Quynh-Nhu Mai

A Career She Went Looking For

The industry cliche is that nobody plans to become a recruiter. Mai is the exception. Fresh out of university and convinced she needed a change, she moved to the Bay Area and set about learning what functions existed inside tech companies and where her own abilities might fit. Her degree was broad. What she kept gravitating toward was people: understanding them, managing them, supporting them.

A mentor pointed her toward HR. Rather than take the suggestion at face value, Mai went and read through every facet of the discipline, from benefits to talent acquisition, looking for the corner of it that would let her engage with people every single day. Recruiting was the answer. Then came the harder part, which was getting in. She began mass sending networking messages to recruiters on LinkedIn, back when the platform itself was still new. The pitch was simple and unembarrassed: I am fresh out of college, I see you have been in recruiting, I want to learn what this is all about.

The break came from LinkedIn itself, which at the time ran a program that brought new graduates in and trained them to be recruiters. As she puts it, there was no better boot camp available. She joined an early stage company and learned the craft inside the building that every recruiter in the world relies on. That grounding, in a place where sourcing and talent data were the product, shaped the technical instincts she still carries.

AI as the End of Transactional Recruiting

Mai's view of artificial intelligence is unusually specific because it is grounded in the tasks she used to do by hand. Deep research into talent pools. Data reports. Quarterly business reviews on recruiting performance. The decks and reports that consumed entire afternoons now get built in record time, and a three hour initiative can collapse into thirty or forty five minutes of prompting, editing and refining before it is ready to present.

The point is not the time saved. The point is what the time is spent on instead. Manual steps, high volume steps, research, talent mapping, data gathering and data production are exactly where AI belongs, she argues, precisely so that recruiters can remain the strategic partner to hiring managers and preserve the empathy and care that candidates need. "That's where AI can't replace the human in recruiting or in HR," she says. She also values what the technology surfaces rather than what it removes: scenarios, strategic options and patterns in the data that a leader working without that access would simply miss.

The Reputation Fight

Ask Mai for advice to recruiting leaders and she goes straight to a grievance she has been arguing against for years. Recruiting is widely regarded as transactional, she says, and the perception is not entirely unearned. In companies that have never seen the function done well, recruiters are pushed into administrative, mindless, high speed work, and the output looks exactly like the stereotype. She has been fortunate to work at high bar companies where recruiting is treated as a partnership: thoughtful, intelligent, data driven, strategic, technical. Most of the profession has not had that exposure.

Her advice, then, is to understand exactly how AI can make you less transactional and more strategic. Strip out the volume, the hundreds of resumes, the repetitive lift, and what remains is the space to be a thoughtful recruiter and a thoughtful recruiting leader for every population you serve, hiring managers, executives and candidates alike.

She believes the payoff will be a reckoning with the old narrative that anyone can be a recruiter because the job is easy. "I have fought very hard to build teams that are smart, strategic, and are relied on by people in the business," she says, and she expects AI to amplify that work tenfold while making it obvious who the 10X recruiters actually are. Expectations for the function are rising, which she welcomes, because it finally showcases that the people who actively pursue this career and love it are smart and ambitious. In a few years, she predicts, the role will look different, be more respected, and give the people who do it something to be genuinely proud of. It is a future she has been building toward since she was a new graduate cold messaging strangers on LinkedIn to ask what recruiting was.