Erin Riska

Expanding Outward, Then Narrowing In

Riska began in training and development, a specialty she held for several years before her remit widened. She moved into people operations as a generalist and then as an HR manager inside small businesses, which meant broad responsibility for every pillar under the human resources umbrella. Compliance. Benefits. Employee relations. Talent acquisition, always, as one line item among many. She practiced that way for a long time and learned the full trade.

But breadth taught her something specific: some parts of the work lit her up and others did not. Talent acquisition consistently landed in the first category, the piece that felt best aligned with her strengths and her interests. So she reversed direction. "Over time, I stopped expanding and started narrowing again," she says, holding onto two pillars, talent acquisition and talent management, and letting the rest go. She jokes that if she never has to run another workers' compensation audit, she will die happy. When she stopped practicing as a generalist HR professional and moved in-house with a purview built purely around recruiting, she got her wish.

She is clear-eyed about the fact that her route is one of two well-worn paths into the profession. Many practitioners arrive by way of human resources and people operations, as she did; many others come through sales development and agency recruiting. "I love that both routes get us here," she says, though she notes with some amusement that the two groups remain recognizably different animals.

The People Who Built the Ethos

Ask Riska who shaped her and she will warn you that she could spend a half hour on the question. Two names surface first. Susan Alfson, founder and president of the company where Riska made the leap from learning and development into human resources more broadly, was a mentor with a long and storied career of her own. Over six years there, Alfson taught her to see the business impact of great people operations and great talent acquisition, and, more subtly, how to hold two things at once: the commercial objective and the employee experience. Riska calls the period incredibly formative and generative, the kind of stretch that sets the terms for everything after.

The second is Dan Miller, director of human resources at Brinkman Construction and Brinkman Real Estate during her time there as a talent acquisition professional. Miller mattered for a reason that is easy to overlook. Early in her career, Riska reported to operations leaders, executives and finance professionals, a reflection of how inconsistently talent acquisition is slotted into org charts depending on a company's size and structure. She gained enormously from those leaders. But Miller was the first person she reported into who had actually done the work himself. He understood it, appreciated it, valued it and, in her words, venerated it. For a practitioner who had spent years explaining her function to people who had never performed it, that recognition was formative in its own right.

The Case for Being a Late Adopter

On artificial intelligence, Riska is refreshingly unbothered by the pressure to be first. "I am the latest of all adopters when it comes to bleeding edge technology," she says, quickly clarifying that this is not Luddism. She uses technology, including AI, in her work. She simply refuses to spend her attention on tooling that arrives with a bang and vanishes within a quarter. Her preference is to let the people who are genuinely energized by exploration do that testing, then watch what rises to the top and what the practitioners she trusts are actually saying and doing. "Let them test. I will implement once something is proven." She notes the irony that in her personal life she is exactly the opposite.

The past twelve to eighteen months changed her posture. While most people mark late 2022 and early 2023, when ChatGPT became broadly available, as the turning point for the common man, Riska points out that meaningful adoption has been much more recent, and still concentrated in particular industries and disciplines rather than spread across the labor market at large. In that window she has become far more proactive about exploring, adopting and implementing tools in her own process. Some have added genuine value. Others, she says, proved a case where the juice was not worth the squeeze.

Where AI has earned its place is in information surfacing and aggregation. She points to a compensation benchmarking study she recently delivered for a client as the clearest example: faster, more efficient, higher quality, and, critically, a body of work she felt markedly more confident presenting. "It has 100% made my job in comp benchmarking infinitely more straightforward," she says.

Territorial About the Voice

The line she has not crossed is communication. Riska uses agentic tools, but to a lesser extent than many peers, and she has not reached a comfort level with letting AI speak on her behalf. She describes herself, for lack of a better term, as territorial about her voice. Even messages that could reasonably be templated get her eyes before they leave. She is not willing to press a button that promises to send something personalized to a hundred people. "I want to make sure it really is personalized."

She expects to keep trailing the field here, and she is entirely at peace with that. Outreach and candidate communication are elements of the work she genuinely enjoys and takes pride in. Her rule is simple and worth borrowing: deploy AI on the tasks that are not the best use of a recruiter's judgment, or on the tasks where the machine is demonstrably better. On the human conversation, she has yet to see any tool clear that bar.

It is a philosophy that reads as caution from the outside and as discipline from the inside. Riska has spent a career deciding, deliberately, what to hold onto and what to hand off. She let go of the workers' comp audits. She is not letting go of the voice.