Tay Rizvi

Finding the Craft Inside the Umbrella

Rizvi is candid about how she chose her field. She knew she was not an engineer or a scientist. She knew she was people-oriented, and her instincts pointed her toward HR. The harder question was what to do once she got there. HR, as she puts it, is a very broad umbrella: generalist or specialist, and if specialist, which specialty. The answer arrived through practice rather than planning. As she grew in that healthcare role, she began interviewing candidates, and she found something she was genuinely good at.

Her definition of a good interviewer has stayed remarkably consistent ever since. It is someone who balances collecting the relevant information about a candidate with making the conversation feel natural. Not scripted. Not daunting. Not the kind of experience that leaves a capable person too nervous to show who they are. "When I realized that I had the ability to do that, I thought I was in the right place," she says. It is a small statement with large implications, because the discipline it describes, extracting signal without extracting comfort, is precisely the skill she now believes the industry is at risk of automating away.

Two Leaders, One Lesson, Delivered Differently

Ask Rizvi about the people who shaped her and she starts with someone she considers obvious. Dorothy Gilligan, later known as Dorothy Miller, was her director in that healthcare setting, leading a team of three that eventually grew to four or five while sitting at the leadership level of the organization. Gilligan was an all-around HR practitioner, and she refused to let Rizvi stay in a single lane. She pushed her into employee relations, where Rizvi spent her time coaching managers on how to develop their people, address shortcomings, and turn around situations where employees were struggling. She pushed her into compensation, where Rizvi ran market analysis and examined internal equity.

None of that was recruitment, strictly speaking, and all of it was. "Once you hire someone, you really want to ensure their success," Rizvi says. The breadth taught her the full employee journey rather than just the front door, and it made her a more honest recruiter. If you are going to sell a company to a candidate, she argues, you had better be accurate about what you are selling: what it actually takes to make it there, which soft skills and values carry someone through. Gilligan also saw capability before Rizvi saw it in herself, handing her one opportunity after another even when Rizvi did not feel ready. "I owe her a lot."

The second figure is her current manager, Natalie Alexiu, Head of Global Recruitment at Digital.ai. They live in two different countries and have never met in person, which makes what Rizvi says about her all the more striking: Alexiu often understands what Rizvi is thinking before Rizvi does. What inspires her most is Alexiu's willingness to give people a chance to shine in their own individual ways, to be their authentic selves in whatever setting they find themselves, and to branch out. It is Gilligan's lesson arriving again in a different form. Rizvi's role at Digital.ai is heavily recruitment focused, yet Alexiu consistently asks her to stretch into other areas of HR and the business, and to build deeper visibility and connection with the hiring teams she supports.

That is where her signature line comes from. "You can never recruit in a box." It is also, in her view, the structural advantage of the in-house recruiter over the staffing agency. Sitting inside a company lets you know its people, the nuances that make them unique, the idiosyncrasies of a technical space or an industry, and the history of where the organization has been. Understanding an organization from many different facets, she says, is very important.

The Gap, and Getting Back on the Bicycle

There is a chapter between healthcare and technology that Rizvi volunteers without hesitation, because she believes other people need to hear it. When her children were young, she stepped away from her career to be a mother. She frames the tension plainly: women in particular are challenged by how much emphasis to place on motherhood versus excelling professionally, and sometimes those two things hum along naturally in harmony while other times they become completely detrimental to one another. She recognized that her kids needed her entire attention, and she made that choice deliberately, supported by a leader who understood it.

Returning to work, in technology, after many years was its own project. Part of it was memory, jogging loose functions she had learned before. Part of it was reinvention, because the world she came back to was nothing like the one she left. "You can get on the bicycle again and always know how to ride the bicycle," she says, "but it's a whole different world." She names the gap for what it was and credits her current environment with giving her the room to close it. For anyone contemplating a similar re-entry, her career is the argument.

Minding the Door in the Age of AI

Rizvi is not an AI skeptic. She sees the buzz in the market, hears constantly from organizations with genuinely impressive tools for building effective talent pipelines, and considers search technology and the ability to sort application pipelines against different criteria straightforwardly helpful. Her concern is narrower and sharper: how to adopt all of it thoughtfully, without sacrificing the human element.

Her evidence is empirical. In roles her teams have hired for, the winning candidate has repeatedly been someone who did not tick all the boxes, and sometimes did not tick the main ones. You go to market with a criteria list, then a profile makes you pause, and what the person has actually done in their past turns out to fit the role in a way nobody had imagined. That instinct to stop and look again is the capability she thinks AI will be genuinely challenged to reproduce. So is the one she considers even more fundamental: recognizing potential rather than only the talent inherent in someone today, and reading where a person will be in three to five years.

Behind that is a defense of the profession itself. Recruitment, in her framing, is about advocacy, opportunity, doing the right thing, and giving people the chance to grow as their careers advance. "The human in human resources cannot go away," she says. "It has to be there."

Her advice to talent leaders heading into 2026 is correspondingly balanced rather than cautionary. Incorporate the AI tools where they look like they will add value. Then stay awake. "We cannot be asleep at the wheel. We can't stop minding this door." The goal, she insists, is to keep working thoughtfully enough that the decisions being made at the end of the process are still human ones. For a career that began with strangers walking through an actual door, application in hand, it is a fitting thing to be guarding.