Leigh Kelley

The Detour That Became the Career

The plan, at the time, was to teach high school Spanish. Kelley was in school, bartending at a restaurant near the offices of Compsys, a recruiting and staffing firm whose employees made a habit of stopping in. She knew them as regulars. She did not, by her own admission, know the R in recruiting.

That changed in one conversation. The regional manager explained what the firm actually did, suggested she come in and hear more, and she took the meeting. She interviewed, she was hired, and she was off to the races. Staffing is fast, unforgiving and an extraordinary teacher; Kelley describes that first year as drinking from a fire hose, and she loved it.

Networking, the same instinct that started everything, moved her again. She met people working in the federal space and found it genuinely intriguing. She joined CNSI, and it was there that her recruiting career took the shape it has held ever since. Her first role was as an account manager supporting the Bureau of the Census, work she enjoyed, though her heart, she says, was still in recruiting. Within a year she moved back into the recruiting department, this time promoted into a recruiting management role.

Two Names She Still Cites

Ask Kelley who shaped her and she starts with Kirk Bryant, the man at the bar. He introduced her to what has become a long career, and he modeled something she has spent years trying to replicate: a wealth of knowledge delivered calmly. Bryant could put anyone at ease, and it did not matter who the audience was, he always conveyed his message clearly and in a way that made people want to trust him. His line about the people business is still the sentence Kelley returns to when the market gets complicated.

The second is Tony Singh, the director who promoted her into recruiting management at CNSI. Kelley learned enormously fast in that role, and she is unequivocal that the speed was a function of the environment she was handed. Without the confidence, the backing and the trust her director extended to her, she says, she would not have developed the confidence to be as successful as she was. It is the kind of debt leaders repay by extending the same thing to the next person, which is precisely what Kelley has spent the years since doing.

Pro AI, and Rigorously Skeptical

Kelley is emphatic on the record: she is pro AI. She believes it has moved mountains in cutting down administrative work and improving efficiency, and she uses it as a second opinion, running a resume against a requisition to pressure test a gut read she has already formed. That is exactly the right use, in her view. The trouble starts when the tool is asked to do the recruiter's actual job.

"AI is wonderful as a tool," she says. "It is not going to replace the humanistic part of recruiting." The model does not have the experience. It does not have the relationship with the hiring manager. It does not understand the contract, or the dozen other pieces of the puzzle that determine whether a person will succeed in a specific seat on a specific program. It will return confident rankings, this candidate first, that candidate second, and a lot of the time, Kelley notes, those rankings are simply wrong.

Her rule is trust and verify. Use the technology to buy back time, but understand that you are still putting your own stamp of approval on everything that passes through it. Just as you would fact check information a person handed you before repeating it, she argues, you owe the same scrutiny to whatever the machine produces. Technology is great when it works. It is not a place to outsource accountability.

The Market Has Only Hardened Her Philosophy

The current federal talent market is, in Kelley's word, unique. Funding cuts and business decisions have put highly qualified people on the market far longer than they expected, and many are accepting salaries well below what they had historically commanded. Rather than changing her philosophy, the moment has reinforced it.

You can have all the AI you want, she argues, and every tool available, but what will continue to make recruiters and therefore organizations successful is relationships. Building them for the long term. Retaining the best talent as long as the constraints of the market allow. Consistent communication, trust and transparency, especially when the news is bad. Kelley talks about difficult separations not as endings but as a break in an employment relationship, because in her experience good people come back around, and how they were treated on the way out determines whether they will.

That means honesty about what is coming and about the hard decisions a company may have to make. There is an enormous amount of talent in the market right now, and she is candid that keeping up with everyone is difficult. She considers trying anyway to be the job.

The Leaders She Points To

Kelley is quick to redirect credit toward the practitioners around her. She names Alice Nguyen, her HR director, as someone who is extremely strategic and mission focused yet never loses sight of people, holding on to empathy as colleagues move through difficult market changes. She names Kristin Kelley, a talent acquisition manager at GDIT, as a genuinely strong and mission focused leader who instills confidence and empowers her whole team. And she names Stacy Forster, a senior talent acquisition specialist at Leidos, whom she calls a true team player and one of the best she knows at building relationships and then maintaining them for years.

The through line is not subtle. Every quality Kelley admires in others is a variation on the sentence a stranger said to her across a bar two decades ago. She has been in the people business ever since.