Yvette Hansen

A Bait and Switch That Became a Career

Hansen did not set out to be a recruiter. She was working at a small, state funded organization that helped people rewrite their resumes, get in front of potential employers and build interview skills. She liked the mission. She wanted a bigger stage. So she answered an advertisement for an executive assistant role at a larger firm, and discovered on arrival that the job on offer was something else entirely: the company, a small third party recruiting agency, was quietly using the ad to find recruiters.

She took it, largely because of the earning potential. The first two weeks were an education in the unglamorous side of the profession. "You were given a book and a phone and you were expected to smile and dial," she recalls. Then she landed her first client, and the calculus changed. "This might not be so bad," she remembers thinking. Two decades of perspective later, that accidental entry looks less like an accident than a fit: someone already drawn to helping people position themselves for work, dropped into the business of doing exactly that at scale.

The Leader Who Handed Her the Room

Ask Hansen who shaped her and one name comes first without hesitation: Lisa Kraska, her leader at UnitedHealth Group. Hansen did not report to her directly, but Kraska saw the potential anyway and gave Hansen her first leadership opportunity in corporate America. She invited Hansen onto leadership calls simply to listen, to be a fly on the wall and understand how decisions were actually made and what data sat behind them.

That exposure rewired how Hansen works. "She introduced me to data and the importance of data," Hansen says. "I am a data geek now. I ground everything in data." Kraska also pushed on something more personal. Hansen was rising through the ranks of a Fortune 5 company without a degree, an almost unheard of trajectory at the time. Kraska told her to go back to school. The conversation happened on a Wednesday. By that Monday, Hansen was enrolled. She finished her degree roughly two years later.

Hansen describes Kraska as fierce and fearless, and credits her with creating a team culture where others could be the same. "She was pivotal in my career," Hansen says. It is a model of sponsorship she has clearly carried forward, and it shows in how she talks about her peers. She points to Kristen Gorney, a Vice President of Talent Acquisition at a division of CVS, as a people centric leader genuinely focused on the impact of hiring on patients and customers. She points to Carrie Boysen, Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Baylor Scott and White Health, for the way she tackles new work and transformation head on rather than shying away from change.

The Biggest Shift Since LinkedIn

Hansen does not undersell what AI is doing to talent acquisition. "Dynamically, it's insane," she says. In her reading, nothing has changed the function this holistically since the internet itself, and since LinkedIn arrived and handed recruiters something close to ready made lead lists that had never existed before.

What excites her is not automation for its own sake but the way the technology forces a rethink of how work gets done. "What we used to think was best in class is decent in class today," she says. Reaching best in class now means asking, at every step, whether an agent or a piece of automation could make the process meaningfully better. She has been comparing notes widely, with peers inside healthcare and well beyond it, on how far to push and where the limits sit.

But she runs every proposal through the same filter. How does the candidate experience change because of this? How does the hiring manager experience change? Are we saving time, creating efficiency, moving faster and improving quality? If the answers are not clear, her instruction is to stop. "Until we know what we're trying to solve for, let's slow it down and figure out the problem first."

Cautiously Optimistic, Relentlessly Human

Asked what she would tell other talent leaders navigating this moment, Hansen's answer is compact and hard won: be cautiously optimistic about the technology on offer while not forgetting the humanity in your process designs. She means candidates, obviously. She also means recruiters.

Too many transformation efforts, in her view, treat the people executing the work as an afterthought. Hansen argues that adoption is the whole game, and adoption is earned. Leaders have to secure buy in, help their teams understand how a tool actually helps them, and be straight with them when it will change their work. If it does, they need to see that the change serves the candidate, the hiring manager and the organization, and to understand the role they will play in it. "You have to keep people at the center of everything," she says.

Ending the Era of the Closed Box

Hansen is equally energized by a cultural shift among her peers. Talent acquisition has historically been a competitive, closed profession, where leaders raced to be first to a milestone, first to adopt a tool, first to claim an outcome, and kept the details to themselves. That is changing. Her peers are now openly sharing the problems they are hitting and the solutions they are testing, and she considers that one of the most valuable developments in the field.

The practical case is obvious to her. Without shared intelligence, every team burns its own cycles on the same experiments. "We're all going to be spinning our wheels beta testing, beta testing, beta testing," she says. Far better to call a friend, ask whether they have piloted a given product and what the outcomes were, then move on to explore something else. In a market flooded with new tools and thin evidence, that kind of candor is its own competitive advantage, and Hansen is doing her part to build it.