Tiffany Toussaint

No One Goes to School to Be a Recruiter

Tiffany says it plainly: no one goes to school to be a recruiter. Her own undergraduate work was in secondary education, with a degree in speech communications, and the plan was a high school classroom. While working part time for a restaurant company, she was recommended for a trainer role at the corporate headquarters, which put her in front of managers and leaders instead of teenagers. The teaching instinct transferred intact. The setting simply changed.

That trainer role sat inside the human resources department, and proximity did the rest. She watched what the recruiters were doing, listened to how they described it, and recognized something she wanted. From there the path built on itself: learning and development, then organizational development, then a generalist role that happened to include recruiting, and finally a full transition into recruiting. Later she went back to school for a master's in organizational management and HR, because she wanted her experience backed by education as well as by hours logged.

Two Degrees of Separation

Alongside her day jobs, Tiffany built a second career in service to the profession. She worked with the Twin Cities Society for Human Resource Management, an affiliate of the Society for Human Resource Management, and led the state council, the Minnesota Society for Human Resource Management. She was also active with Minnesota Recruiters and with Recruiters Network, an association of recruiting networks that included the Minnesota group. Local events, national events, speaking on panels, watching others present, trading ideas: the compounding effect was a network that reaches well beyond Minneapolis and Saint Paul and into other countries.

One name comes up first. Chris Fields, her dear friend and an HR leader who launched his own consulting business and branched into helping job seekers build their resumes, is no longer with us. What Tiffany carries forward is the way he showed up. No matter what was happening around them, he was the person who could lift up a colleague, whether through a joke or an Instagram post of himself driving around Memphis, Tennessee, bebopping to his music. He genuinely loved and cared for the people close to him, and the lesson he left behind is a question his network still asks: how can we support one another?

In practice, that support looks like a phone tree of hard-won expertise. Someone needs a lead on facilitating a pre-employment assessment. Someone is tracking what is happening with the EEOC. Someone has a client company asking the recruiting agency to sit in on candidate conversations and has never encountered that before. Someone has a crucial conversation coming and wants to rehearse, or a presentation to deliver and wants a practice audience. Tiffany calls on that circle, and the circle calls on her. It also scales outward. When practitioners at large, medium, and small organizations compare notes, the profession gets more consistency, better compliance, steadier employee relations, and leaner processes. Even amplifying a colleague's post, resharing the data or the analytics or the industry insight and starting a conversation around it, elevates the whole talent acquisition space. As she puts it, in recruiting and HR there are about two degrees of separation. Someone always knows someone.

Technology That Clears Room for the Human Part

Tiffany is firmly in favor of technology that augments and streamlines the work. Candidates are already using technology to find and apply for jobs, she notes, so there has to be balance on the employer side. She points to conditional logic as an everyday example: if a candidate has one set of experience they route one way, if another set, they route another, with communications automated so the candidate experience improves rather than stalls. The same principle governs how her teams partner with hiring managers to move a process forward.

She is equally clear about the limits. The misuse of AI concerns her, from casually feeding a child's photograph into a tool to the broader reality that some people act with malicious intent. She does not want images of herself or her family uploaded and transformed into something she never approved. That caution is not resistance. It is a call for literacy, particularly on the candidate side, where a 24 hour news cycle rewards headlines over depth. People read that an applicant tracking system has been accused of discrimination for using AI to deselect candidates, she says, and there is more to the story. As the industry evolves, the education has to evolve with it.

Her own working habits prove the point she is making. Productivity rises, and none of it comes at the expense of human interaction. If anything, the tools make it easier for her to be present with her teams.

What She Tells People Early in Their Careers

The advice is consistent and it is not complicated: build the network, and keep building it. You never know when you will need someone, Tiffany says, and you never know when you will be the one whose expertise, insight, or opinion helps someone else. The conversations keep practitioners sharp and connected, and they are just as likely to be about life as about business.

She practices the reciprocity she preaches. Asked to point to peers deserving recognition, she named two immediately: Kristi Jones, a talent acquisition executive in the Kansas City, Missouri area who now works independently as a fractional head of talent acquisition, and Keirsten Greggs, a talent acquisition strategist out of Fairfield, VA, who is the Principal Consultant and Founder of TRAP Recruiter. It is the same reflex Chris Fields modeled, applied one introduction at a time. Tiffany's summary of the community she has spent a career building is short and genuine: she loves her people.