Kelly Molina

From Social Work to the Investment Bank

Molina went to graduate school for social work and began her professional career in the field. Around the time she turned 30, she reached a conclusion that many people arrive at and few act on: she no longer wanted to be in social work, but she had no intention of abandoning the thing that had defined her working life. "The thing that I really loved and that I've always done all my life is work with people and helping people," she says. The open question was which industry would let her keep doing it.

The answer came from a friend in investment banking, who told her recruiting was full of exactly what Molina was already good at: personal communication, and working across the board with people at every level of a business. Her friend thought she would thrive in it. "And so that was it," Molina says. She started inside an investment bank and progressed there, and that first role became the foundation of everything that followed.

She is candid about what made the leap possible. The move from social work to recruitment looks natural in hindsight, and she knows plenty of people who have made it, but somebody has to open the door first. "It's always about that first person that's going to let you walk through the door and fail, and then hopefully succeed from there," she says. Her first recruitment leader was that person, and Molina still counts that willingness to bet on an unproven candidate among the defining influences of her career.

The Tap on the Shoulder

The second inflection point came after Molina moved into recruitment consulting, where she worked as a senior recruiter. Her leader there saw something in her before she fully saw it herself and tapped her on the shoulder to step up into management. It was, she recalls, the moment she realized someone in a position to know believed she was doing something right. She describes that leader simply as a great one, and credits her with opening the door to a management career.

That belief compounded. Molina stayed with the consulting firm for roughly 12 years, climbing steadily up the ladder. The lesson she takes from both of her early champions is the same: careers turn on people who extend an opportunity slightly before the evidence is complete.

Her third influence is her current leader at Willowbridge, Durell Vieau, who was once a client. The two worked together during Molina's consulting years and did enough good work that when the Willowbridge opportunity opened up, a single conversation was sufficient. Molina describes Vieau as a rock: even, unflusterable, down to earth, and at the same time inspirational and motivational, a leader who pushes the envelope. "People want to do well for her," Molina says, "and to me, that's a sign of a great leader." Since joining, Molina has continued to expand her remit, and today she owns talent management alongside talent acquisition, giving her responsibility not only for who comes through the door but for what happens to them once they are inside.

AI That Enhances the Human Touch

Willowbridge hires at volume, which means Molina's teams have historically been inundated with resumes. The temptation in that environment is to become a conveyor belt, passing candidates along without ever really engaging with them. AI and automation have changed that math. "We are definitely entering that AI capability," she says, and the practical result is concrete: her recruiters now speak to considerably more candidates than they could before. The technology stepped up the team's game rather than replacing it.

She is continuing down that path deliberately. A demo of an AI interviewer sat on her calendar the same day she discussed her career, a prospective partnership she called exciting. But her appetite for the technology is anchored in a specific conviction about what it is for. In her view, every industry, and recruitment in particular, has room to let AI make people more effective and more efficient. What it should not do is remove them.

"It's not about getting rid of people. It's enhancing the human touch," she says. The administrative and mundane work that consumes a recruiter's day can be handed off, and what comes back is capacity: capacity to partner properly with key stakeholders in the business, and capacity to connect with candidates in a more meaningful way. For a leader who came to recruiting because she wanted to keep working with people, that is not a productivity argument. It is a philosophical one.

Understand the Why, Not the Trend

Molina's advice to other talent leaders is a warning against reflexive adoption. "It's really, really important to not lean into the trends, but to really understand why things are becoming popular," she says. The market moves fast, and buying a tool because everyone else is buying it produces expensive disappointment.

The better question, she argues, is how a leader capitalizes on the strengths of their own people. That means putting tools in recruiters' hands, but it also means doing the harder work of explaining them: helping teams understand the effectiveness and the efficiencies a tool actually delivers, and being transparent about why these capabilities matter going forward in this career. Do that well, she believes, and recruiters show up as true partners to the business rather than order takers.

It is the same instinct that pulled her out of social work and into recruiting, applied now to technology strategy. Tools are only ever in service of relationships. "I never want to be able to take the human out of recruitment," she says, and everything she has built at Willowbridge is designed so that she never has to.