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.