Kimberly Kelly

The Placement She Still Hears About

Ask her about the people who shaped her career and the first person she reaches for is not a boss. It is one of her very first placements as an IT recruiter, a candidate she put into a program manager role at a very large IT company in Seattle. The two of them still reach out to each other every so often, and his message has stayed consistent across the years: thank you for helping catapult my life forward.

Kimberly keeps that story close for a reason. It is easy in this industry to get stuck in the numbers, in requisitions filled and time to fill and margin, and to forget that each of those data points is a household whose trajectory changed. Remembering the placement rather than the metric is how she keeps the work honest.

Two Buckets Of Influence

When she looks back at the people who influenced her rise, Kimberly sorts them into two buckets. The first holds the mentors who got her moving. Some were women roughly eight or ten years ahead of her in the business who fostered how she grew and developed, and who taught her how to navigate the industry as a whole person rather than a job title. Others were male leaders inside the organizations she worked for who helped her figure out how to push her voice forward, and whose mentorship helped her earn a seat at the table.

The second bucket is the one she says changed her most: the people she has had the chance to lead. Managing teams is where she learned that scaling a business is not an exercise in scaling her own success. It is an exercise in growing the success of others, and doing it through nurturing rather than pressure. That conviction now shapes how she advises clients on change, because the same principle applies whether the subject is a career or a process.

Going First On New Technology

Kimberly has never been the leader who waits to see how a rollout goes for someone else. Eight to ten years ago, when the industry was still asking what a bot could actually do and how stack ranking might change the way talent gets matched, her team members knew exactly what she would say when a new technology came up for pilot: can we go first, can we please go first.

That appetite came with a cost she accepted willingly. Going first often meant doing the same thing two or three times, because the first version of any technology needs tweaking before it becomes genuinely usable. She considered the rework a fair price for being at the leading edge and for having a hand in shaping the tool instead of inheriting it.

Looking back, she notes that those early tech stacks sat on the outside of the work. Teams knew they needed them, but the tools were never personal. Nobody at the desk believed the software was going to fundamentally alter what their day looked like.

When AI Became Personal

Kimberly draws a sharp line between that era and the last two years, which she describes as wildly different. AI has become a deeply personal conversation for two reasons. First, people can actually see how it helps them do something in their day. Second, they can see that their job is going to change, which raises a far more uncomfortable question: do they get to be part of that change, or do they simply have to do what they are told?

She has spent recent months in a running series of conversations with leaders about the pressure and stress that this shift is creating, and one theme keeps surfacing. Decisions about AI tools get made up in some boardroom while the people who genuinely need to use the technology are sitting right there at the desk. That is not new. It is exactly what the industry did with tech stacks. What has changed is the impact and the sheer speed of the change, which makes the old gap far more expensive.

She is also blunt about where the model is heading. Kimberly does not see RPO existing in five years. Something will exist that looks like an RPO, and the industry may well keep calling it that, but the reality is that the delivery will be automated and the value will sit in relationship-based conversations.

Advice For The Year Ahead

Her counsel to other talent leaders heading into 2027 comes straight out of that observation. Build the AI strategy with the people closest to the work that needs to be done, and use them to help develop and create how the process changes. Being intentional about that creation, and treating the people component as real change management rather than an afterthought, is what separates adoption from expenditure.

The alternative, in her words, is a colossal waste. She points to a prominent futurist who recently described talking to chief executives who all say some version of the same thing: they spent all this money and have no idea what they have to show for it. Another year of receipts and no output is not a strategy. Kimberly's answer is to take the time to work with the right people, so that when the invoices come due, a leader can explain precisely what changed and why.

It is a consistent thread across her whole career. The theater company needed income, the boutique firm supplied a craft, and every step since has come back to the same insight: the technology only ever works as well as the people asked to live with it.