Allison Slater Rasch and Katie Wagner are partners at Talent by Design Collective, which helps companies from Series A to Fortune 500 build recruiting infrastructure. Their session started with 2 teams given the same mandate: become AI-native and do more with fewer people.
Plug-and-pray doesn’t work. Team 1 bought every shiny tool, did little enablement and didn’t change any roles. Adoption stayed low, and the capacity model didn’t move. Team 2 picked tools carefully, set principles for where AI decides and where humans do, redesigned roles and rebuilt capacity around the gains. Team 2 got the gains.
Tech now shapes capacity. Teams used to buy tools to get overloaded recruiters back to capacity. Now leadership asks how to hire 10 recruiters instead of 20. Most teams add AI assumptions to their old ratio model. Few have time to measure the real gain.
Decide where the time goes. Efficiency only shows up when you choose what freed-up time is for (more hires, better hires or a smaller team) and rewrite roles to match. In 1 example, a solo recruiter went from 29 hires to 44 in a year after updating processes and adopting AI.
The rise of the power IC. You no longer have to manage people to move up. Heads of talent become player-coaches. Recruiters drop status updates and scheduling to coach hiring managers. RecOps stops taking tickets and governs AI, while talent engineers own the product.
Write AI principles with your team. Spell out what AI can move forward, where humans always step in and how you’ll handle the gray areas. Then keep them where people see them every day.
Their bigger point: hiring managers are becoming your users. As one recruiter put it, “My job is to make my hiring managers better at hiring.”
