Rachel Bourne

A Cornfield, A Company, And A Case Of Trust

Her entry into talent acquisition began at Cummins, a company she describes as an amazing place to work and, crucially, one that let her be entrepreneurial. She was doing diversity and inclusion work, including at the leadership level, when a real need surfaced in diversity recruiting. She had already earned something no job description can confer: trust, inside the company and inside the town.

That town was a small city in Indiana, headquartered, as she puts it, basically in the middle of a cornfield. It also happens to be internationally famous for its architecture, which is how an architect found herself deeply woven into the local community. Persuading people to relocate there was hard. Persuading candidates from underrepresented groups was harder still. "I loved my company. I loved my community. I had the trust of both to do that." The logic followed naturally: who better to put in that space?

The role was pitched to her as light lifting. Get the tech and the sourcing support, make a few decisions, do not worry about the rest. "And that was so not true," she says. Peeling back the layers of the onion revealed a discipline with real depth, and she stayed. Years later she is unambiguous about what that first recruiting job did for her trajectory: had she not taken it, there is no way she would be working in AI today in the way that she is. She suspects she is not alone, and that a great many people now leading AI and transformation work started exactly where she did. Talent acquisition, she argues, has been a genuine launching pad for careers.

The People Who Built The Leader

Bourne is emphatic that she has been the beneficiary of unusually good management. "I couldn't even tell you that I've ever really had a bad boss," she says, calling herself incredibly privileged in that regard. Across her whole career she has had coaches who had her back, who delivered the hard feedback, and who told her how to be better.

Two names come first. Sharon Barner and Carolyn Butler Lee, both figures anyone familiar with Cummins would recognize, are described by Bourne as forces of nature who work actively to uplift others. From them she learned how to grow as a leader and, just as importantly, how to develop the people around her and bring them along.

Then there is her first boss, whose lesson has aged into something like an operating philosophy. She taught Bourne to keep a creative and entrepreneurial spirit, to do the things that scare you, and to build a skill set before you need it: if you think you might one day have to do it, learn it now, and then you can do it later. It is not difficult to trace a line from that instruction to a Head of AI Transformation who spent a recent weekend teaching herself Claude Code and now builds her own apps. She did it, she says, because it was super fun and really interesting to her.

Where AI Actually Helps

Bourne's view of AI in hiring is neither breathless nor defensive. Recruiting, she believes, is a space where AI can genuinely support human decision making, and where human and AI collaboration can work very effectively. Her expertise has been earned in the specifics rather than the slogans: what good, responsible AI actually looks like, and how you help the humans through the change.

The second half of that question is the one she thinks most organizations underweight. Tools arrive faster than trust does. Her broader read on the market is that recruiters are moving into the true talent advisory space, and that recruiting leaders have been carrying the implementation load for the enterprise, not merely receiving it.

She is also willing to say the optimistic thing out loud. "I think that the future in talent is really bright," she says, acknowledging that plenty of people are nervous. The more time she spends inside AI transformation, the further down the road she feels she can see, and what she sees is a paradox: as AI automates more of the work, human connection becomes more valuable, not less. She expects a strategic shift toward human-centered culture. Talent acquisition, in her framing, is a huge steward of that culture. It is the front door, and many of the people who staff it already hold adjacent cultural remits. The open question she keeps returning to is how organizations build and protect that.

The Flight Attendant Standard

Asked what she would tell other talent leaders, Bourne reaches for an image drawn from the cabin, not the boardroom. Talent leaders, she says, are like the flight attendant: they have to stay calm, and they have to help others through the journey. That obligation produces two disciplines.

The first is foresight. Look down the road, anticipate what is coming as far as is possible, and then build the skills and pathways that get people from here to there. Her anchor through every stressful stretch of her own career has been the same conviction: titles and jobs can be taken, skills cannot. She urges leaders to understand the capabilities their function will need in the future regardless of what anyone's current role happens to be.

The second is self-preservation, and she frames it with the same metaphor. You have to put your oxygen mask on first. She draws a direct parallel to the intense period of organizational change that followed the murder of George Floyd, when leaders were asked to guide others through upheaval while absorbing it themselves. Show up depleted and stressed, she warns, and it is not good for anyone. So she practices energy management deliberately: she rests when she needs to, she permits herself to hyper focus when something grips her, and she plans the recovery. The weekend she disappeared into learning to build apps was followed by a weekend of rest. Both were choices.

Paying It Forward

A leader shaped by sponsors tends to become one, and Bourne's instinct for spotlighting others is immediate. She points to Nicole Lovell, a peer at Jacobs and a close partner whose work she credits with making her better, as a model of the talent acquisition leader who got out in front of innovation and is now driving it for the broader HR function and the wider enterprise. She points to Megan Henry at Cummins, head of talent acquisition process excellence and innovation, whom Bourne helped recruit into the field from a traditional corporate quality and process background. Henry took that base and reimagined talent acquisition as the strongest link in the human supply chain and an innovation engine for a Fortune 150 company, all with what Bourne calls a really good human centered lens.

And she points to Rachel Quisenberry, a former close collaborator at Cummins who has run an organization of roughly 300 recruiters filling 16,000 requisitions a year, recently earned a master's degree at Purdue, and is stepping into a new role at IU Health. Bourne's admiration is rooted in something simple and telling: Quisenberry has never stopped learning. It is the same standard Bourne holds herself to, and the same reason she believes the profession's next chapter belongs to the people already doing the hardest parts of the work.