Tara Torres

An Accident That Became a Career

Torres did not set out to build a life in hiring. Her original major was hospitality management, and she was in Orlando, Florida, which meant working for one of the region's best known hotel chains while she was still in school. It taught her something useful: that particular future was not a fit.

What came next was a role at a staffing agency, placing temporary and temp-to-perm workers into a call center. She was still an undergraduate. She liked it enough to change her academic direction entirely, switching her major to HR management, and, as she puts it, "the rest is history."

Through all of it she worked full time and went to school full time. That combination is easy to summarize and hard to live, and it produced the work ethic that has anchored everything since.

The People Who Shaped Her

Ask Torres who made the difference and the first name is not a boss. It is her stepdad, who filled a role in her personal life that was otherwise missing and who consistently pushed her to build a life in which she would not have to depend on anyone else. She is openly grateful for it. That early insistence on being self-sustaining, she says, gave her her priorities straight at a young age and has held her steady across decades of career decisions.

The second is Amy Cropper, her leader at Amazon and now Head of Talent Acquisition at Tricentis. Cropper took a calculated gamble, bringing Torres out of a structured, risk-averse corporate banking environment and into a company organized around innovation and speed. Rather than leaving her to sink or swim, Cropper actively taught her the difference between the two worlds and what success actually requires inside a technology organization. Torres describes her as a leader who is in the trenches with her team while still operating as a strategic visionary, and who navigated the sheer scale of Amazon with a skill Torres considers rare. She calls Cropper an innovative, highly capable people leader.

The third is Amara Jones, her HR leader at CASA and now VP of People at Crafty. Jones pushed her outward. Do the podcast. Write the article. Do the research. Do not only track what is happening inside the organization, track what is happening outside of it. That insistence on continuous learning is what led Torres to the Human Capital AI Council and to a wider professional community. In Torres's words, Jones is a creative HR leader who pushes people to meet their full potential.

She also points to Sarah Bosco, VP of Talent Acquisition at Upstart, as a trusted talent professional who has reinvented herself and remains a source of inspiration.

AI Is Not the First Disruption

Torres has a longer frame of reference than most people currently writing about AI in recruiting, and she uses it. Paper files gave way to the ATS. The ATS matured and video interviewing arrived. Each iteration was disruptive in both the useful and the uncomfortable ways, and each one eventually got absorbed. AI, she argues, is the most disruptive technology the function has seen in a long time, but the playbook for responding to it is not new.

"If we really think about where we were 25 years ago, there's been a ton of evolution and we all survived it," she says. "And we've all are better for it. I think AI is going to be exactly the same."

What that playbook requires, in her telling, is three things. Challenge your norms and your typical way of doing things. Open your mind to what she calls the art of the possible. And then hold people accountable, because change is genuinely hard and good intentions do not move organizations. Teams need a goal and a North Star, and leaders need to be explicit about expectations. If you want your organization to adopt AI, she says, you have to hold it accountable for actually doing so.

Start Before You Feel Ready

Her advice to talent leaders who feel behind is refreshingly free of posturing. Lean in. Ask questions. Show up in a way that assumes nobody expects you to have every answer, because nobody does.

She is specific about where to look. The Human Capital AI Council, led by Kyle Lagunas, is one option. Existing vendors are another, since most now have teams building AI directly into their products and are usually glad to explain how. And the most overlooked resource is often internal: find out who is leading the AI charge inside your own organization and go connect with them.

Above all, begin. Torres makes room for the fact that this can feel intimidating, and she thinks leaders should be honest about that apprehension rather than performing confidence they do not have. Authenticity and engagement are not in conflict. "You can be authentic about the potential intimidation," she says, "but you can also still lean in and find ways that it will work for you." It is the same instinct that took a hospitality student in Orlando into a call center staffing desk and, eventually, into the center of one of the most demanding talent markets in technology.