Lindsey M Buonocore

A Candidate Who Became a Recruiter

Buonocore graduated into the 2009 job market, one of the least forgiving in modern memory. She went into an agency to interview for temporary work, mostly to get her feet wet and see what was out there. The agency saw something else and brought her on instead.

She spent roughly two and a half years in agency recruiting, long enough to discover that the work suited her in a way few first jobs do. She liked meeting people. She liked the moment of recognition when a candidate was genuinely right for a role, and the credibility that came with making that recommendation. What she wanted was to do it from the inside, closer to the business, with a stake in what happened after the offer was signed. That instinct pointed her in-house, and she has built her career there ever since.

The Mentors Who Taught Her to Think Ten Steps Ahead

Buonocore spent six and a half years at Rapid7, and she credits Liz Gormley, her last manager there, with much of her development as a leader. Gormley took her under her wing and taught her the mechanics that rarely appear in a job description: how companies actually work, what separates a good manager from a good corporate operator, and how to think ten steps ahead instead of one. "She was great for kind of building my confidence and strategy," Buonocore says, and the two ideas belong together in her telling. Strategy without confidence is a slide deck. Confidence without strategy is noise.

Her second major influence is the chief people officer she reports to today, a leader Buonocore describes as both genuinely enthusiastic and unusually business minded. From her, Buonocore has absorbed a fuller picture of how a company runs, and a standard for going above and beyond what the HR remit technically requires. It is also the source of one of her sharper observations about her own function: too many HR leaders lean entirely into the people side and skip the operational one. "I think a lot of HR leaders are kind of missing that operational side of how a business runs," she says. The leaders worth learning from, in her view, hold both at once.

Six Months That Changed the Interview

Ask Buonocore what has shifted in recruiting and she starts by rewinding twelve months. A year ago, she notes, everyone would have told you AI mattered, but the actual usage was thin: some sourcing, maybe a homegrown agent handling the mundane tasks. Then came what she calls an explosion of interview intelligence tools inside the space of six months.

SmartBear implemented BrightHire, and the internal conversation around it tracked the market's own learning curve. Six months earlier, she suspects, people in the business would have been more hesitant, more worried about whether candidates would opt in at all. Now the answer is simply yes. Interview intelligence has become standard practice, and Buonocore is clear about why she supports it: it is an addition, not a substitution. "It's not taking the place of the human decision making or that interaction," she says, "but it is actually allowing us to have deeper, more meaningful conversations." A recruiter who is not scribbling notes is a recruiter who is listening.

Hiring for a Future That Does Not Look Like the Past

The more structural change Buonocore points to is philosophical. In a market reshaped this quickly, she argues, past performance can no longer be trusted to dictate future success. That forces a redesign of the evaluation itself, built around behavioral, personality, and cognitive assessments that measure the traits a role will require rather than only the ones a resume documents.

For leadership hires, she is looking for curiosity and the ability to move with changing market dynamics. She is also asking a question that barely existed a few years ago: can this person think through org design when part of the organization is not human? "What are the people doing, or what are the agents within my organization doing?" is now, in her framing, a legitimate leadership competency. Further down the org chart, her team has started building interview questions designed to surface whether a candidate will work with the technology to enhance their role or push back against it on principle. In the tech space especially, she says, this has changed not just talent acquisition but how the company thinks about hiring overall.

Advice: Put the Human Element on Top

Buonocore's counsel to other talent leaders is pragmatic rather than evangelical. Use AI as a true extension of the team. Let it absorb the mundane and the repeatable so that interviewers arrive with room to think. Then spend that reclaimed attention on the data that actually matters: the technical assessment, the personality assessment, the cognitive assessment, and the deeper read on who the person is, what makes them tick, and how they think.

"Put the human element on top of all that AI," she says. The payoff she is chasing is quality of hire, and she frames it as a discipline rather than a hope: think through what you can do to ensure the people you hire today are still top performers a year or two from now. The alternative, in her view, is drifting along in the same uncertainty the industry has tolerated for years.

It is a notably unsentimental position from someone whose career began with a stranger deciding she was worth a bet. Buonocore has spent fifteen years learning to make that call with more rigor and less guesswork, and she remains actively curious about what comes next, particularly in sourcing. The tools keep changing. The judgment, in her hands, is the part that compounds.