Eric Hess

A Career That Began With Someone Else's Instinct

Hess graduated from college into a recession and was working retail when the opportunity found him. He had no plan to build a life in hiring. "I wasn't necessarily anticipating taking a role in talent acquisition," he says. "I just kind of fell into it. And it's been a love of mine ever since."

Staffing became his proving ground for quite a few years before his path carried him into large corporate environments and eventually into leadership. He describes what followed without embellishment: his career progressed and blossomed from there. What is striking, two decades on, is how little distance he puts between the person he is now and the twenty-something who got a chance from someone willing to look past the application in front of him.

Three Leaders, Three Lessons

Hess names three leaders without pausing over the list. The first is Blair Ruiz, one of his earliest managers in staffing and, as it happens, the same manager Eric Hudson reported to. Ruiz taught him how to work, not merely how to get things done. "Work hard and have pride and value in what you do and treat people well," is how Hess summarizes it. That work ethic was instilled at a young age, he says, and he remains forever grateful for it, because it is the standard he still holds his own teams to.

The second is Preeti Bhatia, one of his leaders at Amazon and, in his estimation, one of the best leaders he has ever had the opportunity to work with. They worked together through the challenging years of the pandemic, when demand for the business surged and hiring, as Hess puts it, was running wild. Bhatia challenged him to think more broadly, to dive deep, and to grow from a strong operator into a strategic thought partner and leader. She also taught by example. "She cared about her people. She treated everybody fairly," he says, and she wanted to see everyone succeed. She was integral to his development and advancement inside Amazon, and he still points to the way she operated fairly and justly and fought for her people as the template.

The third is Martina Winston, who hired him into his role at Protective Life. Hess describes her as a phenomenal leader, passionate about helping others, empathetic, and unafraid to stand up for what is right, one who pushed the organization to bring diverse and inclusive thinking and structure to its recruitment efforts. He is candid that he emulates a lot of her characteristics directly. She helped mold him into a different kind of manager for his team, and he describes her as a critical component and a catalyst in who he is today.

Leaning In Before the Curve

On artificial intelligence, Hess is neither skeptic nor hype merchant. He sees talent acquisition sitting at the front end of adaptation and adoption, from language models to new automations, and he thinks that position is earned rather than accidental. Recruiting teams have an appetite for these tools, he says, because they understand the lift AI can provide against the nuanced and transactional tasks the function has always had to handle.

He puts the stakes plainly. "In our world, if you're not leaning into it, you're behind the curve," he says. The reasoning is not novelty but arithmetic. Efficiency in the process affects time to fill, affects hiring, and affects the candidate experience, and those are the measures by which successful talent acquisition organizations are judged. So his team examines the entire chain, from the inception of the application through evaluation, offers, negotiations, and start date, asking where AI can close a gap or break down a barrier that existed in previous years.

The endpoint he cares about is not the technology. It is how the organization shows up, how candidates are treated, and how quickly and how timely a team is able to respond to the people who raised their hand. That, he says, is something Protective Life continues to iterate on, and something the wider profession should keep iterating on too.

What Never Changes

Asked what advice he would offer other talent leaders heading into 2026, Hess acknowledges the volatility of the last two decades: the rise and fall of job boards, the arrival of LinkedIn, the remote work reset, now the AI wave. Then he pivots to what has survived all of it, and to the thing he credits for his own success.

"Keeping your customer top of mind," he says, whether that customer is an internal stakeholder in the business or an external candidate. Deep, sustaining, meaningful partnerships. Communication and collaboration. The customer service dimension of the work, held visible inside the team and across the current and future employee base. "That will never change," he says. "There's a human and a personal touch that comes with talent acquisition that is important to not lose touch of."

It is worth noting where that conviction was formed. Hess's career exists because a recruiter spent thirty unhurried minutes with a job seeker who had applied for something else entirely, listened closely enough to hear a different future, and said so out loud. No automation would have caught it. His counsel to the field is essentially an argument for protecting that capacity at scale: let the tools take the friction, and make sure the relationships, the rapport, and the partnerships with hiring managers, business leaders, and candidates stay at the center of the work. "The more things change," he says, "the more things stay the same."