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.

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 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.