Kevin Newell

Airport Rides and a Standing Invitation

The origin story begins in a car. Before he finished college, Newell was driving the owner of a staffing company to and from the airport for business trips. Somewhere in those rides, the owner made him an offer that outlasted the drives themselves: once you graduate, come interview with us.

Graduation arrived and Newell was doing door to door sales while also writing for local newspapers. He wanted something more stable. So he took the invitation, interviewed, was selected, and started recruiting immediately in an agency environment. "I fell into it," he says of the industry, with the shrug of someone who has never much cared how a career begins, only what gets built afterward.

The Mentors Who Built the Operator

Newell is unusually precise about who shaped him and what each of them contributed. Paul Sanford, a former superior with three or four decades in the recruitment industry, recognized his sense of urgency and gave it structure. Sanford helped him build a framework for how he approached the day, and the results showed up in the numbers: higher conversion rates, a stronger sense of accomplishment, and a track he could see himself moving along. Sanford also arrived early in his leadership development, coaching him first as an individual contributor and then again once he was leading others.

Ann Sterner, who came from a solutions architecture and sales executive background, brought something different. Newell credits her high EQ and her willingness to teach it. She helped him learn to navigate executive meetings, to speak with senior leaders about strategy and planning, and to handle the kind of conflict that arises at the managerial and director level rather than only among individual contributors. That was the shift from tactician to strategist.

Andy Lake, an executive at a Fortune 50 company, contributed trust. Lake had enough confidence in Newell to let him work autonomously and take part in high level decisions that carried significant impact not just for his own team but for teams across the company. At Amazon Web Services, Newell then worked for a manager he describes as a combination of everything the earlier mentors had given him: autonomy, strong guiding principles, and the ability to help him navigate leadership and senior leadership dynamics inside one of the world's most demanding organizations. "It really opened me up to a completely different world," he says.

Asked which leaders in the field deserve wider recognition, Newell named Kelsey Giltner of Amazon Web Services, Ann Sterner of Dale Workforce Solutions, and Paul Sanford of Talent First.

Leading in a Flat Organization

The mentorship at Raise has taught him the most unusual skill in his portfolio: how to lead in a completely flat organization. One of his mentors there has been in the industry since the 1980s and has done nearly everything in it, buying companies, selling companies, working across every corner of staffing. Another operates at a level that would traditionally carry a chief operations officer or chief executive officer title, and works with Newell collaboratively rather than instructionally.

There is no hierarchy to lean on. "You have to manage those without managing," Newell says, which in practice means giving people frameworks, helping them recognize their own potential, and equipping them to self manage. He is candid that a fully self managed flat structure is rare anywhere and rarer still in staffing.

The current subject of that collaboration is scale: how to take the organization to another level without importing the hierarchy it has deliberately gone without.

A Long Runway with AI

Few people in talent acquisition have been at this as long. Newell was using AI tools from around 2010, beginning with resume matching and automated scheduling. In 2017 he adopted what most people would now recognize as AI: an assessment technology for IT candidates that evaluated backgrounds using machine learning and natural language processing on the back end.

When generative AI emerged, he treated it as a discipline rather than a novelty. Every single day he carved out a couple of hours to educate himself specifically in generative AI, separate from what he already knew about machine learning, with the explicit goal of bringing it into the organization accurately. Out of that came prompt playbooks and a practical retraining of how recruiters communicate with tools like ChatGPT, which he notes is nothing like plugging terms into a search engine. He then layered in assessment tools, matching engines, and voice agents.

The insight that organizes all of it is not about tools. It is about redesign. Knowing how to operate a platform is table stakes; the real question is how the workflow itself gets rebuilt around these technologies, and how a recruiter's own professional profile changes as a result. The way a recruiter would have described themselves the old way, Newell argues, should read differently now.

The Hard Part Is Not Finding People

Newell is clear eyed about where the difficulty actually lives in his current environment. Sourcing candidates is not the bottleneck. The challenge is how roles are sold to candidates, and identifying in advance which candidates will be receptive to the speed at which his team has to operate. It is a distinction that separates a volume mindset from a market one.

That framing is also his test for new technology. A system that can parse candidates against feedback given in real time is doing something genuinely useful, because it engages with the judgment part of the work. A system that simply returns more names is solving a problem he does not have.

Advice for the Next Cycle

Asked what he would tell other talent leaders heading into 2027, Newell did not reach for a technology recommendation. He reached for a management one. Let your team members understand how their own world could be redesigned, and what it might look like six months, twelve months, two years from now. Let them think through what they could bring to candidates and to internal stakeholders using these tools.

The corollary matters just as much: stop building it for them. "Instead of building it for them all the time, allow that creativity," he says. Let recruiters write their own prompts, break their own workflows, and rebuild them. It is the same philosophy that governs how he leads in a flat organization, applied to a new frontier. Give people the framework, then get out of the way.