Jennifer Candee

The Accidental Recruiter Who Never Looked Back

Partway through her counseling work, Candee recognized something about the shape of her own ambition. She still wanted to help people, but she wanted to do it inside organizations, at the scale that human resources allows. So she set out to move into HR and signed up with a couple of agencies to make it happen.

Those agencies came back with a different proposition entirely. They offered her a job as a recruiter. "I never really looked back," she says. She did go on to become an HR director, completing the original plan, but the pull of talent proved stronger than the pull of the broader function. She chose it deliberately and built from there, rising to global head of talent acquisition and, along the way, becoming an unusual hybrid: a psychologist by training who reads organizations the way she once read people.

That rise came fast, and it came with a peculiar challenge. The leaders Candee reported into early on were rarely talent acquisition specialists. They were talent management SVPs or global chief people officers with less direct TA experience. There was no one immediately above her who had walked her exact path. "I basically had to become the leader that I would have wanted to have," she says. It is a line that explains a great deal about how she runs teams now.

Excitement, Concern and Trepidation

On artificial intelligence, Candee resists the two easy positions. She will not declare the transformation complete, because it plainly is not. "We're still in it," she says. What she sees across the profession is a mix of excitement, concern and trepidation, and she thinks all three are warranted.

The excitement is real where AI takes the drudgery out of the work and gives the human moments back to humans. The trepidation lives in risk and compliance, in protecting the diversity of talent pipelines, and in a line she draws firmly: AI should be guiding behind the scenes, not making hiring decisions. Her deeper worry is structural. A system trained on past behavior inherits past behavior. "Humans are fallible. AI is also fallible," she notes. "It's learning from humans."

Her practical counsel is to tread lightly and start where the barriers to adoption are lowest and the risk is smallest, sourcing, for instance, or the very beginning of the recruitment process, while keeping the strong human touchpoints intact everywhere they matter.

She has also watched a pattern emerge that troubles her: organizations cutting recruiters in order to fund the AI meant to make recruiters more strategic. Candee understands the commercial logic completely. Budget has to come from somewhere. But the sequencing, she argues, is backwards. You are cutting off your nose to spite your face when you have not yet installed the technology, tested it, and proven it strong enough to deliver the efficiencies you have already spent.

Go Slow to Go Fast

Her recommendation to fellow talent leaders is compact and countercultural in a moment of enormous hurry. Go slow to go fast. Be deliberate about the use case. Do not use AI to use AI, or test simply to test. Start instead with the real questions: what are we trying to solve for, how will this make the team more efficient, and in what way are we enabling our recruiters to do the best job they can?

That last question is the one she keeps returning to, because she thinks the profession has a habit worth breaking. TA leaders pile on technology, and however much recruiters enjoy new tools, the result is a person logging into ten different systems a day with a million tabs open. Candee wants the opposite: a streamlined, one stop environment where the machinery runs behind the scenes and the visible work is strategic. That, to her, is what elevating talent acquisition actually looks like.

Why EQ Has Never Mattered More

If there is a closing argument in Candee's thinking, it is about what technology cannot absorb. "EQ has never been more important," she says. The behind the scenes work may increasingly belong to machines. The reading of a room, a candidate, a nervous hiring manager does not.

Paired with that is a premium on agility. The leaders who will thrive, in her view, are the adaptable ones, the people who can sit comfortably with the unknown, because the unknowns are not going anywhere for the foreseeable future. In large, complex organizations and in turnaround situations especially, she prizes the ability to pivot quickly, to adapt to changing circumstances, and to offer alternative solutions without becoming emotionally attached to any single one of them. She is candid that this is genuinely hard, requiring a leader to hold what the business needs right now and where it might be going at the same time.

That flexibility in both strategy and execution, she believes, will be the most critical capability of the next decade. Coming from someone who was trained to listen for what people are not saying, and who built a global talent career by becoming the leader she wished she had, it lands as more than a forecast. It reads as a method.