Lindsey Roundtree

From Fashion School to a Full Desk

Roundtree joined the company, then known as Options Employment Resources, as a part time administrative assistant during her final year of school. She was studying fashion, completed her internship in Europe, and came home with a clear realization: it was not the career she wanted. She raised it with the CEO at the time, Christine, who told her the firm loved having her there and asked how she felt about giving recruiting a shot.

She was ready to commit to something full time, and she jumped in with both feet. The training ground was agency work, which she still regards as the most demanding version of the job. "Running a full desk is hard," she says, and she means it as a compliment to everyone who has done it. From there she moved steadily upward, holding nearly every position in the organization along the way, a progression she sums up simply: from school to work to growth. Last year that path produced her current role spanning both talent and product, a scope she never set out to build but which now reflects exactly where her eighteen years of experience converge.

The People Who Shaped the Way She Leads

Three people stand out when Roundtree traces the influences on her leadership. Jessica Oberto, People Science's COO, has been her partner in crime for 15 years. "We have tackled so much together," Roundtree says. What Oberto brought was the thing she believes the profession too often lacks: structure, process, and stability applied to talent acquisition, a discipline that can otherwise run entirely on adrenaline.

Christy Jean Blanc of the American Red Cross, who oversees talent acquisition vendors, taught her what partnership looks like from the buyer's chair. Blanc was a client when Roundtree was early in her career, and the two engaged again during COVID, roughly six plus years of collaboration in total. Roundtree calls her the dream client: someone who hears vendors out, values the work, and understands the relationship she is being offered rather than simply the service she is purchasing. That standard became Roundtree's own operating goal.

Most recently there is Eileen Kowalski, whose background includes GM and Paradox. The two have worked together and shared conference stages on AI in the workplace, and when the latest version of the People Science product came out of beta a few weeks ago, Kowalski jumped straight in to help develop the go to market strategy, with no invoice attached. What Roundtree admires most is her refusal to be sidelined. Talent acquisition, Roundtree notes, is chronically underappreciated and rarely handed a seat at the table. Kowalski "will throw elbows to get there," and Roundtree considers the profession lucky to have that voice in it.

The Biggest Shift She Has Ever Seen

Roundtree does not hedge on the scale of the current moment. AI represents the biggest shift she has witnessed in her entire career in talent acquisition, and it is changing as fast as the practitioners trying to absorb it. Her concern is not adoption. Plenty of teams are adopting. "A lot of people are doing it, but it doesn't mean they're doing it well."

She took that argument to the stage at the TA Institute in Los Angeles. Her thesis: organizations are rushing to automate before they understand their own process, and technology layered onto a broken workflow does not repair the workflow. It accelerates the damage. Map the stages, find the holes, fix them, and only then bring in the tool that can assist. Recruiters, meanwhile, are watching reductions happen across the board and worrying about their own roles, which makes thoughtful sequencing not just an operational question but a human one.

Sequenced properly, the results are hard to argue with. A client pilot launched a few months ago cut time to schedule from 17 days to two. Hiring managers and candidates gained autonomy over when to meet, and interviews were missed and rescheduled far less often as a result. On AI agents, Roundtree is enthusiastic and deliberate at once: know your AI readiness score before you put something that large into your process. She put her own agent into production within the last year, and the hardest part was not the technology. It was earning buy in from her recruiters. Her resulting rule is one more teams should borrow: test internally before you go external, before anything touches your candidate pools and the people you have the most to lose with.

Advice: Diagnose Before You Deploy

The science behind People Science, as she describes it, is the recruiting continuum, a framework that lays out the eight stages of recruiting. She uses it as a diagnostic. Before you push in new tools, before you decide to hire, before you decide to lay off, before you make what she calls the earth shattering decisions, know where you stand today and fix what is not working.

She is candid about the pressure working against that discipline. She counted 45 sales emails in a single day. The rush to feel complete and accomplished on AI is real, and the cost of getting it wrong lands on candidates. In the last three months alone, she points out, nearly everyone in the industry has received an irrelevant automated text about a job with nothing to do with their skill set. Her own 16 year old gets six or seven a day and cannot legally work yet. That is what indiscriminate pipeline building looks like from the outside, and it deters the very buyers and consumers a brand is trying to win.

Her prescription is patience with teeth. Work in small segments. Analyze each one. Fix a piece, add the AI that makes sense there, then move to the next, even when a vendor promises to solve sourcing, screening, and reporting all at once. It is a heavy lift, and there is no prize for carrying all of it in one trip.

Then insist on measurement. These technologies are expensive, and if you cannot measure the outcome of the investment, or your vendor cannot show you how, "you're talking to the wrong vendor." The same test applies to trust: find the partner who genuinely wants to be one. Roundtree credits that instinct, cultivated over years of client facing work, with much of her own success and with the growth of People Science itself. "We are intelligent. We know what we're doing," she says of her peers in talent acquisition. The task now is to proceed with enough care to prove it.