Kate Andrews

From the Whole People Function to the Front of It

Andrews has spent her career in HR and has held a wide range of roles across the HR and people function. In each of them, one thread kept reasserting itself. Whatever the title, whatever the remit, the highest-leverage work always involved bringing in top talent, and so she kept playing in that space in different capacities until she was ready to own it outright.

That breadth is not incidental to how she leads today. A leader who has worked across the people function understands that a hire is not a transaction that ends at the offer letter. It is the beginning of a tenure, and the experience a candidate has during the process sets expectations that either hold up or collapse in the first ninety days. Andrews frames her mandate as bringing in the talent to build the future, and she measures it not only by who says yes but by who stays.

Her proudest signal of success is a piece of unsolicited feedback that recurs. New hires arrive and tell her team that the picture they were given in the process was accurate. "You told us everything," they say, "and we see it as we walk in the door." She credits her recruiters directly for making that possible. In a market full of polished pitches, honesty that survives contact with reality is a competitive advantage, and she treats it as one.

The Leaders Who Shaped Her

Andrews calls the question of naming influences "a great problem to have," because the list is long. Three stand out.

Early in her career, at a large Fortune 500 organization, she worked with a recruiting leader whose focus was early career pipelines and, crucially, how to build them into real programs through university relations rather than treat them as seasonal hiring pushes. That hyper focus, encountered at a formative moment, was monumental in shaping how Andrews thinks about the space to this day.

At her previous organization, she met Karen, the leader of the talent function, from the other side of the table. Karen gave her what Andrews describes as the world's most incredible experience as a candidate, and was a huge reason Andrews joined the company at all. It was a live demonstration of the thesis Andrews now runs on: recruiting is not administrative, it is the front of everything, and a great recruiting leader can change where a talented person decides to spend the next chapter of their career.

The third influence is the one she works with now. Andrews describes her current team as some of the world's best recruiting leaders, distributed across the globe, and says she is honored to learn from them almost daily about the nuances, the shifts and what is newly possible in the field. "The leadership that we have today is awe-inspiring," she says. It is a notable admission from someone senior enough to stop learning: the mentorship, in her telling, now runs upward as well as down.

People First in an AI Reset

Andrews does not treat artificial intelligence as a recruiting story. She treats it as a bigger one. "AI is reshaping more than just TA," she says, pointing to the whole talent space, the way work happens inside companies, and society itself. The rules, in her view, are still being written, and talent acquisition is no exception to the changes headed its way.

She is genuinely optimistic about what the tools unlock. Speed and efficiency, yes, but more specifically the ability to better enable recruiters to find people, to build fairer processes, and to evaluate skills across the world rather than within a familiar radius. That last point matters for a global team. Andrews sees AI as something that opens new doors for the function rather than narrowing it.

The caution she carries is precise. As technology, tooling and efficiency gains accumulate, she insists that the experience stay at the heart of the work. Her guidance to other talent leaders is a discipline rather than a slogan: keep people first, keep recruiters relationship-oriented, and build the combination of human and machine that actually differentiates the organization in the eyes of a candidate. "While this evolves and hopefully is better for the recruiters, better for our candidates as they come in the door," she says, she is equally conscious of balancing all of it. She expects the evolution to continue for years, and she is, by her own description, very excited to see where it goes.

The Standard She Sets

What emerges from Andrews's account of her work is a leader who refuses the false choice the industry keeps offering itself. Efficiency or humanity. Technology or relationships. Volume or experience. Her answer is that the function only earns its seat by delivering both at once, and that the proof shows up quietly, in the new hire who walks through the door and finds the company exactly as it was described.

It is also why she is intentional about credit. Asked about the leaders who shaped her, she named a program builder, a recruiter who changed her own career, and her own team. The through line is a belief that recruiting is a craft passed hand to hand, and that the people practicing it are worth naming.