HR Spotlight: What a Recruiter Really Thinks About AI, Talent Strategy, and More

When you hear “recruiter,” you might think of cold-calling, skimming resumes, and trawling through LinkedIn for new leads.

While these tasks are all part of the recruiting process, the real purpose of talent acquisition goes much deeper than just reading resumes. Recruiters are closely tied to business strategy, shaping talent investment and stewarding company culture. And as technology advances and labor markets shift, recruiting has become more nuanced and more crucial than ever.

To unpack it all, we sat down with one of our very own recruiters at BambooHR, Bekah Wilkerson. During our Q&A, we discussed the strategic impact of recruiting, how AI is changing talent acquisition, and what recruiters really wish people knew about their role.

Meet Bekah Wilkerson, Sr. Talent Acquisition Partner at BambooHR!

*Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Tell us about you! How did you get into recruiting, and how did your career path lead to your current role?

When I was in school, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I thought business was really interesting, especially the strategy side of it. I loved my finance classes—I almost did an accounting program, but I realized I’d be bored looking at spreadsheets all day. I wanted to be solving more complicated people problems. So I ended up joining an HR program.

Graduating from the program, I said the one thing I knew I didn’t want to be was a recruiter. I saw recruiting as very salesy, and I didn’t want to spend my days trying to convince people to come work for a company that I wasn’t even happy at.

Instead, I got my start in recruiting operations. I was on the back end, putting together processes for training recruiters and creating workflows for smooth candidate experiences. And then I found BambooHR.

Someone had reached out to me from BambooHR, and we met up for lunch. We talked about my strong opinions on recruiting, and how I believed more companies really needed to be focused on not just filling seats, but really thinking about long-term retention and whether we’re hiring people who'd be happy in those roles. And the person from BambooHR really aligned with that.

The more I learned about BambooHR, the more I thought I would love working here. And I could get behind spending my days bringing other people to BambooHR, too. So all of a sudden, I did a 180 and became a recruiter after all!

I really do love BambooHR. When I’m trying to fill a role, I’m genuinely convinced there are a lot of people out there that would also be super happy here. And it’s so rewarding to be a part of that.

Why is talent acquisition essential to modern HR?

It’s important in this day and age to have a high-functioning recruiting team. People are a company’s most valuable resource. You really need to embed your people into your business strategy and make sure that you’re getting the right people at the right time.

It can be easy for companies to just go, “We need to fill this position, let’s do it quickly,” and perhaps not put enough thought into how the role will address business challenges, or whether we’re choosing the best person for the role.

But talent acquisition is actually a lot more complex than that. Recruiters assess the talent needs of your organization. We ask questions like:

• What are we trying to do as a business?
• What does that mean for our people needs?
• How do we distill those needs into defined roles and go out and find the right people?

Maybe we have a business problem and we’ve thought of a couple of roles to solve it. At that point, I’ll come in and help determine what the role will actually look like and what skills a person will need for it. And then, I’ll go find that person and hire them.

The recruitment process itself also serves a strategic function. An employee’s first interaction with a company sets the tone for how they’ll feel about the company in the long run. Think of the recruiting process as a reflection of the employee experience and your mission and values. You need to be intentionally crafting the candidate experience from the very first touchpoint with a potential new hire.

What’s a typical day in the life of a recruiter?

Each day is a little different. There’s the stereotypical stuff—I do spend a good chunk of my day reviewing applications. Every candidate that applies to one of my roles at BambooHR, I look at their application. I spend a lot of time on the phone interviewing people. I also spend quite a bit of time on LinkedIn, searching for people and sending messages to try to convince them that maybe they want to talk to me. And of course, I write job descriptions and help design the interview process.

But there’s also a lot to do outside those standard tasks. I work with hiring managers on scoping roles correctly and matching them to the market. I’ll also proactively partner with hiring managers before we launch a role, just to think more deeply about the talent needs on their team.

I do analytics and research, as well. If we’re running a search for a role, sometimes we need to reassess the pricing or the talent market, so I’ll run analyses and work with other teams to make those data-informed decisions.

What are the biggest challenges and wins for a recruiter?

Being a recruiter can be emotionally challenging. A lot of my day, unfortunately, is spent telling people no, they didn’t get the job, or they’re not getting an interview. That’s hard. Most recruiters, myself included, get into the field because we really care about people and the human experience, and telling people no doesn’t feel good.

On the flip side, it’s rewarding to find the right fit. When you can say, “This is the candidate we’ve been needing, and I think BambooHR is the company this person has been looking for,” it’s a big positive for that person’s life and for us. So I love that.

