Stephanie Holman

A Counselor's Instincts, Applied to Hiring

Holman began her career in education as a school guidance counselor working with students from kindergarten through twelfth grade, then moved into higher education. In both settings she was part of someone's journey toward a credential, advising on degrees and hoping the job would follow at the end of it. What she could not stop wondering about was the chapter after graduation, the one she never got to see.

Recruiting handed her that chapter. Instead of advising on a degree and hoping an opportunity would appear, she is now the person telling people about the opportunities already in front of them. The counselor's habits carried over intact: listen closely, explain the process, and remember that the person on the other side of the exchange is making a decision that will reshape their life.

The People Who Taught Her the Job

Asked which leaders shaped her, Holman does not hesitate. Amy Miller, a recruiting manager at AWS working on Project Kuiper, where the teams are doing what Holman describes as a lot of cool stuff with satellites, is her first and most emphatic answer. What she respects is accuracy. Social media is saturated with hiring advice, and Miller is a practitioner who pulls back the curtain with information job seekers and recruiters can actually trust: where a resume goes after you hit apply, what an applicant tracking system is and is not doing, whether a human or a machine is behind a rejection. On the recruiter side, Miller models the hard conversations, including what to do when a candidate's compensation ask sits outside the band. "She's my absolute number one for recruiting information," Holman says.

Andy Gill, her former manager at two different companies, taught her something less technical and more foundational. Words like applicant and candidate sound sterile, Holman notes, and it is easy to forget who is actually on the other side of them. Gill's lesson was that you do not have to look a certain way or talk a certain way to do this job well. You have to be human. In practice that means respect, transparency about the process, and no confusion about what happens next, which is how trust gets built.

Her third choice is Ben Mena, whose value lies in the community he has assembled across the profession. In-house recruiters, agency recruiters, and every variation in between all sit inside that network, and Holman sees the benefit running in two directions. Recruiters get a wider map of their own industry. Job seekers get something arguably more useful: a clear understanding of who they are actually speaking with, and how an agency recruiter's process differs from an in-house recruiter's.

There is a fourth name, and Holman says it should have been in the original three. Sinead is a talent voice she has followed online for years, and the lesson there was permission rather than technique. "Sinead gave me the freedom to show up as myself," she says. Everyone carries some anxiety about how they look and how they sound, Holman observes, and social media has changed enough that firsthand accounts have displaced polished commercials as the thing people trust. Audiences now turn to Instagram for a real opinion on a hair product. The same shift applies to how talent leaders and companies present themselves, and the freedom to be unpolished turns out to be an advantage.

Why She Changed Her Mind About AI

Holman is unusually candid about the fact that she did not start out an enthusiast. "I was resistant to AI," she says, and she wants that on the record for anyone reading who feels the same way. Part of it was generational, she allows. Part of it was a specific and legitimate worry: when a conversation is being captured, something about its organic quality changes, and she was not sure how candidates would feel about that. She was not entirely sure how she felt about it either.

What moved her was thinking through why the product existed in the first place. A recruiter, as she puts it, has a stack of plates spinning in the air at any given moment, and one of them is the conversation happening right now. Holman recruits technical talent in the tech space, which is exactly why she is so precise about the limits of her own expertise. "I am not an engineer. I do not pretend to be an engineer," she says, and she considers the alternative the most dangerous thing someone in her position could do, because assumptions fill the space where deep knowledge should be. "I know a little bit about a lot." So she listens actively, converts what she hears into notes while the candidate is still speaking, and hopes the record she produces represents them fairly.

Technology like BrightHire, which she has used, closed that gap. When a conversation is captured and transcribed, nothing is lost in translation, and Holman reframed the whole category around a single word: advocacy. It helps her advocate accurately for the person she just spoke with, and it protects the candidate, who now knows that the experience they described out loud will reach the hiring team intact. Newer tools go further, layering intelligence on top of the transcript so a summary is legible to anyone who needs to understand what transpired. BrightHire is far from the only option, she notes, and the category keeps expanding.

Advice for the Year Ahead

Her counsel to business leaders and recruiters heading into 2026 is direct and unsentimental. AI is not going anywhere. Recruiters and businesses will have to embrace it in some form or fashion, and the sooner they engage the better. "Lean in and see where it can make sense for your business processes," she says. Crucially, that is not an argument for wholesale adoption. It does not mean you have to take it all. It means finding the specific pieces that, from a business standpoint, a resource standpoint, and a time standpoint, genuinely speed things up. "That's not a bad thing."

The through line across all of it, the counselor's chair, the mentors, the transcription tools, is the same conviction stated three different ways. The process should be clear, the record should be accurate, and the person on the other end deserves an advocate. Holman is also quick to point attention elsewhere, naming Ricky Dearing, a senior director of talent acquisition she encounters at military related events, as someone whose deep involvement in the military community deserves recognition alongside her own. In a profession that runs on generosity and rarely gets credited for it, that instinct to redirect the spotlight may be the most telling detail of all.