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.

Three Leaders, Three Lessons

Brown is generous and specific about who shaped him. He credits Jason Miller, an unusually AI forward practitioner who built a community called Promptmates, for showing what it looks like to work publicly at the frontier of AI and talent acquisition and to share that work openly rather than hoard it.

From Chris McMahon, now a chief people officer, Brown learned the discipline that separates good talent leaders from great ones: how to be strategic and operational at the same time, and how to balance the two so that the programs you build are right sized for the company at that moment rather than borrowed from a company three stages ahead.

The third is Chris Mannion, a peer rather than a boss. The two have never worked for each other, but they have traded ideas for years, drawn together by nearly identical backgrounds. Mannion's specialty is headcount planning, a niche that can turn dense fast, and Brown admires both his forward thinking on TA operations and his ability to explain the technical in plainly human terms.

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 David Vencis, now building a company called Eliza, as "probably one of the most hungriest TA leaders I know," eager to make thoughtful change, empathetic in how he leads, and genuinely good at recruiting itself, the player coach everybody wants. He named Chris Mannion of Meander again, noting how much he has put on the line to share his headcount planning expertise with the TA community. And he named Liz Gormley, VP of Talent Acquisition at Rapid7, as one of the best TA leaders he has ever worked with: thoughtful, direct, empathetic, able to lead a team through constant change, and, as Brown puts it, doing it with a smile.

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.