Lindsey Hammer

An Alumni Email That Changed the Trajectory

Hammer studied communications and journalism at Texas A&M. She knew two things: she liked talking to people, and she wanted work she would find rewarding. What that meant as an actual career was a mystery, and graduation was coming fast enough to make her nervous.

The answer arrived through the university's famously active alumni network. An email circulated through the communications school announcing that a recruiter named Sean, from the staffing firm TEKsystems, would be on site to meet students. Hammer looked the company up, found it genuinely interesting, and reached out. They set a time to meet. "The rest was kind of history from there," she says.

She still describes it the way most people in the field do, as falling into recruiting. What she found was not the fallback she had feared but a profession with real range: relationships, business judgment, technology, and leadership all inside the same job description.

The Two Managers Who Shaped Her Playbook

Ask Hammer who influenced her most and she names two people she is still in touch with today, both former managers. Lindsay Moody gave her the opportunity to move into leadership. "I'm super grateful for whatever it was she saw in me that allowed her to take that chance," Hammer says. Jessica Amato, now Chief People Officer at Auger, managed her afterward and reinforced the same disciplines from a different angle.

The lessons compound into something like a method. Always come with data. Always start from the end result and work backwards to establish what has to happen to get there. Hammer applies that to team building as directly as she applies it to a hiring plan: What is my ideal team in six months? What do I want us to be accomplishing? What processes or changes do I need to make so my current team can get there?

The lesson she cites most admiringly, though, is the least intuitive one: work yourself out of a job. She watched Amato do it a number of times, and she watched Moody do it while serving as her manager. Moody saw a gap between the technology recruiting relied on and the recruiting teams themselves, built substantial support to close it, and moved on. Much of that came out of the automated phone screen scheduler work the two of them took on together. It is a model of leadership measured by what survives your departure.

Both women also taught her to lead from the why. Know your audience, know why you are pursuing something, decide how you want to show up, and tie every decision back to that reasoning, particularly the hard ones. Helping people understand why a decision is being made, Hammer believes, is the single best way to bring a team along.

Go Toward the Things That Scare You

Hammer's read on the AI landscape is grounded in the fact that she has already lived through a slower version of it. What once required two years of beta testing and change management now moves far faster, and the rate of change is itself accelerating. Her guidance to companies is blunt: lean into it, and lean into it quickly.

For individuals, she prescribes something smaller and more forgiving. Do not wait until you have a strategy. Open ChatGPT or a comparable assistant, write a prompt, and start getting familiar. Then ask the more useful question. Not what AI cannot do yet, but what it is already capable of, because that boundary keeps moving. Hammer offers herself as evidence. She has recruited in tech for years without ever thinking of herself as a technical person, and now finds herself thinking she could build an app or write code, because the tools have made that reachable.

"Go towards the things that scare you," she says of her own career. "Change is inevitable, change is the one constant." The alternative, sitting back because everything is moving too fast to know where to start, is the one approach she has no patience for.

Amplify, Do Not Eliminate

Where Hammer breaks from much of the current discourse is on what AI is actually for inside a recruiting organization. The default framing is subtraction: fewer recruiters, fewer steps, fewer costs. Hers is multiplication. Rather than removing a recruiter, she argues, give that recruiter room to do what they are best at, which is engaging with people, understanding the business need, and figuring out how to bring all of it together.

Recruiters are not buried in administrative work by choice. They do it because the job requires it. Multiple systems, note taking, scheduling follow-ups, reviewing resumes: all of it pulls time away from candidates and clients. That is precisely the load she wants AI to carry, and she is equally firm that a human stays in the loop and that companies think strategically about where that human belongs.

The formulation she keeps returning to sounds contradictory until you sit with it. "How do I leverage AI to make me more human?" Sometimes that means time returned for relationship and engagement work. Sometimes it means research and knowledge that let her execute faster and do more knowledge sharing. Leaders, she believes, need the people dimension of the job more now, not less.

Leading Through Ambiguity

Her advice to other talent leaders begins with a candid acknowledgment of what this moment feels like from inside a team. People are asking whether they should be concerned. Whether their jobs are at risk. How their day to day is about to change. Nobody has complete answers, and Hammer thinks pretending otherwise is the worse option. Leading through ambiguity, in her view, is now a core requirement of the role.

"We're all in this together. We're all going to figure it out together. Let's learn together," is how she frames it, and she pairs the reassurance with a working agenda: identify what the team already does well and find ways to do more of it, identify what it does not do well and find tools that improve it. Stay agile. Stay curious. Over communicate.

That last instinct is not a management technique for her so much as a personal operating principle. "If I'm not learning, essentially I'm dying," she says. "What am I doing if I'm not learning?" It is the standard she sets for herself and the culture she works to instill in her team, and it explains why she is comfortable standing in front of people without all the answers. Regardless of the outcome, in her view, the more you learn, the better off you are.