Josh Moore

Cutting His Teeth in the Agency

Like many in the profession, Moore did not study talent acquisition. "I kind of fell into it thinking that I was going to follow a stereotypical HR track," he says. The staffing firm where he started, roughly 24 to 25 years ago, was where he cut his teeth, and he arrived there without a clear picture of what recruiting even was.

He learned quickly, and what he learned stuck. The agency model forces a recruiter to hold two realities at once: the specific, often urgent demand of a business, and the messy, shifting supply of talent available in the market. Bridging those two is a skill that does not appear on a curriculum. "I really enjoy connecting the dots between what a business needs in terms of talent demand and how do you find the right talent in the market to align to that need," he says. That sentence is essentially a description of his entire career.

The evolution came when the work stopped being only his own. Today Moore is as invested in showing others how to do it, in naming the craft and spreading it across the business, as he is in the searches themselves.

The People Who Gave Him Rope

Asked to name the influences that shaped him, Moore does not reach for famous names. He reaches for a pattern. Every pivot point in his career, he says, traces back to the same kind of person: someone who believed in him, stood behind him, and took a bet on him before the resume said they should.

Those leaders looked past the obvious. They evaluated him on prior experience and, more importantly, on character, then moved him into roles that stretched his skill set beyond what he thought he was capable of. Crucially, they let him fail fast. "Give me the rope to go try, build and learn, but also stand behind me to steer me," he says, describing it as having bumpers in the lane. It is a philosophy of leadership that manages risk without eliminating it, and it explains a great deal about how Moore now develops the people who report to him.

He extends the same instinct outward. Asked to spotlight peers, he named Lisa Kraska of U.S. Acute Care Solutions, whom he calls a visionary: highly inspirational, deeply grounded, and so genuine that talent is simply drawn to her. "She is almost like a magnet," he says of her ability to craft a vision and bring people along with it. He also named Branden Beard of General Motors, whom he describes as a talent cultivator, a leader who leads from the front and is unusually strong at building and scaling both teams and the people inside them.

AI as an Enabling Device, Not a Headline

Moore's read on artificial intelligence is notably unsentimental. Over the past nine to 12 months, he says, the pace has become impossible to fully track. "AI has moved. The pace is, you can't keep up. It's moving too fast." In that window he has watched the technology travel from coined term to something that is genuinely reshaping operational workflows and daily process.

His response is a discipline rather than a strategy deck. Anyone sitting in the recruiting chair, he argues, has to start learning it now, and the entry point is small: 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour each day spent understanding functionality. The gains, he says, are real. Time-consuming tasks that once consumed a recruiter's calendar are increasingly solvable, and what that buys back is attention.

That is where his framing sharpens. The industry talks constantly about recruiters becoming strategic talent advisors, and Moore's view is that AI is what makes the aspiration physically possible. "AI is an enabling device to get you into those," he says, describing the shift toward genuine focus on the business and on the talent. At U.S. Bank, the point of automating the routine is not efficiency for its own sake. It is creating the room to connect the dots that only a human can connect.

Curiosity, Humility, and a Network Worth Calling

Pressed for the advice he would give other talent leaders, Moore offers three things, and they build on each other.

The first is curiosity. Stay curious and hungry, he says, and treat it as a practice rather than a personality trait: build routines into the day, keep your foot on the gas, and pay close attention to what is changing outside the walls of your own company. Without that external awareness, he argues, no one can credibly drive a strategic talent agenda for a business.

The second is humility, and he defines it precisely. The job market is pocketed, with sharp growth in some areas and reductions in others, all of it moving fast. In that environment, the most valuable sentence a leader can say is a simple one: "Hey, I don't have the answer, but I'll find out."

The third follows naturally from the second. Moore believes an external network of fellow talent leaders is more critical now than ever, both as a lifeline and as a benchmark. Calling a peer to compare notes does something practical, surfacing outside ideas and trends that help you influence decisions in your own chair, and something human. "It makes you feel less insane in your day to day when you have a community to connect with," he says. More often than not, he notes, it turns out your peers are wrestling with the same thing you are, and the collective mindset solves what solitary thinking cannot.