Ray Custis

Useful Tool, Ethical Guardrails

On artificial intelligence, Custis is neither an evangelist nor a skeptic. He is a practitioner. He uses it every day and is actively encouraged to, and he is specific about where the value lives: administrative tasks, creative production, campaign and content work that used to eat hours. A post or an image for a job advertisement or a wellness event that once took a couple of hours now takes a fraction of that. He frames that saved time as a quality of life dividend rather than a productivity statistic. "It gives you an opportunity to balance life out a little bit more," he says, "especially if you have a family and kids."

He has also watched the displacement stories, and he has watched what came after them. His read is that the market is correcting: companies are discovering that the technology cannot replace every part of a person's role, and they are hiring people back. Where he does apply pressure is on ethics. Is the technology being used ethically? Are there guardrails and boundaries? He believes the industry is still working that out in real time, and he offers a clinician's standard as the default setting. If the foundation is doing no harm to people within our roles while we use this technology, he argues, better decisions follow, and the tool becomes genuinely helpful rather than merely fast.

Be Coachable, and Be Well

Asked what advice he would give someone entering the industry, Custis does not hesitate. Always be coachable, and always have the intention of learning. He calls it a posture, the deliberate choice to remain a student, and he ties it directly to the moment the profession is in. AI is changing roles and changing the landscape of how business gets done, which means flexibility is no longer a personality trait but a job requirement. The posture also has a social payoff: it keeps you humble enough to learn from the many different people in the industry, whether the lesson is how to approach a candidate, how to handle a salary negotiation, or how to build a campaign that reaches a specific audience.

Then he says the part most talent leaders leave out. Recruiters burn out. He has watched it, particularly on the staffing agency side, where plenty of good people churn and burn. "One minute you're up, next minute you're down, next minute you're up, and there's so many ebbs and flows." His prescription is unglamorous and specific: take care of yourself mentally, emotionally, and physically, and get the support you need, whether that comes through a direct manager, through mental health services, or through support groups and friends who keep you encouraged. Learning about yourself, he argues, is what lets you develop the capacity to handle the ups and downs of this work. "That's going to be a huge, huge tool and huge foundation for them to stand on."

Characteristically, when given the chance to talk about himself further, he spent it talking about other people on his team at KBR and in the industry, singling out how closely they track the technology and the way the industry and their roles are changing. It is the same instinct that started his career, pointed outward: notice what someone is good at, then say it out loud.