Jessica Trujillo

From Psychology to the Pipeline

The through line was always people. Coming out of Cal State Northridge with a psychology degree, Trujillo did not have a precise destination in mind, only a category. Human resources seemed like the obvious translation, the business application of everything the degree had covered. That logic led to a recruiting coordinator role, which was supposed to be a stepping stone toward an HR operations title.

What happened instead was a conversion. Coordinating for a team of more than 30 recruiters offered a panoramic view of how differently each person worked, negotiated, and engaged. There was a scoreboard to it, a measurable question of how many people got hired, and Trujillo found that energizing rather than exhausting. Within roughly a year, the HR administrator plan was retired for good.

Adtech turned out to be the right terrain for that temperament. The industry moves quickly, roles shift constantly, and every requisition demands a fresh education. Trujillo treats that as a feature. Recruiters do not perform the jobs they hire for, but the good ones develop real visibility into what those jobs actually require, and that visibility is what separates a resume matcher from a partner.

The Mentors Who Set the Bar

Trujillo is generous and specific about who built this career, and the list runs in three directions. The first is the manager who made recruiting look like something worth doing. Trujillo met this mentor at that first company, followed her to another organization where she became the direct manager, and describes her simply as the reason for wanting to be a recruiter at all. She showed the ropes and, just as importantly, modeled how to be competitive in the space. She is now a recruiting leader at GumGum, and Trujillo still credits her with shaping the recruiter she became.

The second direction is current leadership. Two leaders Trujillo works with now push for strategic thinking rather than tactical execution, which is the appropriate challenge at a senior level. The third is less obvious and, Trujillo argues, underrated: an HR mentor who connected the operational and administrative machinery of human resources to the recruiting function. Recruiters sit inside the HR organization, and understanding how that organization actually operates makes for a stronger recruiter. That lesson has stayed.

AI as a Multiplier, Not a Replacement

Trujillo is an enthusiastic adopter, personally and professionally, and rejects the framing that dominates most conversations about automation in hiring. The threat is not that AI takes the job. The threat is standing still while the tooling moves. Applicant tracking systems are already absorbing AI capability, and Trujillo expects vendors to keep pace with the trend or lose relevance.

The math is straightforward. A significant share of a recruiter's week is administrative, and another large share is sourcing. Both are exactly the kind of work that can be compressed. The recruiters who benefit most, in Trujillo's assessment, will be the ones who successfully strip out the busywork and reinvest the recovered hours in the parts of the role that require a human being: closer relationships with hiring partners, more time with candidates, more presence with external leaders.

At Kargo, that is an active project rather than a talking point. The recruiting team is evaluating different tools with a stated purpose, which is to make the work easier so there is more time to spend with candidates and business partners. AI has also started showing up in evaluation itself, helping build scorecards that give recruiters and business leaders a shared language for discussing the candidates in front of them.

Advice for Talent Leaders

Heading into 2027, Trujillo's advice comes down to a single word: proximity. Talent leaders should want a seat at the table, meet with business leaders, and immerse themselves in the operation deeply enough to talk about where it is going, not just what needs filling this quarter. The 2027 planning conversations are already underway on Trujillo's side, which is rather the point.

The urgency is structural. Since the pandemic, businesses have absorbed multiple significant changes inside a single year, and a recruiting function that only understands the present tense will always be late. Visibility into the next six to twelve months is what allows a recruiter to identify the skills that actually matter and to build evaluation criteria that hold up.

There is a sharper version of the point buried in it. Trujillo expects hiring to shift further away from cataloging the skills a candidate already has toward identifying the capabilities an organization is currently missing. That is a harder question to answer, and it is unanswerable from outside the business. If the business is moving quickly, recruiting has to understand what that movement looks like. Recruiters are not doing the roles, but they should have the visibility.