools assess people delivers real parity and equality across the full candidate demographic. Until both are true, the human stays in the seat.

Advice for the Next Cycle

For professionals looking for their next opportunity heading into 2026, Lee offers advice she has followed herself. Lean into AI tools to work smarter rather than harder, particularly on personal branding and how you show up digitally. She is candid that branding is not her own natural strength as a people and culture expert, and says plainly that she is thankful the tools now exist to close that gap.

But she is emphatic that the technology supplements the work rather than replacing it. "In job search moments, relationships have been king," she says. Sustained investment in strong in-person connections with the people in your professional ecosystem remains, in her view, the most reliable asset a candidate has.

For those in the hiring seat, her guidance is to prepare for application volume that no longer correlates with genuine interest, and to build the systems that separate signal from noise so recruiters can spend their attention where it matters.

It is a fitting instinct from someone whose career turned on the realization that the best part of this profession is what happens on the other side of the offer.