Michael Brown

The Job He Almost Never Took

"Nobody ever says they went to college to become a recruiter," Brown observes, and his own entry into the field proves the point. Fresh out of school, he lined up what he believed was a marketing interview. It turned out to be a recruiting company, and a bit of a bait and switch. He got the offer, went home, talked it over with his parents, and ultimately turned it down.

What stuck was the curiosity. The episode sent him looking into what recruiting actually was, and the answer was interesting enough to build a career on. Two decades later, that career includes standing up talent functions where none existed, scaling teams through hypergrowth, and now running a consulting practice where he juggles several clients at once, moving between contexts that each demand a different version of the same craft.

AI as Decision Support

Brown's read on the past year is clear eyed about the friction. At the macro level, candidates are using AI to shape and inflate their experiences, and recruiting teams are absorbing the consequences: distorted inbound flow, fake candidates, and a general erosion of trust. "There's a strife that's happening between the two," he says.

He is still, on balance, an optimist. AI, in his framing, lets recruiting teams automate and augment the mundane work that used to consume the week: reporting, funnel analysis, candidate prep, interview kits, feedback analysis. What it produces is not just saved hours but better inputs. He calls it decision support. "They're signals," he says. "They give you greater signals." The real acceleration, in his view, is that recruiters can now operate with far more signal in the work they do than the profession has ever had before.

The second half of the equation is what recruiters do with the time they reclaim. Brown pushes for reinvestment rather than idle capacity: going deeper on data, sharpening stakeholder management skills, or taking on a passion project that moves the business forward, whether that means building something internal or vibe coding a website. The skill ceiling, he argues, has risen, and the reclaimed hours are the raw material for reaching it.

The Builders Will Inherit It

Brown's advice for talent leaders heading further into 2026 is compressed into a single conviction: "The future of this profession belongs to the people who build, and not necessarily for the people that are going to wait for the building to come to them." It is a call to agency in a moment when many recruiting teams are waiting to be told what the new rules are.

Asked which peers deserve a wider spotlight, Brown answered without hedging. He named leaders who embody hunger for thoughtful change, empathy in leadership, and genuine recruiting skill, the player coaches everybody wants. He pointed to practitioners who have put expertise on the line to share headcount planning knowledge with the TA community. And he highlighted VP-level leaders doing exceptional work: thoughtful, direct, empathetic, able to lead teams through constant change, and doing it with grace.

The pattern in his choices is telling. Brown values people who build in public, who explain complexity instead of guarding it, and who carry teams through turbulence without losing their humanity. It is the same standard he has spent twenty years holding himself to.