Tamina Becker

The Partner Who Suggested A Successor

Many years before the Claude licences, Tamina was a customer service manager in a contact centre environment. The role came with a standing partnership: a talent acquisition partner handled all customer service hiring, and Tamina was the key contact on the business side. Recruitment, at that stage, was something observed at close range rather than practised.

Then the partner announced a departure, and suggested Tamina as a possible replacement. It was a move Tamina had never once considered. The suggestion was enough to prompt a look at the role, then an application, then an offer. "The rest is history," Tamina says. That origin still shapes the approach, because the first real exposure to recruiting came from the position of its internal customer.

Never Burn A Bridge, Never Drop A Plate

Ask about formative influences and the answer is deliberately plural. Managers, colleagues and candidates have all contributed pieces, and there is no single defining mentor so much as an accumulation of habits picked up from people worth watching. Talent acquisition, as Tamina sees it, is a small world in which today's candidate is tomorrow's manager or colleague, which makes burning bridges a poor idea on every count.

The most practical lessons came from a run of strong managers, and they were unglamorous by design. Do what you say you are going to do. Follow up on everything you promise to follow up on. Stay organised, because with that many plates in the air one will eventually drop, and the impact travels across every touchpoint a candidate has with the business. Candidate experience, in Tamina's framing, is less an abstraction than an exercise in memory: everyone in recruiting has been a candidate, so the standard is simply the treatment you would want for yourself.

More recent guidance has pushed in a different direction. The counsel Tamina now values most is about stepping back from the reactive, operational pull of the function to ask the harder questions. How can this be done better? Which processes deserve rebuilding? Where can AI genuinely remove friction? How should the team plan so that it is not perpetually catching up?

Skills, Not Just Prompts

Tamina describes the working relationship with Claude as a committed one, complete with the occasional disagreement, and the practical output is a growing library of purpose-built skills. There is a job description skill and a job advert skill: information goes in, a usable draft comes out. There is a candidate communication skill for the moments every recruiter recognises, when a candidate asks for difficult feedback in writing and the blank page suddenly feels loaded. Everything is reviewed through a human lens and tweaked where needed, but the time saved is substantial.

The most consequential build was not a content tool at all. Tamina used Claude to construct a resource planner for the team, an exercise that produced a clear-eyed picture of the workload the function had been absorbing. It also produced something previously missing: evidence. Making the case for additional resource had been difficult without clear data or a crisp way of articulating the gap, and the planner addressed both at once.

Alongside that, an AI consultant is currently working with the business specifically on AI and automation inside Teamtailor, the company's applicant tracking system, with the aim of stripping out admin and creating efficiencies. Tamina's assessment is that this puts the team slightly ahead of the game compared with many talent acquisition peers. The shift shows on the candidate side too. Blue Light Card now screens for how candidates think about AI and how much they use it, looking for people passionate about using it in the right way rather than overusing it.

Advice For Talent Leaders Heading Into The New Year

Blue Light Card's financial year runs to the end of April, so the planning rhythm sits slightly out of step with the calendar, with the business roughly halfway through its year. The advice for peers is direct all the same: explore AI, and explore specifically what it can do for you rather than what it does in the abstract. The resource planner is the proof case. A problem that had resisted a persuasive business case for a while became solvable once the right tool was pointed at it, because the obstacle had never been the argument itself but the data and the articulation behind it.

There is a technique attached. When you do not quite know what to ask, describe the problem, then ask the assistant to put the questions to you: request that it walks you through what it needs in order to help. Tamina calls it a game changer. It is also a neat summary of the wider philosophy, which is that the value sits less in the technology than in the willingness to interrogate your own process honestly enough to improve it.