Susan Chy

Philosophy, Law School, and a Question That Started a Career

Chy studied philosophy as an undergraduate and went on to law school before concluding that the law was not the life she wanted. What followed was the kind of accident that a whole generation of recruiters will recognize. Around the 2008 downturn, she was placed at a software company by a recruiting agency, and the placement was good enough that she went back to the same agency later, hoping they could do it again.

They had nothing to offer her. What they had instead was an opinion about her. They liked her enough to suggest she come work for them, maybe starting as a sourcer. Her response has become the origin story she still tells: "What's a sourcer? And also, how much does it pay?" That exchange launched a career that would eventually put her at the head of talent functions across multiple companies.

The philosophy training did not go to waste. Chy's approach to recruiting problems is structural, skeptical of easy answers, and unusually willing to say that the right solution depends on the conditions. It is a habit of mind that has aged well in an industry currently awash in one-size-fits-all promises.

Gratitude in Both Directions

Ask Chy to name the leaders who shaped her and she starts with a caveat that doubles as a leadership philosophy: she has led talent acquisition at so many companies without reporting to another talent leader that most of her learning has come from her own teams, from the agency recruiters she partnered with, and from books. "I like to learn from everyone around me," she says. She folds what she picks up into her own recruiting philosophies rather than looking upward for a template.

One name, though, she offers without hesitation: Kaleigh Oleynik. Oleynik was a direct report when Chy was leading talent acquisition for Revolut as the company was launching in the United States, a small, new team inside a very large business. What made Oleynik exceptional was that she required almost no hand-holding, and that she modeled the traits Chy prizes in everyone she works with: communication, transparency, collaboration, and a stakeholder mentality where the company's goals belong to everybody. Those were things Chy already believed. Oleynik amplified them.

The postscript is the part Chy loves. Both women eventually left Revolut. Oleynik went to Talkspace, the online therapy provider, and rose to VP of Talent there. Chy moved into contract work, and later found herself working for the person who had once reported to her. "Our relationship works well, whether I'm reporting to her or she's reporting to me," she says. The reason, in her view, is the absence of ego on both sides. When she describes what makes Oleynik rare, she reaches for the shortest possible summary: a combination of EQ and IQ, plus fun, smart, and agile, in a field where leadership, listening, and emotional intelligence are scarcer than they should be.

That seriousness extends to how she gives her name to anyone. Asked for recommendations, Chy does not oblige quickly. "I'm not just going to be willy-nilly throwing names around. I will only give you people that I truly respect."

Rebuilding a Function From Manual to Modern

At LILT, Chy was brought in to make a talent organization efficient, and she has moved fast. The LinkedIn accounts came in week one. An AI sourcing tool followed within weeks. From there she has been layering in automation wherever it earns its place: resume screening, sourcing, engagement, and outreach.

The logic is about capacity, not novelty. The company's talent managers are not narrow specialists; they source, they recruit, and they do a little bit of everything, which means they are stretched thin. "That's why the automation part is so important," she says. Every hour returned to a generalist is an hour that goes back into the parts of hiring that only a person can do.

AI Is Old and New at the Same Time

Chy's read on the AI moment is refreshingly unbreathless. AI, she notes, is both old and new: it has been developing for a long time, and it is still developing, which is precisely why it raises so many eyebrows and so much skepticism. She has sat through the HR events and the industry dinners where the same question surfaces again and again: how do we balance the use of AI while still preserving the human touch?

Her answer starts from first principles. "We are in the human business," she says. "We talk to people. We are people-facing." What she refuses to do is pretend there is a universal playbook. The right strategy depends on who you are hiring, what the company looks like, and how big it is. Factor those in and the approach has to be customized. "There's no one size fits all solution."

Where consensus does exist, she believes, is on the shape of the trade. Use AI to streamline process and automate work. Protect the moments that genuinely need a human, and use the time you have freed up to enhance and uphold the candidate experience, and then keep going past the offer into onboarding, where new employees form their first real impression of a company.

Advice: Do What's Right for You

Chy's counsel to other talent leaders navigating the same terrain is deliberately unglamorous, and it is the harder discipline to practice. Resist the pressure to copy someone else's stack, someone else's process, someone else's conference-stage certainty. "What works for me may not necessarily work for you or your environment. Each place is so different from one another."

It is advice with real authority behind it, offered by someone who has walked into enough different companies to know that context is not a detail; it is the whole assignment. Do your own diagnosis. Automate what deserves automating. Keep the ego out of the room. And never lose sight of the fact that on the other end of every workflow is a person deciding whether to trust you with their career.