Jessica Oberto

From the Classroom to the Hiring Table

Oberto majored in education, and her early career took her into a school, where she eventually served as an administrator. Among her duties there was one she had never planned on: interviewing and hiring staff. She enjoyed that part of the job enough to reorganize her ambitions around it, and she went looking for work that was, as she puts it, more focused in recruiting.

What she found was that entry-level role at the University of Florida, taking in applications on paper and logging hourly campus jobs one keystroke at a time. She moved up quickly from there into higher-level exempt recruiting at the university, and the decision she describes making at that point was less a career pivot than a confirmation. This was work she enjoyed, and work she wanted to continue to pursue.

The Managers Who Taught Her the Craft

Oberto is unusually direct about how new she was to recruiting in those first years, and just as direct about who carried her through them. Jennifer Curtis and Melissa Curry were her two managers at the University of Florida, and she credits both with giving her real insight into what it actually takes to be a good recruiter rather than simply a busy one.

She was junior, she was green, and she made the mistakes that come with both. What her managers did with those mistakes is the part she has carried forward. "They took the time to teach me, show me the way, and really wanted me to continue to pursue a career in talent acquisition," she says. Two people choosing to invest patience in a brand-new recruiter is how a durable practitioner gets made, and the lesson shows in how Oberto now talks about teams: not as headcount to be tooled up, but as skill sets to be built deliberately.

Two Ways to Adopt AI, and Only One That Works

Ask Oberto how AI has reshaped recruiting and she does not answer with a product list. She answers with a fork in the road, because she has watched organizations take both branches.

The first branch is adoption by peer pressure. Companies decide they need AI in the hiring process because everyone else is doing it, take "the latest and greatest tool," and, in her words, "slap it on." It rarely ends up working in their favor, and she is precise about why. Either there was an unresolved problem in the recruiting process that the new tool simply accelerated, or there was no team in place able to acclimate appropriately to it. "The companies that kind of just said, hey, we have to get on this, and did something quickly without thinking about process and the skill sets of their team first probably had a few more bumps in the road with their AI tools," she says.

The second branch is slower and, in her experience, far more productive. Oberto describes it as a sequence, and she runs it in order. One: establish what the organization's recruiting needs actually are today. Two: map what the process actually looks like right now. Three: name the specific areas the team wants to improve. Four, and only then, ask what the best tool for that particular set of facts would be. Five: run an AI assessment to confirm the process is running smoothly and that the team is genuinely ready for what has been introduced. Skip those steps and the outcome is not a failed pilot but a wasted budget. "If your team's not ready to adopt a new tool," she says, "you're just throwing money down the drain."

The Rise of the Work Architect

Oberto's advice to other talent leaders begins with openness. Be open-minded to change and innovation, she says, because everything is changing so quickly in recruiting. Her more provocative argument concerns what the job itself is becoming. As AI absorbs the administrative and automatic tasks that once filled a requisition-heavy day, she expects a significant shift in what a recruiter is actually responsible for.

Her prediction is that talent acquisition professionals become true advisors and partners to the business. She frames the emerging role not as a recruiter filling a job but as a work architect: someone who understands how a role is constructed, what responsibilities it carries, and how to design a match rather than merely source one. That reframing carries a hiring consequence she is candid about. Leaders should be willing to bring up people who do not necessarily have a recruiting background at all, including those with deeper experience in project management, provided they can work with people and think structurally about how a job rolls out. Then, she adds, look for talent that thinks that way too.

Ten Steps Ahead, Anchored to the Basics

Oberto's closing thought is a balance she has spent a career holding. Talent acquisition is evolving quickly, and the organizations that will succeed at bringing on good talent, she argues, are the ones staying ten steps ahead of everything, taking risks and trying new things. They will do all of that while sticking to the basics of process and having the right skill sets in place for their team.

It is the same instinct that made her effective at that front desk at Florida, now applied at a considerably larger scale: curiosity about what is coming, paired with rigor about what is already broken. Oberto's value to the profession is that she refuses to trade one for the other, and her career, running from paper applications to AI assessments, is the argument for why both still matter.