Reshmi Nair

A Psychology Degree and a Process of Elimination

Nair studied psychology as an undergraduate, and she tried the obvious doors first. She volunteered with distress centres, which was therapy focused work, and with CAMH, a leading mental health institution in North America, where she contributed to research based projects. Both experiences taught her something durable, and both told her the same thing: neither was the right long term fit. The research moved too slowly for someone who likes to see results and keep things in motion. The crisis work carried an emotional weight she was honest enough to name rather than push through.

So she paused and reasoned it out. The one subject she had genuinely loved since grade 11 and 12, and again in undergrad, was business. With a psychology degree, that pointed to two doors: marketing or human resources. Marketing she ruled out quickly. "I am not that creative. I wish I was," she says. Within HR, the business partner track required further formal study, and she was not ready to go back to school. She wanted to work. Talent acquisition was what remained, and it turned out to be the answer she had been circling the whole time.

How she actually got in is the part worth studying. Nair blanket messaged people on LinkedIn asking for ten minutes to chat. Not for a job. Just to talk. Enough of them said yes that she started learning the shape of the profession from the inside, and one respondent misread the intent entirely and asked her to send a resume. She sent it, went through the interviews, and that person became her first manager. "It is my favorite decision," she says of choosing talent acquisition. "I've had so much fun since."

The Human Element Is Growing, Not Shrinking

Nair's read on AI in recruiting is refreshingly two sided. The tools are genuinely useful for drafting and for surfacing the next most relevant question in an interview, and she has no interest in pretending otherwise. What has surprised her is the second order effect. As automation has spread, the value of a real conversation has gone up rather than down.

The evidence arrives in her rejection calls. When she phones candidates who did not advance, a striking number thank her for the call itself, for not sending a blanket email or letting a machine handle the news. "I think there's a lot more importance or emphasis being placed on human relationships and human connections," she says. "I'm not sure how that happened, but that's something that's happened."

The concerns are real too. She has seen candidates using AI during interviews, which cuts against the trust that any hiring relationship depends on. And she worries about screening systems that fixate on keywords and quietly discard good people. That is why LGC uses no AI tools for screening at all. The resumes are read by humans, and the process is run by humans, start to finish.

Hold On to Your Network

Asked what she would tell other talent leaders heading into 2026, Nair does not reach for a technology answer. She reaches for people. Hold on to your network, she says, and say the quiet part out loud, because the field badly underestimates how many practitioners are sitting with identical questions and identical anxieties.

"It really does help to talk it through so you don't feel like it's all of you in your head," she says. "We're all in the trenches a little bit. But if we put all our heads together, I'm sure we'll all figure out what comes next." It is the same instinct that got her into the profession in the first place, when an unknown psychology graduate in Toronto started messaging strangers on LinkedIn for ten minutes of their time. It worked then. She is betting it still works now.