Loren von Sternberg

A Sales Floor, A Friend, And A Project That Stuck

The path started in sales. Fresh out of university, Loren went into business to business selling and door knocking, work that teaches a person very quickly how to earn a stranger's attention and hold it. A friend suggested the pivot: the firm where the friend worked was hiring recruiters for a project, and Loren, she said, would be good at it.

The introduction led to a meeting, and the meeting led to a start date the following week. That first role was not traditional recruitment at all but project work, and from there Loren moved into a different part of the business and into recruitment proper. Each role appeared rather than being plotted out years in advance. She says plainly that she fell into the industry; what she built on those steps afterwards was deliberate, and the sequence added up to a good path.

The sales grounding never left. It shows up now in her conviction that the craft of recruitment is relationship building rather than message volume.

The Leaders Who Redrew The Job

Loren's account of the people who shaped her begins, unusually, with the difficult ones. Early in her career she worked for managers who were not always fair or kind. She does not dwell on them, but she does credit them with something useful: a clear picture of the leader she did not want to become. For anyone currently sitting under a boss like that, her framing is worth borrowing. The experience is horrible while it lasts, and it teaches you a great deal about who you want to be, how you want to be perceived, and how not to repeat it.

The better half of the story is at Pro. The founder who hired her was, in Loren's telling, genuinely inspirational and a brilliant relationship builder, the kind of example that turns an abstract idea about client trust into something concrete. A mentor there did something rarer still. Instead of treating her as a delivery function, that mentor saw the role differently and convinced Loren it could carry far more value than she had assumed. Her current MD looked at what she had built and developed the position further around it.

Loren is clear about the trade behind that expanded scope. The wider remit only makes sense if she is adding value and making an impact for the business.

AI Curious, And Organized About It

"I am very AI curious," Loren says, a phrase she coined for herself. She likes trying new tools and seeing which ones survive contact with real work. Some do brilliantly. Dictation replaced her keyboard for most correspondence. Automated notes replaced the frantic typing that used to happen while a candidate was still talking, a habit she never liked because it meant nobody was getting her full attention.

Her sharper observation is about implementation rather than capability. Plenty of organizations, she argues, have not taken the technology by the horns properly, which leaves individuals stumbling through on their own with whatever tool they happen to have opened. At Pro the approach has been to regulate and standardize instead: automations built out, new products added to the tech stack, and a recently launched internal training module covering how the team can use AI day to day. When something works for one person, the firm shares it and tries to bring everyone along on the journey. Not everyone in any business is going to embrace it, she notes, but the direction is set.

The use cases she is most enthusiastic about are the unglamorous ones: admin heavy tasks, manual CRM work, the routine steps that can be automated and handed off to free up people's time. Alongside those sit the lighter uses, including the images people generate for their personal branding on LinkedIn. The hardest part is the pace. Things change so quickly that a tool can be close to out of date almost as soon as it is implemented, which is precisely why she keeps an open mind and keeps looking.

On the question of replacement she is unmoved. AI is brilliant, and it still needs a human eye and a human touch. When someone suggested putting an AI bot on the phone lines to answer and route clients through, her answer was immediate. Nobody wants to talk to a bot.

Advice: Protect The Candidate Experience

For talent leaders heading into the new year, Loren pulls several threads into one. Implement AI, and implement it properly. Then guard the thing it can most easily erode.

Candidate experience takes priority over everything, and she has watched automation quietly chip away at it: rejections fired out without thought, contact handled by a system that strips the relationship out entirely. Her rule for anyone new to the industry is old fashioned and non negotiable. Pick up the phone. Do not rely on a LinkedIn message or an email. Do not be a keyboard warrior. If there is an exciting job to discuss, phone the person, because enthusiasm travels through a voice and questions can be asked in the moment. If there is bad news, phone as well, be honest, and tell someone the way you would want to be told yourself.

The standard she sets is not about outcomes but about how people are left feeling. Anyone who has given their time to an application or a hiring process should come away from it feeling good, whether or not they were successful. That, in Loren's view, is what the technology exists to protect rather than replace.