John Glorioso

“Experience matters, and it matters for our people internally and for our candidates.”

At Accenture, some of the most committed recruiters John Glorioso ever worked beside were not recruiters at all. They were client-facing consultants who spent 40 or more hours a week at client sites, then stayed after hours to talk with students, run case studies and mentor the candidates they hoped to bring onto their projects. For John, now 11 years into a career at the firm, that example became a working philosophy: experience matters, for candidates and for the people already inside the organization.

The early years meant traveling and recruiting directly. The work now happens behind the scenes, in recruiting strategy, where John serves as Global Recruitment Strategic Priorities Project Manager. The view from strategy is wider than the view from a campus recruiting event, but the priorities have held steady: support the candidates moving through the process, and support the business those hires will go on to serve.

Long before global priorities and recruiting strategy, John was the student who signed up for things. At the University of Southern Mississippi, student government and leadership programs filled the calendar, and they revealed a simple trait that would shape everything after: John loves people. Political campaign work followed graduation while the next step came into focus.

That next step turned out to be recruiting. John applied for a campus recruiter role and discovered that the hiring manager was a stepfather's ex-wife. It is a story John tells with good humor, a reminder of how small the world can be. What came after was about fit. Campus recruiting drew on the same instincts that student leadership had sharpened, and the work felt like a natural fit.

The people who shaped John's career most were not a single boss but a group: Accenture's client-facing professionals. Recruiting is the core of an HR professional's job, John notes, and the thing they are paid to do. Consultants are paid to serve clients. Yet during the years John spent traveling as a recruiter, those consultants were the colleagues who taught the most.

They treated recruiting events as a plus one on top of full weeks at client sites, because they wanted to staff their projects with the best possible candidates for the clients they served. Their involvement went well beyond describing the firm. They worked through case studies with younger students, coached and mentored them, and invested real time in helping them develop so that, when the moment came, those students would be ready to step into consulting. The lesson John carried forward was about passion: people so committed to their work that they gave time after hours to finding and building the next generation of talent.

AI now runs through nearly everything the recruiting function does, from integrating new hires and confirming their experience is going well to reporting results early and often. In hiring, the goal is a frictionless process with signals built in along the way. Assessments let candidates show the work they can do, and AI helps confirm who applicants are and that they are who they say they are. Speed, in this view, is not a cold efficiency metric. Getting a candidate to an offer faster is itself part of a good experience.

What that speed buys is room for relationships. As AI takes on more of the process, John expects human connection to grow more important, not less, because candidates still need to understand a company's culture before committing to it. Removing the human element was never the point. AI is changing everything, John says, including how recruiters think about human interaction itself.

The central recommendation for recruiting leaders is about measurement. Success, in John's framing, has two scorecards: one for the people a team brings in and one for the experience it creates along the way. The second is the one most easily lost. Keeping it in view means continuing to build signals throughout the process that let candidates show who they are, finding better ways to support both candidates and the business, and coming together as a field to innovate.

Embracing AI belongs in that picture, for candidates, recruiters and the business alike. The industry has to build its processes around the new technology rather than resist it, and the teams John works with are encouraged to stay forward thinking about how, with the human experience considered in parallel. The bottom line is simple: experience matters, internally and for candidates, and the human element belongs at the forefront even as the tools keep changing.