Taryn Little

From a Houston Boutique to Amazon, Zillow and Paramount

Little's first job out of college was at a boutique agency in Houston, working for a manager named Tricia who has since passed away. Tricia taught her the unglamorous fundamentals that still hold: show up every single day, smile and dial, keep your desk organized, and know your market better than anyone else in the room. "She was an expert in her space," Little says. The lesson Little took forward was not just discipline but authenticity, that the fastest route to a real relationship is being recognizably yourself.

The agency years gave way to a run through some of the most demanding talent organizations in American business. At Amazon she worked closely with Esther Frey, now at Oracle, and studied her style with the attention of someone taking notes for later. Frey was casual but professional, empathetic, and transparent when she could be, which in recruiting means holding confidences carefully while still telling people the truth. "I learned a lot from her," Little says, "just because I saw her grow and take on more, but also just with that humility." She counts Frey as a compassionate leader and a great mentor, and names Monique Visser and Dustin Hanson among the peers whose example she values, Visser for an outgoing energy that lifts a room and Hanson for being unmistakably real and transparent as a leader.

Then came Zillow, which she regards as a genuine outlier. "We were pretty bleeding edge when it came to trying new things," she says, crediting a leader who believed in experimentation and simply let the team explore. Many of the initiatives other companies and teams are only now standing up, Zillow was running years earlier. That experience shaped her expectation of what a talent function is allowed to attempt.

Today she is at Paramount, where she and her team are pushing the envelope on applying AI to daily recruiting work and are currently evaluating new tooling for the organization. She arrived there by following Jean Lanctot, her current leader, whom she first met at Amazon when the two started at the same time in peer individual contributor roles. Lanctot had earned deep respect from the business and was constantly trying new things. "I would follow her anywhere," Little says. "She is brilliant, she's scrappy, and she's personable." The pattern is not incidental: transparency, humility and compassion are the traits she looks for in a leader precisely because they are the traits she is trying to embody. "That's who I am and who I want to continue to be."

The Rise of the Technical Talent Advisor

Ask Little what AI is doing to recruiting and she does not answer in the language of efficiency gains. She answers in the language of who gets hired into the profession next. Over the last three years she has watched the ground shift, and her conclusion is that the job description for a recruiter is quietly being rewritten.

"We're going to need people that are not afraid, that are curious, that want to constantly learn, that can be somewhat technical," she says. The new tools reward practitioners willing to get their hands dirty, even to do a little coding, in service of finding the right person. She frames it as a generational upgrade to an old craft: "It's a totally different take on Boolean searches, but using the different tools available."

What emerges, in her view, is a hybrid professional the industry has talked about for years but rarely staffed for. Talent advisors who are relationship builders first, but who are also technical and relentlessly curious, inventing ways to untap pools of talent that were previously invisible and maximizing their own leverage in the process. That combination, not automation alone, is what she believes will define the next decade of the function.

Experiment, Document, Share

Her advice to other talent leaders navigating this period is refreshingly free of hedging. Experiment. "Don't be afraid to try," she says. But the experimentation only pays off if it is treated as work rather than novelty: take notes on how you did it, go back and audit what succeeded and what quietly failed, and build an institutional memory instead of a series of one off pilots.

The second half of her advice is less common in a competitive field. Talk to your peers. Find the people you are comfortable sharing with and play with the new tools together, because the learning curve is too steep and too fast for anyone to climb alone. "I think that that's what's going to make us all stronger," she says.

It is a fitting close for someone who entered the profession because a relative told her he helped people find jobs. Twenty five years on, across an agency floor, Amazon, Zillow and now Paramount, Little's answer to what she does all day has not fundamentally changed. The tools have. She simply intends to be among the first to master them.