Kaylee Estes

From an Auburn Degree to the Technical Desk

Estes graduated from Auburn and took a job as executive assistant to the CEO of a construction company. It was a serious first assignment, but she could feel it was not the shape of the career she wanted. A friend worked at a midsize local recruiting firm focused on tech and healthcare, a shop that had just won a Best Places to Work award. That detail is what caught her attention. She reached out, got connected, and interviewed.

She went in assuming she would land on the healthcare side of the business. She came out a technical recruiter instead, and the accident stuck. "This is a super fun job right out of school," she says of those early years, and the enthusiasm has proved durable: the technical desk became the foundation of everything that followed, from agency work to in-house recruiting to building her own firm.

The Two People Who Shaped the Path

Estes credits her early education in the craft to Kevin Floyd, a managing partner at that first firm and a founding member of what became a highly successful agency. He was, in her telling, a genuinely great mentor who taught her the industry from the ground up, and his influence extends well beyond her own career. Floyd has been doing this for decades and has mentored and trained a large share of the recruiting talent in Atlanta. "He's a really great human," she says.

The second name is Andy Pittman, now global head of talent at ShipBob and previously head of talent at MailChimp, now part of Intuit. When Estes was weighing a move from agency to in-house, Pittman agreed to have lunch with her. They barely knew each other. He gave her the full picture anyway: the honest advice, the tradeoffs, the things nobody writes down about making that transition. She walked out of that lunch certain she wanted to make the move. They stayed in touch for years, and in one of the tidier arcs in the business, ShipBob is now a client of hers. She describes Pittman as an exceptional talent leader in the Atlanta community with rare perspective on building effective in-house teams, and as a great human and a great recruiter all around.

Building for the Embedded Model

Estes Group has bet its model on proximity. Rather than working contingent search, the firm places its recruiters inside client organizations on a part-time basis, where they operate as in-house recruiters: owning process, partnering with hiring managers, advising on requirements. The offering has proved popular enough that the firm has moved away from contingent work almost entirely.

It is a deliberate read on where the market is heading. "The landscape around recruiting and staffing firms is changing," Estes says, pointing to the wave of new service offerings entering the market and her expectation that tooling will become part of what firms sell alongside talent. She is unambiguous about the direction of travel on one point: she does not believe recruiting is going away, by any means, with the advances in AI.

Tool Overload and the Shifting Requisition

Ask Estes what has changed most in the past year and she answers with two separate shifts. The first is the sheer volume of new products arriving. Sourcing tools competing with LinkedIn, meeting recording tools, new applicant tracking systems. "It's like tool overload almost," she says, and the exhausting part is not any single tool but the constant question underneath it: what is the shiny object, what should I actually be trying, and how do I improve my craft in an era where the answer changes monthly.

The second shift is more consequential. The roles themselves are being rewritten. New requirements, new categories of job, new asks from hiring managers who want skills that barely existed two years ago. Estes argues this is where recruiters earn their standing. Staying current is not optional, because the person on the other side of the intake call needs someone who can tell them whether the requirement they just wrote is findable in the market. "You need to be able to advise your hiring managers on that," she says. The jobs are changing, and so is the way those jobs get recruited.

Keep Your North Star

For all her fluency with the new landscape, Estes's advice to other talent leaders is a deliberate act of resistance against the noise. Get distracted by the AI conversation and the tooling churn, she warns, and you can lose the thread of the actual work. "Good recruiters know what a good process looks like, how to work really well with candidates, how to really help a hiring manager." Those basics have always been true, and she treats them as a North Star rather than a fallback.

The rest is relationships, a word every recruiter uses and few operationalize. Estes is blunt about why it matters more now, not less. A clever new sourcing tactic may surface a strong candidate, but finding someone is only the beginning. You still have to nurture that relationship and carry the person all the way through to the final stages of an interview process. The same is true of clients and hiring teams, and it is the reason a talent leader can genuinely shape how an entire company hires: influence inside the business, built on trust, applied to fundamentals that work.

Her prescription is short enough to remember on a hard day. Keep your North Star. Try new things. And know that being a good recruiter comes down to quality and relationships, always.