Justin Victoor

A Deliberate Way In

The entry point was not accidental. Justin was genuinely curious about HR and talent and went looking for it, taking night courses in college precisely because that format put students in the room with working HR professionals rather than only with textbooks. The practitioners were the curriculum. That early exposure to people actually doing the job gave Justin a clear picture of the field before ever holding a title in it.

After college came a bigger bet: leaving a hometown behind for Vancouver on the West Coast. The timing was fortunate. The Olympics were coming, the city was growing, and there was a genuine sense of momentum to attach to. Justin buckled down and looked for a way in, and Adecco provided it. Temp assignments came first, the kind of unglamorous work that teaches a recruiter how organizations actually function. Then came the Olympic contract, and with it a crash course in high volume recruitment under real pressure. What began as a foot in the door became a career.

The Leaders Who Shaped the Approach

Justin is quick to credit the people who opened doors and set standards. The first was a longtime leader at Adecco based out of Edmonton, Alberta, who took a chance on a candidate coming out of hospitality rather than a conventional recruiting background. What stayed with Justin was not just the yes, but the rigor behind it: that leader did the due diligence, followed up with the leaders Justin had worked for previously, and made an informed decision rather than a convenient one. Watching that same person build a long, dedicated career inside one organization left its own impression.

The project manager on the Olympics initiative taught a different lesson. Dig in. Say yes. Bring a level of service to clients that goes past the transaction. She was excellent at delivery and equally excellent at relationships, a combination Justin identifies as rarer than it should be, and she carried a relentlessly positive outlook through a project with an immovable deadline. That pairing of execution and warmth became a template.

A more recent influence, a VP of People Operations at Nettwerk Music Group, showed Justin what talent work looks like when it turns toward culture. She arrived focused on building initiatives that supported employees inside the organization, and the results were measurable: voluntary turnover fell to roughly 5 percent during the period Justin was on that team. It is a number Justin cites with real respect, because it makes an abstract argument concrete. Culture work is retention work, and retention work shows up in the data.

When Every Resume Is a Perfect Match

Justin is candid about where AI helps. Note taking is one obvious win, freeing a recruiter from splitting attention between a conversation and a keyboard, and producing summaries that are more detailed and more reliable than memory alone. Administrative and back office functions are another. Justin's strengths sit on the people side, in the conversational side of the work, so anything that clears the desk of process overhead buys back time for the part of the job that actually requires a human.

The pitfall is more subtle, and Justin has watched it emerge in real time. AI tools now write resumes. AI tools also match those resumes against job descriptions. The result is an applicant tracking system filling up with perfect scores, and a perfect score has stopped being a signal of fit. It has started being a signal that a machine wrote the document. Justin's practical adjustment is to stop treating the top of the list as the top of the list. Instead of chasing the 100 percent matches, look further down, toward 75 percent, where the applications tend to read as more authentic. It is a small procedural change with a large philosophical point behind it: the tooling optimized itself into uselessness at the very top, and the recruiter's judgment is what restores the signal.

Advice for the Year Ahead

Heading into 2027, Justin's counsel to other talent leaders is not technological. It is relational. Maintain the human connection. Follow up. Keep building relationships with candidates even when the pipeline moves on. Justin is realistic that no recruiter can help everyone who reaches out, but is equally clear that the people who put in the work and follow up deserve a response that reflects it. Candidate experience is built in exactly those moments, in the reply that was not strictly required.

The second half of the advice pulls in the opposite direction, and intentionally so. Stay open-minded about AI and about changes in process, because the world is shifting faster than it ever has and adaptation is not optional. Justin holds both ideas without strain: adopt the tools aggressively, and use the time they return to be more present with people, not less. That balance, learned in a temp assignment, tested against a thousand Olympic hires, and refined in the music industry, is the throughline of the career.