Stephanie Degnan

An Education That Began in a Temp Agency

Degnan's introduction to the business came through her mother, who had built a career in staffing and the temp world and then decided to break out and launch her own temp agency. Degnan was a teenager at the time. Her first title in the industry was office clerk. She spent a couple of summers there before heading to Northeastern University to pursue a business degree, and Northeastern's co-op model, which sends students into industry for half of the year, pushed her straight back toward people work. Because she already had an HR background, she landed as an HR analyst at Bain & Company for six months.

Then she changed direction entirely, moving into supply chain after college. The detour did not hold. Degnan found her way back into software and implementation, this time on the HR side, and the two halves of her resume fused into something more useful than either would have been alone: process discipline from operations, human context from HR. As she puts it, she did a little bit of a circle around.

At People Science, the RPO where she landed next, she ran implementation on the operations side, building out the teams that served each client. That meant learning every customer's systems and every customer's process, then designing how a recruiting team would actually function inside them. Few jobs teach a person faster that a hiring process is only as good as the mechanics underneath it. From there she moved into full ATS implementation, the work she does today.

The Line Between Automation and AI

When Degnan describes what has changed recently, she starts with vocabulary rather than technology. Everybody is trying to go very fast when it comes to incorporating AI, she notes. But among the customers whose HR processes she implements, the two words land very differently. AI still reads as slightly scary to some organizations. Automation is something those same organizations get excited about. You can often reach the second by way of the first, and part of her job is helping leaders see that distinction clearly enough to make a decision instead of a leap.

Where she sees real returns is at the beginning of the funnel. Several of her current customers are high volume employers contending with enormous applicant flow, and weeding through that by hand is, in her assessment, simply not winnable. Tools that improve upfront screening, so that the proper talent advances to the next stage, earn their keep.

Her second target is the bottleneck that surfaces with essentially every customer she supports: hiring manager feedback. Teams cannot get it, and they cannot find a way to speed up the evaluation stages that depend on it. Degnan's math on the fix is blunt. Apply automation and AI to scheduling and to feedback capture, she argues, and between those two components of the process alone, an organization would cut weeks out of its timeline. Not days. Weeks.

Skeptical by Design

Degnan is not an evangelist, and that is precisely what makes her credible with buyers. Her counsel to talent leaders is to hold two ideas at once: accept that AI is going to be part of the future of the function, and stay slightly skeptical about how it proves ROI and genuinely benefits the talent acquisition space. There are proper places for AI to be incorporated, she says, and there are tactical components of the process that automation, and maybe AI, will solve for. The discipline lies in telling one from the other before signing anything.

On the existential question she is unambiguous. She does not believe the technology will eliminate people, and she does not believe it will eliminate recruiters. What it can do is strip away the forms, the follow ups, and the administrative residue of the job, handing recruiters back the work only a human can do. Several of the organizations she supports cannot find specific talent sets at all, because the applicant base with the right qualifications does not exist in the volume they need. Redirect recruiter time toward building those pools of people, she argues, and the shape of the entire profession shifts.

The People She Credits

Degnan names her influences readily. Mike Jebo, a colleague from her earliest software implementation days during a stint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was systems based rather than HR based, and taught her to think about architecture first. Their paths diverged afterward, though she reconnected with him recently, which says something about the impression he left.

Within HR, she points first to Lindsey Roundtree at People Science, her former RPO, whom she describes as a futuristic planner and a strategic mind operating at the forefront of where the recruitment process and talent acquisition as a whole are heading. Roundtree has introduced AI across the recruiting process end to end, and articulates the firm's recruiting continuum in a way Degnan considers unusually clear. She is also the leader whose team took that old Access database and turned it into HireGate.

Then there is Kimberly Hosking, a former iCIMS colleague now consulting on HR and systems at Optimized Recruitment Solutions. Degnan calls her an innovator, and, admiringly, so incredibly tactical, with the rarer ability to cut through the minutiae and strip talent acquisition down to its basics. Take all the minutiae away, Degnan explains, and you are left with almost a blank slate from which to build the proper processes. That, she says, is what Hosking really excels at, and she freely admits she envies the skill. Degnan champions others in the field as well, among them Marielle Barnes, AVP of HR Technology and People at MedStar Health System, who is modernizing the tech stack of a health system operating in one of the toughest clinical hiring markets there is.

It is a telling roster. Every person on it builds something, and every lesson Degnan draws from them concerns structure: design the system properly, and the humans working inside it get to do better work. Decades after filing paperwork in her mother's temp agency, that remains the throughline of her career.