Lauren Holzer

The Itch That Never Went Away

What hooked her on that first construction project was not the mechanics of hiring. It was the arc. She got to go find people, bring them into an organization, and then watch what happened next.

"It was all about building teams," she says, "and you got to bring in people and help shape their career and then see them grow and develop within the organization you brought them into." That double return, impact for the business and momentum for the individual, is the thing she still describes as extremely rewarding two decades of work later.

Her formal recruiting education began in the agency world, an environment she credits for giving her a permanent respect for numbers. Agency taught her the funnel, the metrics, the pace, and the activity levels required to actually move a search. Leaders who skip that apprenticeship often never develop the instinct for it. Holzer did, and it has followed her into every internal role since.

Three People, Three Different Lessons

Ask Holzer who shaped her and she does not hedge. Cal Schilling, her boss at Vocus, comes first. Vocus was where she moved from agency into her first internal role, and it was a company growing, in her words, like crazy, which meant enormous hiring volume and enormous opportunity. She delivered, Schilling saw it, and he promoted her into management. "He kind of saw that in me and gave me a shot," she says. The lesson was about what a manager can unlock simply by betting early on someone.

Emily Markman, whom Holzer has worked alongside for many years at both Clarabridge and The Knot Worldwide, she calls her biggest mentor. Markman's contribution was broader than recruiting technique. She taught Holzer what Holzer now calls the business of people: how talent decisions ripple into performance, structure, and trust, and how a leader earns the kind of standing where their judgment is genuinely valued rather than merely consulted.

The third is Maddie Rylander, her current boss, whom she describes as a phenomenal business mind. The influence there is sharpening: the discipline of framing every talent conversation in the language of the business it serves.

AI, and the Three Experiences It Has to Improve

Holzer is clear eyed about the scale of the change underway. Recruiting, like many spaces, is going through a massive shift, and she refuses to evaluate it as a single question. Instead she breaks it into three experiences.

The first is the candidate experience, and whether new tooling actually makes it better rather than simply faster. The second is the recruiter experience, especially sourcing, where AI now allows teams to identify talent far more quickly across the many channels where people genuinely live, whether that is LinkedIn, Reddit, or somewhere no one was looking a year ago. The third, and the one most often forgotten, is the stakeholder experience: making it easier for hiring managers to hire, and to make genuinely good talent decisions.

Her verdict on where the technology is already winning is specific. The heavy administrative burdens that consume recruiter and stakeholder time are being reduced or eliminated, and that is a gift, because it pushes recruiters back toward the work only humans can do. "What's important is still ensuring that there is that human connection," she says, and taking the real time required to assess fit. Automation, in her framing, is not a replacement for judgment. It is what buys the space for judgment.

Advice: Know Where the Business Is Going

Asked what she would tell other talent leaders, Holzer does not reach for a sourcing tactic. She goes straight to strategy. Lean in hard on understanding the business's vision, she says: what is the one year plan, what is the three year plan, and what talent strategy could plausibly support it. Everything is moving at a faster clip, and the workforce itself is shifting rapidly as new skill sets emerge.

She expects the traditional signals to come under pressure. Certifications, education, even experience itself will be challenged and will look very different. That makes forward planning less optional than it used to be. A credible strategy, in her view, has to cover both sides of the house: external hiring, yes, but also internal performance management and mobility, so the organization is genuinely set up to succeed rather than perpetually buying its way out of gaps.

Do that, and talent acquisition stops being purely reactive. "You get to look at, yes, here are the needs we have now, but as we look to the future, where do I need to go building pipelines to be able to bridge any of those talent gaps that we might have?" That is where the seat at the table comes from, and why she insists on describing her function as a business partner: efficient at closing roles and finding great people today, while anticipating what the business will need tomorrow.

Building the Bench

For a leader who came into the field because she loved watching people grow, it is telling how quickly Holzer turns the spotlight onto her own team. She points to Kristen Steinhauer, who leads recruiting and reports to her, as one of the best she has seen at identifying talent, exceptionally strong in technical sourcing and qualification, driven by a real sense of urgency, and a phenomenal partner to the business.

She is just as emphatic about Bailey Lan, a manager on her team who runs hiring for sales and marketing, where the volume is heaviest. Lan, Holzer says, is one of those people who makes a team better simply by being dropped into it: highly motivated, and in her words, really, really strong.

It is the same instinct that started everything on a construction site years ago. Find good people. Give them room. Watch what they build.