Gerry Crispin

From Mechanical Systems to Human Systems

Crispin studied engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, then took an opportunity to go to graduate school for industrial organizational psychology. He describes the pivot in the language of a systems thinker: he moved from mechanical systems to human systems. To fund the transition he taught basic psychology at Stevens for a couple of years, then took a job in career services. That, he says, is where he fell in love with recruiting.

The work was deceptively simple on paper. Several hundred graduating students, and in those days, especially for engineers, jobs that were not hard to come by. What fascinated him was everything the students had not thought about: how they presented themselves, and why they were taking a job at all beyond making some money. The questions he began asking then are the same ones he asks now. Does the work you do make a job? Does the job you do make a career? And does that career fit the life you actually want to live?

At the end of his graduate work he joined Johnson & Johnson, where he spent more than 10 years working almost entirely in human resources and recruiting. A second decade followed on the other side of the table, running recruitment advertising operations for one of the industry's major players. When the internet arrived, he was fascinated enough to start his own business around it, writing several books, consulting widely and doing some recruiting on the side. In the early 2000s he pivoted again, this time to building the peer community that CareerXroads is known for today.

The Letters He Wrote to His Elders

Long before networking was a verb in this profession, Crispin was writing letters. "When I was very young, they were elders in the field," he says of the people who shaped him. "I was fascinated by what I could learn from them and began writing to them." He would write to anyone helping him better understand what he was trying to accomplish, and, more often than not, they wrote back.

One of those correspondents was Mark Huselid, whose early work in the 1970s and 1980s attempted to measure the impact of recruiting and human resources on the performance of corporations. For a young man trained as an engineer, the lesson landed hard and permanently: the human side of the business could be measured, and if it could be measured it could be argued for in the language executives respect.

Today the legion of people he learns from is, as he cheerfully notes, entirely younger than he is. He singles out his business partner Chris Hoyt, a former director of talent acquisition at PepsiCo and now president of CareerXroads, as one of the more extraordinary individuals he has met along the way. What Crispin admires is not just competence but temperament: a passion for the work and a compulsion to keep finding ways to improve it, matched to Crispin's own aspiration to make a difference in the world around him. After a decade together, Hoyt is leading the reinvention of the CareerXroads platform with AI so that peers and colleagues can keep chatting, engaging and learning from each other. "You learn from everyone that you have a conversation with," Crispin says, and after 60 years he still means it literally.

The Choice Is Not Agent or Human

Crispin expects wave after wave of change as AI matures, and he draws the parallel deliberately. The early internet was often broken. You could not find things. Yahoo was not much help. Google eventually became the way everyone learned to get around. AI, he argues, is on the same arc, and it has already reached the point where agents can conduct interviews equal in quality to what a human can do, even if plenty of agents in the market are not yet that good.

This is where he parts company with the prevailing anxiety. Candidates say they want to deal with a human, not an agent. Crispin's response is blunt and, once heard, hard to unhear. "You don't have a choice between an agent and a human. You have a choice between an agent or nothing." When 200 people apply for a job, no recruiter is going to interview 200 people. Roughly a dozen get to show up, engage and interview. The rest are, at best, politely told the role is moving on without them. Most are simply ghosted.

An agent, by contrast, can have substantially the same conversation with all 200 in a short period of time, probe their answers, and focus entirely on their capability to do the job. If everyone who expresses interest could genuinely compete, Crispin argues, the perception candidates hold of the entire hiring process would improve dramatically. He is clear-eyed about the symmetry of the problem, too: employers now worry about non-human candidates applying to hundreds of jobs, sometimes without the candidate even knowing it is happening. He expects extraordinary shifts within the next couple of years.

And he keeps returning to that digital twin, not as a novelty but as a career tool. Imagine graduating from college with one, he says, an agent that accumulates your experience alongside you, assesses it, finds new ways to reflect it back, and strengthens your ability to make choices about how you manage your career. It is the career services job he loved in his twenties, scaled to a lifetime.

The Line Below Which Nobody Should Practice

Asked what advice he would give people entering talent acquisition, Crispin does not talk about tools or tactics. He talks about standards. His single piece of advice is to understand the baseline practices that must form the foundation of hiring, the floor beneath which no professional should be operating.

He starts with the obvious one. Every employer who invites people to express interest owes every one of them a clear answer when the answer is no. "Ghosting a candidate is an unacceptable practice in hiring in the 21st century," he says, and leaders in talent acquisition need to jump on that train. He puts pay transparency, AI transparency, closure for applicants and thoughtful treatment of people with neurodiversity and other needs in the same category: not best practices to aspire to, but baseline practices that define a starting point for building leadership in the field.

Above that line, he is generous and pluralistic. There are plenty of legitimate ways to approach best practice depending on the size of your company and the industry you compete in. Below it, he is unsparing. Practitioners operating there should be called out by their peers and colleagues, and encouraged to consider another career. Coming from someone who has spent six decades trying to make the profession worthy of the people who pass through it, the verdict carries weight. Crispin still describes the work as fun. The standard he holds it to has never softened.