Kaitlyn Borea

An Accidental Volunteer With Very Good Timing

Borea has a piece of early-career advice that sounds like a joke and isn't: if you want your trajectory to change, please a CFO. Bessie, the finance leader whose team she had filled, was thrilled with the result, and word traveled. Not long after, Paul, the CEO of Burnham Financial Group, walked over to Borea's desk and told her he thought she would make a great recruiter, and suggested she focus on it.

That conversation converted an HR generalist into a campus recruiter, her first formal recruitment role, and she has done a little bit of everything since. Burnham Financial Group, Chanel, Toma. Big company environments and then startups. She describes the origin of all of it as "a full accidental volunteer success," a phrase that undersells the pattern it established: raise your hand, learn the thing in public, deliver a result someone still remembers 15 years later.

The Mentors Who Changed the Trajectory

Ask Borea who shaped her and two names arrive immediately. The first is Kim Rogers, now CHRO at Shift4, who hired Borea to run the talent function at Toma. It was a genuine bet. Borea had spent her career at large companies and had no startup experience at all, and Rogers put her in startup land anyway. "I think it totally changed the trajectory of my career," Borea says. The relationship outlasted the job. Rogers is the person she reaches for when a situation gets sticky or a day goes sideways, someone she connects with not only professionally but on a human level, and whom she trusts "deeply and innately" to guide her in the right direction.

The second is Jamal Pierre, whom she worked with at Chanel and who took her under his wing. Eight years later they still keep in touch. What she admires in him is how entrepreneurial he is, a quality she believes talent professionals are too rarely permitted to claim. "Sometimes HR and talent professionals sort of get put into this box," she says, expected to be one very specific thing. Pierre showed her the opposite, time and again: that a career can evolve, that you can deliberately metamorphose it. Now, when she is stuck on a project or building something from scratch, she replays those conversations and asks the more entrepreneurial version of the question.

AI Is Playing on Both Teams

Borea's most useful observation about the current market is one she believes almost nobody is naming out loud. Recruiting is a two-sided market, candidates on one side and recruiters on the other, and for the first time the same technology is deployed on both. An applicant tracking system was only ever a company tool, used by a business and its recruitment team. Generative AI is not. Candidates are automating their applications, so volume has surged. Recruiters are automating screening and dispositioning, so the response has accelerated too. "AI is literally playing on both teams," she says. "So the game has gotten a little bit more complicated, and a little bit heavier because of volume."

What makes the arithmetic unforgiving is that nothing is reducing the inflow. More people are on the job market, applying has never been easier, and recruitment teams, in Borea's observation, seem smaller than they have ever been. That leaves leverage as the only real answer. Recruiters have to lean on tools to be more effective and more efficient, not as a preference but as a condition of the job.

She is equally attentive to the policy vacuum this has opened. Some job descriptions now tell candidates they are not allowed to use AI in an application. Others explicitly encourage using it on a resume. The split, she notes, comes down to each company's philosophy, its security posture, and the vision it holds for AI usage inside the business. Her guidance to talent leaders is two-sided by design: be thoughtful about how you use the technology, and be just as thoughtful about how you assess other people's use of it. As for what comes next, she is refreshingly unwilling to pretend. "I don't know that anybody has a crystal ball."

Keeping the Human In It

For all her fluency with the tooling, Borea's advice to talent leaders begins somewhere else. Prioritize keeping the human in the recruitment process, because at the end of the day the work is hiring humans. That means staying aligned on the north stars that actually matter: candidate experience, talent density, and profile. Know what you are hunting for, stay focused, and do not lose sight of the human aspect of what the function does.

She rejects the prevailing doom and gloom. Her view is that AI will elevate excellent recruiters precisely because it absorbs the mundane and hands back the hours that matter: understanding the person on the other side of the table, connecting deeply with hiring managers, working a network to genuinely understand a search. Recruiters have always had technology, she points out. What is different is how much of the workload it can carry now.

Everything Is in Pencil

The last thing Borea wanted to add was about temperament. Talent leaders, she argues, have to be innately curious and cannot afford to be intimidated by change. "Everything is in pencil," she says. "You're allowed to experiment." She offers exactly one guardrail: do not upload your company's 2025 compensation agreements.

It is advice she earned. Borea admits she was intimidated by some of these AI tools herself and had to get over that hump of fear before anything else was possible. On the other side of it, the work became fun. Now she can play with the technology, test it, and keep going. That spirit of curiosity and experimentation, she believes, matters as much as any framework a talent leader can adopt, and it is the same instinct that once made her the only person in the room willing to take an unclaimed search.