Tal Assayag

From the Classroom to the Science of Behavior

Her career did not start with a requisition. It started with a classroom. Like all Israelis, Assayag entered military service after school, and she served as a soldier teacher, working with very young children who came from broken homes, kids whose parents were not functioning as parents should. One day a week, she and her fellow soldier teachers went to the university to train formally for the profession.

It was there, in conversation with one of her professors, that a door opened. She learned there was a discipline devoted to understanding why people do what they do, and how they might be moved toward better decisions. She left the army and went to study behavioral science. What she wanted, badly, was to become an organizational psychologist and reshape companies from the inside.

Reality intervened in the most useful way. She was young, and by her own account she had zero understanding of how things actually worked, so she took a job as a recruiter at an agency to learn the machinery. The clarity arrived almost immediately. "I understood very quickly that this is my path," she says. She could read people. She could see how an individual's strengths might be elaborated into something a company genuinely needed. And she could change the trajectory of a life, one conversation at a time.

That conviction has stayed with her, sharpened by a puzzle she has never quite accepted. She watched colleague after colleague treat talent acquisition as a waystation, a step to be traded for a classic HR role. Assayag could not understand it. Few functions carry as much impact or as much meaning. Talent acquisition was not the runway. It was the destination.

The Manager Who Believed, the Mother Who Set the Standard

Ask Assayag who shaped her and she names two people, and neither answer is a formality. The first is John Long, her current manager, who joined Forte five years ago, a couple of years into her own tenure there. The pairing was combustible at first: a British leader who had moved to the States and an Israeli living in Israel, two very different cultures, two very different styles of speaking and behaving. She had learned English only about nine years earlier, and as a native Hebrew speaker she found the Latin languages an entirely new world. There were clashes.

What mattered was what came after them. Long believed she had the passion and the drive to keep pushing herself, and he made a habit of putting her on the spot, challenging her to question everything and to grow into a stronger manager and a stronger talent leader. The friction turned into faith, and the faith turned into development. He is also the person who put her name forward for this recognition.

Her second answer is less conventional and, she suspects, more revealing. "I would say my mother," she says, describing the most modest and intelligent person she has met, and the way she treats everyone with kindness. That is not sentiment separated from strategy. It is Assayag's operating philosophy as a talent acquisition lead: see people as people, not as a CV or another lead toward a closed position. Staying open, kind and modest in every conversation is, in her framing, the actual craft.

Fifty Episodes, and What They No Longer Say

Three years ago Assayag launched a podcast and recorded 50 episodes with leaders across the talent acquisition space. Her verdict on that archive today is unusually candid: most of it is no longer relevant. The pace of change has outrun the conversation, and she is not precious about it.

Her read on why is grounded rather than breathless. The bulk of recruiting work, she points out, is operational and repetitive: submitting scorecards, preparing candidates for interviews, absorbing the business needs of the organization and its stakeholders. Agents and AI, used well, clear that layer away. What they cannot do is the part she considers the actual job, which is shaping the company itself.

That means structuring and prioritizing critical hiring needs, understanding strategic requirements, collaborating cross functionally, and connecting hiring decisions to revenue. "Recruitment has a very strong power on shaping the companies," she argues, and the leaders who use the time AI gives back to think rather than execute will finally position talent acquisition where it belongs in the org. Her phrase for the alternative is blunt: robot mode.

Adopt Everything. Doubt Everything.

Her advice to other talent leaders holds two ideas in tension, which is why it is worth hearing. Adopt AI as aggressively as you can. Then interrogate it just as aggressively.

She is wary of the gravitational pull of the hype cycle. Pushing an AI function into real production is genuinely difficult, and the assumption that everything can be transformed at once invites carelessness. So she recommends a posture of permanent curiosity: try the new tools, then challenge the outputs and the working methods behind them. Doubt, in her vocabulary, is not cynicism. It is the same instinct John Long trained into her, applied to technology.

And underneath it, the constant. "At the end of the day, we're human, and in a talent position, work with humans," she says. Not robot mode. Human at the end. For a leader who came to recruiting through a classroom of children who needed someone to see them clearly, it is less a slogan than a through line.