Heidi Lynne Kurter

The Backfill Question

Most organizations treat departures as a hole to be plugged. Kurter treats them as a design opportunity. When someone exits the business, she sits with the hiring manager and works through a deliberate sequence: do you need these exact skills, or is that simply the shape the job happened to take? Does the role need to evolve to get the team where it needs to go? Can the responsibilities be parsed out strategically across the existing team rather than reassembled into the same job description?

It is a discipline that requires patience and a willingness to slow a manager down in a moment when they want speed. It also requires credibility, which is why Kurter invested so heavily in learning the functions she supports. Her view is that a talent leader who cannot speak intelligently to a role has no standing to challenge how it is defined.

Germany, and the Cost of Credibility

The formative chapter came when Kurter was living in Germany and had to dive into technical recruiting. She did not arrive with a technical background. She built one, learning the terminology and the substance of the work because she understood that credibility with engineers is earned, not assumed. "I needed to gain credibility with the people that I was speaking with," she says of that period.

She had help. A leader there, though not a recruiter himself, played an unusually active role in hiring because he genuinely cared about talent. He worked hand in hand with her, not to make her an expert in every detail of every role, but to ensure she could speak to each one confidently. The lesson stuck and generalized well beyond engineering. Kurter came away convinced that she needed to understand roles across the business, finance and marketing included, with the same seriousness she had brought to technical hiring.

The People Who Shaped Her

Kurter is unusually generous in naming the people who taught her, including one who reported to her. That recruiter arrived with what Kurter calls a forward-thinking mindset and a habit of championing unconventional candidates, the ones Kurter or anyone else might have passed over. She would look at them in a different light and bring them forward. Most of them turned out to be incredible candidates. Kurter still describes it as one of the most genuinely creative, out of the box approaches she has encountered, and she is candid that the learning ran upward.

Her current manager gets equal credit, specifically for the backfill discipline that now defines Kurter's practice. It is a small intellectual gift with outsized consequences: a habit of thinking that prevents organizations from spending real money rebuilding roles they no longer need.

That gratitude extends outward. Asked to name talent leaders deserving of recognition, Kurter pointed to Natalie Alexiou, Head of Talent Acquisition at Digital.ai; Tayeba Rizvi, Principal Recruiter at Digital.ai; and Amith Nag Ganesh, now at Redesign Health, whom she describes simply as phenomenal at recruiting.

A Deliberate Skepticism About AI

In an industry sprinting toward automation, Kurter's position is considered and firm. Digital.ai, by her account, tries not to use AI in its recruitment process, and the reason is bias. It is a stance that costs speed and buys something else: confidence that the humans making hiring decisions are actually the ones making them.

She is watching the alternative unfold through friends who have been laid off or separated and are now navigating the market. They apply, receive a link, and record answers into a void. There is nobody on the other end. Kurter has not been through one herself, and she is honest that she does not know how she would feel if she were. What she does know is that it represents the single largest shift she has observed in how hiring is conducted, and she is not rushing to adopt it.

Permission to Pause

Her advice to talent leaders heading into 2026 is not about tooling. It is about attention, and it is quietly countercultural. The volume of AI content aimed at talent professionals has become, in her word, inundating: webinars, workshops, articles, headlines, an endless scroll of things TA leaders should be doing. Kurter's counsel is to whittle it down.

It is genuinely acceptable, she argues, to pause the inbound entirely for a stretch and choose one channel instead, perhaps only attending networking events such as ATD gatherings and gathering information there. "It is okay to pause and process and get your information from different ways at different times," she says. She frames it plainly as a mental health issue. The constant drumbeat of change is exhausting, and exhaustion is not a strategy. Leaders who protect their capacity to think will make better decisions than those who simply consume more.

It is a fitting philosophy from someone whose defining professional instinct is to stop, ask whether the obvious move is the right one, and only then proceed.