Gail Audibert

Forty-Two Years, One Decision

Audibert's entry into recruiting came shortly after college, when a first job selling telephone equipment turned out not to be the right fit. Within months she applied for a role in recruiting and landed it, and she arrived with something more useful than experience: a refusal to let the second attempt go the way of the first. "There was no way I wasn't going to succeed in recruiting," she says. "I gave it my all."

That resolve compounded. Four decades later she is still doing the work, still on the contingent side of the business, and still running searches herself rather than watching from a distance. Longevity in recruiting is rare. Longevity with the intensity of someone who once had something to prove is rarer.

The Level Playing Field and the Quagmire

On artificial intelligence, Audibert leads with the upside, and it is a specific one. AI has given every recruiter the ability to research at depth, to find people, connect with them, and learn about them before the first conversation. For a Coca-Cola or a major tech company, that capability was always available. For medium-sized firms, small firms, and independent agencies, it was not. "It's giving us a level playing field," she says. "That's phenomenal."

The downside arrives with the same wave. More information means more to weed through, and what she sees flowing into companies is a quagmire of data, some of it not attached to real people or real information at all. Candidates are the ones absorbing the cost. They fire off thousands of applications and hear nothing back. "I don't know if it's the right word, dehumanized," she says, "but there's a real disconnect and kind of a sadness going around for people who are looking for opportunities." The sense that the process is hopeless, she believes, comes from everything routing through an algorithm with no way to reach a person for a conversation.

Her argument against over-indexing on data is a practical one, not a sentimental one. Screens do not surface the traits that make someone valuable. You cannot see that a person can reason, influence, earn trust, or set the data aside and go with a well-earned gut instinct until you speak with them. Those, she says, are usually the people worth hiring.

Leading the Pinnacle Society

As president of the Pinnacle Society, Audibert helps steer a peer group whose members have been vetted by other recruiters to be among the best recruiters. The organization convenes two conferences a year and trains its members continuously on emerging technology, functioning as a collective filter on what is worth adopting. "When we bring people in to our conference, everybody's like, okay, we'll get that one, that one, that one," she says. "We're kind of vetting it for everybody." Much of that work runs through the group's technology director, who reviews tools and makes recommendations to the membership.

Her ambition for the group is straightforward and she has enjoyed leading the charge on it: keeping Pinnacle positioned as a genuine influencer in the recruiting industry rather than a credential that sits quietly on a website.