Kristen Sroczynski

From The Cosmopolitan to the Candidate Pipeline

Sroczynski is a Las Vegas native, and every role she held from university onward was events and people facing. She was working at The Cosmopolitan when the pandemic arrived and the city, along with the entire live events economy, went quiet. That inflection point became her entry into recruiting.

She started at a boutique agency with its own clients and a handful of platforms, and by her own description put the training wheels on. That first year was an education in the taxonomy of the industry: contract versus locum versus perm, light industrial versus healthcare, and the very different rhythms each one demands. Healthcare stuck. She has spent the majority of her career there since, including through the full arc of the COVID era, which she calls, with some understatement, "quite an era" to be recruiting clinicians.

What she brought with her from hospitality turned out to be more durable than any technical playbook. Concierge work, events work, the daily practice of reading a room and getting to know people quickly: all of it maps cleanly onto recruiting. "It's just connecting people," she says. "Yes, you're servicing your clients. Yes, you're working with your candidates. But I'm just trying to find the right person for the right opportunity, and I get to do that all day."

That framing is what powers her through the harder weeks. She points to a placement she made recently for someone who had believed they were retired, realized a year in that they were not ready, and needed a way back. It is a pattern she sees often in healthcare, and one she has learned to treat as an opportunity rather than a complication. The work, at its best, is life changing.

The Leaders Who Took Her Under Their Wing

Sroczynski is emphatic that she has been fortunate in her managers, and she names them. After leaving the boutique agency, she worked as an independent contract recruiter, grinding through roles on her own. Walker, one of her early managers at Relode, noticed how hard she was pressing and brought her in house. Being seen, she says, mattered as much as the opportunity itself.

Two current leaders at Relode continue to shape her: an account manager on her team and the company's CEO. What each of them has given her is access to a different altitude of the business. "You think you know when you first start recruiting," she says, "and then every year you kind of peel back a layer of how the industry really works," as opposed to simply matching a recruiter to a job.

The image she keeps returning to is someone taking her under their wing: recognizing that the drive was already there and then inviting her further in. It is a model of leadership she now carries into her own role. And it is one she believes matters more than ever, because the healthcare recruiting market of 2026 bears very little resemblance to the one she entered in 2021.

Adopting AI Without Losing the Human Part

Sroczynski's position on artificial intelligence is refreshingly unhysterical. "It's not going anywhere," she says, and she has no interest in pretending otherwise. She is quick to note that AI has quietly lived in the back end of recruiting for years, in resume parsing and applicant tracking systems. What has changed is that it has moved to the front of the house, into the candidate interaction layer, and that is where she believes the real gains and the real risks now sit.

Her own usage is deliberate. She does not touch it every day, but she uses it every week: on communication, on her writing, on job descriptions, on the mechanics of connecting with candidates. Her team is actively trialing several tools, and she expects her usage to climb by the end of the year. She describes herself as balanced on the subject, and she means it as a discipline rather than a hedge.

The line she will not cross is authenticity. "AI is amazing, but I also don't want to lose this," she says, meaning the human exchange at the center of the job. Efficiency is worth pursuing. Integrity is not negotiable. In a market where automation is being sold as a substitute for judgment, that distinction is a competitive advantage, not a limitation.

Stay Hungry, and Bet on Drive

Ask Sroczynski for advice and she immediately splits the question in two, because she does not believe newcomers and talent leaders need to hear the same thing.

For people entering the industry, her counsel is simple and relentless: stay hungry. Learn the role. Learn the client. Learn the industry. Then do it again. "I personally think that's the best way to find success in this industry, because there's always something new to learn." It is a description of her own trajectory as much as a prescription for anyone else's.

For leaders, her message is pointed. Years in the seat matter, she acknowledges, but they are not the whole story. "Drive really matters," she says. Her ask of hiring managers and talent leaders is to stop discounting the candidate with only a few years of experience, because that is frequently the person who becomes the next generation of leadership. Sroczynski has reason to believe it. Someone made exactly that bet on her.