Rachel Allen

A Finance Degree That Landed in HR

When Allen returned from her travels with no job lined up, she did what she would later spend a career teaching others to do. She leveraged her network. The opportunity she found was in mortgage servicing, which in her own words she reasoned was "finance-ish," finance adjacent, close enough. It was not finance at all. It was a call center.

She does not describe it as a wrong turn. She describes it as a master class. Day after day she spoke with people who were upset, frightened, and in genuinely difficult circumstances, and she learned something about the discipline of staying human under pressure that no finance rotation would have taught her. That lesson has outlasted everything else from those years.

As the housing market crisis approached, Allen went to the staffing agency Robert Half Finance and Accounting looking for the finance job she had always imagined. They told her honestly that she was too many years removed from her degree without real finance experience for them to place her. Then they asked a better question: why not recruit for us? Why not recruit for finance and accounting? That was her entry into the profession.

One of her clients in that agency seat was 7-Eleven. They recruited her internally, and she has been an in-house talent leader ever since. Talent acquisition, she likes to point out, is the newest piece of HR, which means she has watched nearly the entire arc of the modern function from a working seat inside it.

Strategy First, Shiny Objects Last

Ask Allen what talent leaders should do as agentic AI reshapes the function, and she starts not with tools but with sequence. Lead with the problem you are solving. Understand your business strategy. Only then ask whether technology or AI is the right channel to empower and enable you to hit those strategic objectives.

"We need to make sure, in this world where there's a lot of shiny objects, that we aren't led by the shiny object first," she says. It is a discipline more than a prediction, and it comes from someone who has now watched job boards rise and fall, LinkedIn arrive, remote work reset expectations after COVID, and AI arrive on top of all of it.

On the question everyone is actually asking, Allen is measured and clear. The organization will look different. The roles will look different. But the work is not going away, and the change will not be one for one. There is no simple equation in which a role disappears because of AI.

The Return of the Art

What drew Allen to talent acquisition in the first place was that it is a beautiful blend of art and science. Her honest read on the last decade is that the profession overcorrected toward the science. Metrics, systems, funnels, process.

She believes agentic AI will push the pendulum back. As more of the science becomes automated or handled through technology support, practitioners get freed up to concentrate on the moments that matter and on human connection where it genuinely counts in the role. That, she argues, is the differentiator ahead, and it is a soft skill rather than a technical one.

It is a striking conclusion from someone whose first professional lesson came in a call center, talking to people on the worst day of their financial lives. Two decades on, Allen has arrived back where she started, at the conviction that empathy is not the softest part of the job but the most durable. "I think AI is going to empower the people to be really good at being human," she says. For a leader who came into the profession by accident and never left, that is not a hedge against the future. It is the plan.