Another challenge is that recruiting ends up being a lot more cross-functional than people realize. When I’m working on a search, I’m often sitting between the hiring manager, our business partner team, our compensation team, the finance team, and I’m trying to make sure it all comes together. And sometimes I’ve had to navigate misalignment between those stakeholders.

It can be easy to just surrender to assigning blame and be like, “it’s finance’s fault, it’s the hiring manager’s fault.” But I think your role as the recruiter is to spot those potential misalignments early and bring people together. Hopefully, you can help the hiring manager own the decision for their team and steer them in a good direction.

What do you wish more people understood about your job?

One misconception is that we’re just here to fill open jobs as quickly as possible. So often, recruiters feel pressured to sell someone into a role, so they can get it closed. And really, the point of recruiting is to solve a business need.

Time to fill is important, but at the end of the day, what matters most is that we’re making hiring decisions that will be positive long-term. We need to find employees who perform well, have the right skills, and have the motivation to stay in the job.

Another common misconception is that recruiters just sit and look at applications all day. Honestly, that’s one of the less exciting parts of my job. There are a lot more strategic functions in recruiting. We partner cross-functionally and work with hiring managers to evaluate our business needs and develop the right roles.

I’ve had it happen so many times where we take a step back from a talent search and realize we’ve actually defined a role incorrectly, and we need to take it down and revamp it. And it’s often the recruiter that takes the lead on identifying those gaps and making strategic changes. So recruiting is much, much more than just reviewing applications.

What are the HR tools you can’t live without?

Applicant tracking systems are what recruiters live and die by. I’m in the ATS all day long. LinkedIn is definitely big as well, just to have access to the talent that’s out there and be able to message them. Our ATS and LinkedIn are the two that are critical for me.

How do you see talent acquisition evolving with AI and other innovations in your field?

There is so much debate out there right now about the future of recruiting. I know a lot of companies have started trying to use AI bots to conduct first-round interviews, and some people are thinking maybe we don’t even need recruiters anymore.

It’s true that AI is definitely going to change how we think about recruiting, and a lot of our processes are probably going to look really different from how they look today. It used to take me hours and hours to create a job description and interview questions for a role. I still do the polishing and final review, but AI has cut down the time I spend on it by 80%.

But as I mentioned, a big misconception about recruiting is that you’re just filtering resumes. AI can speed up that type of task, but there are so many other strategic aspects of talent acquisition that I think human recruiters will always be needed in some form.

We’ve also been seeing interesting developments as candidates use AI when they apply for jobs. AI can be used in less-than-positive ways, with AI bots applying to jobs and posing as candidates.

In that regard, recruiting is actually becoming more in-person and interactive, just for the sake of confirming our candidates are real people. I’m doing more Zoom calls than phone calls these days, so it can be more personal and so I can actually see the other human on the call. I’ve also been holding more in-person meetings, as well.

It will be really interesting to see the interplay between AI automating those repetitive recruiting tasks versus the increased need for manual processes and in-person interactions to prevent bot candidates.

How do you balance the use of AI with the human side of recruiting?

It’s a valid concern. In a lot of ways, AI does make things less human and less personal—some companies are going to be totally okay with that, and some companies aren’t. I think that a company’s AI usage, especially in their people practices and recruiting, speaks volumes about what matters to the company.

From a candidate perspective, you can weed out companies that don’t align with your values. See how they respond to your application and how personalized it is, especially as you progress further in the hiring process.

The discussion our recruiting team has a lot right now is how do we use AI in smart ways that don’t sacrifice things that are really important to us as a company. Candidate experience is huge to us. Finding people that align with our mission and values is huge to us. And some of that is best done by a human.

Additionally, when it comes to candidate evaluation, AI can be biased. The models are programmed to replicate patterns. Because of that, sometimes AI actually leads to more biased decisions.

So we find the ways AI can speed things up, but we always want to have humans doing the real work on the “why” and the intentionality behind hiring and always double-checking the work AI does.

What career advice would you give to someone aspiring to be a recruiter?

The better you understand the business, the better an HR professional you’ll be. You can know all the different pieces about compliance and regulations, but what will serve you best and differentiate you as a great HR pro is your understanding of the inner workings of the business and how it relates to what you’re doing.

That has served me really well. Taking time to learn about the business helps me work with both hiring managers and candidates, and empowers me to be a lot more effective at my job. The more I understand BambooHR as a business—or the SaaS industry in general—the better I am at recruiting.