Monica Plata

Proximity, Then Purpose

Plata is candid that she did not set out to become a recruiter. Her mother was in recruiting, and Plata grew up around the agency world, absorbing its rhythms long before she had any professional vocabulary for them. The summer she was still in high school, she worked as a receptionist for a recruiting agency. Through college she ran reference checks for contacts she had built inside that same world. "It kind of organically happened just based on proximity," she says.

Proximity became profession. She spent almost eleven years in agency recruiting before moving into tech, and the through-line she describes is not ambition so much as recognition: she kept choosing the work because she kept liking what the work was actually for.

AI Moves Faster Than the Playbook

At Intrinsic, AI is not a pilot program. BrightHire is in use in the US, Gemini is part of Plata's daily practice, and when the team works through how to disrupt the recruiting space and design automation flows, AI is a central component rather than an add-on. She is equally attentive to what the technology does to the applicant's experience: when someone applies, what response do they actually get?

Her reservation is specific and narrow. Some companies are leaning into AI video screening and agent-led conversations before a candidate ever speaks to someone live. That, she says plainly, is not the way she thinks about candidate experience, and it is not territory she has chosen to explore. Her attention goes instead to streamlining the hiring process and to a harder question her peers are still avoiding: how does an organization get comfortable with candidates using AI themselves?

In a technical hiring landscape, Plata argues, it is safe to assume most people are using some form of AI throughout the process. The productive response is not prohibition. It is better screening, sharper questions, and genuine probing to understand what sits behind an answer. "I think that's becoming more obsolete," she says of the blanket-refusal posture. "Everyone is incorporating it in different ways."

The Advice: Center the Human

Asked what she would tell other talent leaders navigating this next phase, Plata does not reach for a technology roadmap. She reaches for the reason she is still in the profession two decades on. Whatever the tooling becomes, the job is to bridge companies and roles to people, and everyone on both sides of that bridge is a person looking for connection and community.

She is clear-eyed that automation and simplification will keep expanding, and that there is real concern in the industry about what the future of recruiting looks like. Her read is that automation makes practitioners more impactful rather than less relevant, provided the reclaimed time goes to the right place. "The most impactful work we can do is that human connection and building relationships," she says, with hiring leaders and business teams as much as with candidates. The human touch element, she insists, is what defines a candidate's experience regardless of the outcome and regardless of the tools in play.

"That's the work that really matters."