Kristi Kennebrew

From Sales Floor to Sourcing Desk

Kennebrew did not arrive in talent through an HR track. She started in sales as a business development representative, and those skills turned out to be perfectly portable. She used them, quite deliberately, to move into talent sourcing, and they carried her into sourcing work at Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Cisco.

"I used my transferable skills to get into recruitment," she says of the pivot, and the phrase says a lot about how she sees careers generally. She does not treat backgrounds as fixed categories. She treats them as inventories of capability that can be redeployed, an outlook that shapes how she evaluates candidates whose resumes do not read like a straight line.

What kept her in the field was not the mechanics of sourcing but the outcome of it. Guiding people through a confusing process, helping them land better jobs and earn more money, gave the work a purpose that outlasted any single requisition. Today, in recruitment marketing, she describes the arc as cumulative rather than sequential. "All of the skills have built up to this one place where I'm at," she says. Read from the outside, the progression looks almost designed: sales, then sourcing, then marketing, each layer widening the number of people she can reach at once.

The Influence of Honest Voices

Ask Kennebrew who shaped her and she starts with Bonnie Dilbert, a prominent voice on LinkedIn who works at Zapier. The two have never met in person. They have had a handful of conversations and coffee chats, and that has been enough. What Kennebrew admires is the sheer volume of effort and knowledge Dilbert has given away publicly, on LinkedIn and other platforms, explaining how the workforce actually operates and how people can navigate it.

The lesson she took was about posture, not tactics. Dilbert's willingness to have open, honest conversations with job seekers gave Kennebrew a template for her own public voice. "That is how I want to move," she says. "I want to be open and honest and authentic with my audience about what's really happening out here."

She is careful to note that her influences do not reduce to one name. She credits the many professionals who have spoken candidly about their layoffs and their job searches, and equally the recruiters who have been transparent about how hiring works from the inside and where the process could use some help. She has taken bits and pieces of each of them, and those pieces, she says, have shaped everything.

A Clear-Eyed Read on AI

Kennebrew's view of artificial intelligence is neither breathless nor defensive, which is rarer than it sounds. Part of her own career navigation out of pure sourcing came from an honest assessment of where the technology was heading. She does not frame it as a takeover so much as a reallocation, with AI increasingly taking control of the front end of hiring: the initial application, the applicant tracking system, the mechanics of finding and sourcing candidates.

She sees genuine upside. AI, used well, helps talent teams tap into untapped talent and find people in unique spaces they would never have surfaced manually. But she is willing to voice the reservation most people skip. When the tools begin doing too much of the work on a recruiter's behalf, she is not convinced that is necessarily healthy. Judgment is the part of recruiting that cannot be handed off.

That skepticism does not stop her from being an active evaluator. Part of her remit is going out and finding the latest and greatest AI tools for finding talent, identifying the most innovative options and testing what actually helps rather than what merely sounds impressive. She occupies a useful vantage point: close enough to the technology to assess it honestly, far enough from the hype to say no.

Empathy as an Operating Standard

Her advice to other talent leaders is direct: put yourself in the candidate's shoes and understand their experience. She observes that some leaders have held their positions long enough that they may not fully grasp what the job search feels like right now, in a market reshaped by AI. Empathy, in that context, is not sentiment. It is accurate information about the system you are running. A candidate's experience, she argues, is just as important as the outcome the business is chasing.

From there she moves to action. Providing access is what turns empathy into something a candidate can use, which is why she personally posts roles and shares them with her community rather than assuming the right people will stumble across them. Visibility, in her framing, is a form of fairness.

Kennebrew believes this is the dividing line in the profession. Working quietly in the background to move candidates through a pipeline is one thing. Being a public voice for underrepresented candidates and for people finding it hard to get hired in this market is another. That distinction, she says, is what separates leaders who are there for themselves from leaders who are genuinely there for the candidate and the candidate experience. It is the standard she has set for her own work, and she applies it in full view of the audience she serves.