Ray Custis

A Friend's Wife Saw It First

Custis did not go looking for recruiting. He was transitioning out of the home improvement industry, where he had been running a small family company, when a friend who managed at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and that friend's wife, who worked in talent acquisition and HR, told him something he had not considered. "You have the personality and the work ethic for this," they said. "Why don't you try out recruiting?"

He had no idea what the work actually was. Then he learned. "Oh wow, this is about helping people," he remembers thinking. "And I love helping people." He got his feet wet at Aerotek, absorbing the pace and pressure of the staffing environment, and found the thing that would keep him in the industry for the long haul: the gratification of helping people and their families get jobs. It is worth noting how he tells the story. The credit goes to the person who spotted a capability in him before he saw it in himself, which happens to be the same act he now performs for a living.

Two People Who Spoke Life Into Him

Ask him who shaped him and he starts in a high school locker room. Custis is a former athlete, and in his junior year his football coach pulled him aside and told him he had the ability and the potential to earn a full scholarship and play at a big school. Custis did not believe it. He knew he had speed and athleticism, but he did not think he had the size, and no one in his family had even gone to college. His coach kept insisting. "This is what you're going to get, a scholarship. I need you to stay focused."

The prediction held. Custis went on to play at the University of Maryland and signed with the Washington team as a free agent in 2005, and he became the first in his family to attend college. What he took from the experience was not the highlight reel. It was the arithmetic of belief. "Just having him believe in me at that time more than I believed in myself," he says, is what made the rest possible.

The second influence is his wife. He credits her level of truth, light, and commitment to personal development with the largest share of his growth as an adult, and points to a concrete result: she is the reason he went back to school for the clinical mental health counseling degree and the therapy license that now sit alongside his recruiting career. Two people, one who insisted on his athletic potential and one who insisted on his interior life, and both of them raised the ceiling on what he thought he was allowed to attempt.

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. He put forward Dennis Barasato, one of the lead senior recruiters on his team at KBR, as phenomenal, singling out how closely Barasato tracks the technology and the way the industry and their roles are changing. He also named Heran Bisrat, a former colleague now a senior technical recruiter at Mozilla, as another longtime practitioner he considers exceptional. It is the same instinct that started his career, pointed outward: notice what someone is good at, then say it out loud.