Kayla Woitkowski

The Anomaly Who Chose the Field

Recruiting, as Woitkowski puts it, is "absolutely a fall into field for most." She calls herself the anomaly, one of the rare people who studied the discipline that maps most directly onto the work she does today. Getting there still took a course correction. A first-generation college student at North Carolina State University, she enrolled as an accounting major largely on her parents' advice, sat through her very first accounting course, and found out fairly quickly that it was not right for her. Funny enough, she notes, she went on to marry an accountant, which only reinforced the point.

What redirected her was a leader in NC State's College of Management who saw something and said so. HR was a growing field, they told her, one where human interaction and the ability to positively affect the business sit side by side, and they saw potential in her for it. She started taking HR classes and found the discipline genuinely engaging. Then she stacked up internships across it: training and development at BMW Manufacturing, a leadership internship at Target, and HR generalist work in government with the AICPA and the EPA.

The turn came at BMW. Hired into training and development, she realized her full-time co-op was not consuming the forty hours available to her each week, so she went to the recruiter who had hired her and asked whether there was anything she could help with. That single act of initiative put her on an assignment supporting the company's co-op and intern hiring days, and it settled the question of what she would do with her career. She loved connecting students with opportunity. She loved the energy and vibrance of those hiring days. By graduation her own job search was narrowly targeted at university recruiting, and it has been her field ever since.

The People She Credits

Ask Woitkowski who built her, and she starts with Jill Decker, formerly Jill Decker Ripper, her very first manager when she was herself a recent college graduate. Decker's gift was belief, extended before it was earned, and a willingness to push her to stretch beyond what she knew she was capable of at the time. Decker encouraged her to take an assignment in Silicon Valley, where she expanded into technical recruiting and learned what hiring looks like in a fiercely competitive high-tech market. More than the skills, Woitkowski remembers being empowered by a leader who believed in her at a moment when she did not yet fully believe in herself.

The second is Dawn Carter, whom she calls the godmother of emerging talent and university recruiting, a leader who has run emerging talent teams at some of the biggest names in the business, including Disney, Uber and Amazon. What sets Carter apart, in Woitkowski's telling, is not the resume. It is that no matter who is asking and no matter how full her calendar is, she takes the call. Student or seasoned professional, Carter gives her time away relentlessly to better the industry and the growth of talent inside it. "I don't know where she finds the time," Woitkowski says.

The third is Anna Perrock, now Anna Zanone, her peer during their years together at SAS, where the two of them led Americas recruiting side by side. Zanone rose quickly through leadership, went on to serve as a vice president of talent acquisition, and has since stepped away from corporate America to start her own recruiting agency. What Woitkowski took from her was a model of humility: a servant leader, endlessly approachable, who takes the work seriously without taking herself too seriously. She is grateful for what the two of them built together, and for the proof it offered that you can move the business, change the lives of the talent you hire, and have a great deal of fun while doing it. She counts her current leader at Nutanix, Will Bernal, among the people who have shaped her as well.

Bots or Bodies

AI, in Woitkowski's assessment, is changing everything, starting with how practitioners themselves recruit. But the place she watches most closely is the one she considers her area of passion and expertise: entry-level hiring. The conversation she hears inside tech companies right now comes down to a blunt strategic framing: bots or bodies. Can this work be done by a bot, or does it need to be done by a human? With generative AI now writing code, a number of organizations have concluded they no longer know how they will use entry-level talent going forward, and the noise around divesting from early-career hiring has grown loud.

She thinks that is incredibly short-sighted, and she has two reasons. The first is arithmetic. Cut entry-level hiring today and you have severed the pipeline that produces your mid-career talent and the leaders you will need tomorrow. The second is capability. This generation are AI natives, and there is no better cohort to come in and drive productivity and real use cases for generative AI than the people using it every single day, in classrooms deliberately teaching them to be more performant with it. She points to IBM, whose chief HR officer has gone on the record saying the company is significantly increasing its entry-level hiring, as evidence that some of the smartest operators are moving in the opposite direction from the headlines. Organizations that decline to augment their workforce with talent that already has the skill are, in her view, leaving the advantage on the table.

The Employers This Generation Will Remember

The same uncertainty that has companies hesitating has left students anxious, and Woitkowski sees that as an opening rather than a problem. Employers have a rare chance to show up with empathy: to hear students, to see them, to acknowledge that the moment can feel concerning and disheartening, and then to tell them plainly that the skills they are building are the skills the business needs.

Her advice to talent leaders heading deeper into 2026 is to make that support concrete. Come alongside the universities. Run career readiness seminars and skill-building training. Create experiential learning and on-the-job development. And be specific about what will matter most in a world where generative AI writes the first draft of the code: critical thinking, problem solving, and systems-level thinking, understanding not simply how to produce code but how that code affects the wider system it lands in and the other areas of the business it touches.

Employers who do that work, she argues, will lower the fear and the anxiety around a generation entering the workforce at a genuinely destabilizing moment. And they will be remembered for it. "They're the employers that this generation is going to remember for years to come," she says. It is the same bet her own mentors once made on her, extended forward at scale.