Justin Tang

A Cold Call That Changed the Career

The turn came in 2014. Tang was working an outside sales position when a recruiter from Randstad reached out to him directly about a staffing consultant role. Recruiting had never crossed his mind. He took the call anyway, learned the job involved running a full desk, both the sales side and full cycle recruiting, and decided to join. The transferable skills were obvious in hindsight. The willingness to pick up the phone was the actual variable.

He spent about a year in staffing before moving into corporate recruiting at Equinox Fitness, where he handled field recruiting for roughly 16 club locations. He was successful there, and as the company expanded he moved into a leadership role inside its talent acquisition group, spending about two years leading a team of recruiters. In 2021 he made the jump to Triumvirate Environmental as a talent acquisition manager. About a year and a half ago he was promoted to associate director.

The People Who Took the Risk

Ask Tang about gratitude and he starts with the people who saw something before he had proven it. Dan O'Leary, a sales leader at Staples, hired him into an outside sales role when Tang had no outside sales experience and the company was looking for a seasoned professional. "He went out on the limb and took a risk on me," Tang says, and he is direct about the arithmetic that followed: without that sales role, the Randstad recruiter would never have called, and there would have been no bridge into talent acquisition at all.

Yannick Riveti recruited and hired him into Equinox, and then kept investing after the hire. Tang credits him as a great mentor who developed him professionally and had him ready when a leadership opening appeared. Tang describes him as fun, outgoing, slightly eccentric, and genuinely excellent at professional development. Riveti is now based in Amsterdam at Google, working on EMEA workforce strategy and talent pipeline resilience for Google Cloud data centers.

The third is Elise Gebeili, now Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Triumvirate Environmental and Tang's current leader. She was the talent acquisition manager when she reached out to him on LinkedIn about the opening she was vacating on her way into an HR director role. They worked together closely, and Tang says she taught him not only the company and the craft but how to lead teams and, most importantly, how to build strong relationships with the business. Business acumen was the area where he most wanted development, and she gave him the tools and guidance to close the gap. He calls her a driven, strategic, understanding leader who drives performance and success across the department. He also points to Joseph Keenan, senior director of global talent acquisition at Equinox, as an empathetic, caring leader whose deep grasp of the business makes him better at guiding talent acquisition teams.

Patient About AI, Not Passive

Tang has no illusions about the scale of what AI is doing to the labor market. He notes headlines such as Oracle cutting 30,000 roles to redirect capital toward AI infrastructure and data centers as evidence that the technology is reshaping how businesses function and which jobs even exist to hire for.

Inside talent acquisition, though, his counsel is restraint with intent. There is enormous pressure on companies to adopt AI, and in his view a lot of teams are adopting it because they feel obligated rather than because they can articulate why. The test he applies is simple: does it make the hiring process better for the candidate, the hiring manager, and the recruiter? "Ultimately, at the end of the day, is that the experience in the process is good for all parties, most importantly the candidate," he says. He has watched enough stories about candidate experience degraded by badly deployed automation to insist that companies establish standards, guidelines, and values before tools.

That is how his own team operates. Patient. Intentional. Not implementing AI for the sake of implementing AI. But patience is not paralysis, and Tang is quick to quote an intern who spent the summer with the team and built a project on AI and talent acquisition. The intern's conclusion, which Tang endorses, was that the talent acquisition professionals who do not evolve with AI are the ones who get left behind, and the gap will not be a small one.

From Filling Reqs to Sitting at the Table

The advice Tang most wants other talent leaders to hear is about identity. "We're more than just filling recs," he says. The profession is evolving into a genuine business partnership, and he believes in a consultative recruiting approach that starts with understanding the business rather than processing a requisition. His own portfolio is proof of the shift: workforce planning, mergers and acquisitions, and the unglamorous but decisive work of getting acquired companies built into systems and hiring processes.

He frames the standard he sets for his recruiters as a triple mandate. Hire the best person for the company, for the hiring manager's team, and for the individual being hired. All three have to be true. For talent acquisition leaders reading the next few years correctly, he argues, the priority is skilling recruiters up in exactly these areas, planning, business acumen, integration work, so the function keeps earning its seat as the profession continues to evolve.