Recruiting is in the middle of a reset. For two decades, the story has been more tools, more applicants, more noise. Underneath that, something more fundamental is happening: talent acquisition has drifted from a relationship-driven craft to a transactional machine—just as AI begins to reshape how work gets done.

The question now is not whether AI will transform recruiting, but whether recruiters and HR leaders will use it to get back to what made this function valuable in the first place. Judgment. Relationships. Strategic insight.

📺 Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/y3BR5R6SI_o

From dialing for dollars to inbox fatigue

If you started in recruiting before job boards went mainstream (like I did), the job looked very different. You went to conferences, collected business cards, and called people at their desks. That was “dialing for dollars,” and it was tedious but it produced real relationships. You knew the people you placed.

Denise’s point of view is that digital channels broke that intimacy. Job boards, LinkedIn, and one-click apply turned activity into a metric and email volume into a proxy for impact. When a recruiter responds to, “How many candidates have you actually spoken to?” with “I sent 72 emails,” you see the see the confusion with output viewed as connection.

Ironically, this is the territory AI cannot cover for you. AI can summarize conversations and score profiles, but it won’t become the person candidates call before they decide to move. If recruiting is going to reclaim that space, the function has to pair AI’s scale with a conscious return to one-on-one conversations.

Skills-based recruiting: concept vs. reality

“Skills-based recruiting” is everywhere right now. It’s in analyst reports, vendor decks, and conference agendas. For me, that can be makes me give a hard eye-roll, because skills have always mattered more than job titles or pedigrees in real hiring conversations.

Denise says the constraint isn’t the concept. It’s leadership.

Processes and policies are still optimized for degrees, years of experience, specific brand-name employers. Denise’s story about a configuration management engineer shows the cost. The candidate was one year short of a degree but clearly strong. Leadership refused to flex. A year later, the role was still open. By then, the candidate had finished her degree, and only then did the company make the hire. That year of lost output is the hidden tax of rigid requirements.

Skilled trades are back in the spotlight

AI and automation seem to be reframing the value of skilled trades. As middle management and back-office roles face pressure, trades jobs are looking more attractive to many workers. The chance to take advantage of clear demand, tangible output, and earnings will quickly rival degree-based careers.

Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI,” has even suggested that training as a plumber may be one of the smartest moves in an uncertain job market. His comment reflects a larger truth: physical, complex, context-heavy work is significantly harder to automate than digital desk work.

The economics back this up at an individual level. I’ve seen trade-certified peers close an initial pay gap with degree-holders and then surpass them, without the drag of student loans. Denise added more examples: her son built a solid business installing specialized 3M protective film on high-end vehicles. Her firm now recruits for construction roles on semiconductor fabs—HVAC, electricians, plumbers, water-systems experts—that are essential to advanced tech infrastructure.

Boomerang recruiting and alumni networks

If recruiting is going to become more strategic, alumni can’t be an afterthought. Boomerang talent, people who leave and later return, is one of the most underused levers in the talent system.

Denise’s agency has built entire projects around this idea with clients like FormFactor, Medtronic, and Lam Research. Those companies asked her team to re-engage former employees, sometimes with targeted briefs like “bring back high-potential female technical talent.” I have to say, I wish I would have thought about this strategy when I was still leading teams.

The value shows up quickly:

• Faster ramp: Alumni already understand the culture and systems.

• Better insight: They’re more honest about why they left than they were during exit interviews.

• Higher capability: They often return with new skills, perspectives, and playbooks gained elsewhere.

There’s also a competitive intelligence benefit. Long-term relationships with talent let you sense changes in the market before they’re visible in data. During a major expansion in Texas banking markets, those relationships gave me early reads on leadership changes, strategic shifts, and emerging risks at competitor institutions.

The human edge in an AI-heavy future

We covered a lot of ground in this episode including AI, skills-based hiring, the rise of trades, creative sourcing, alumni strategies. Despite all of this, one constant remains: relationships are still the durable advantage in recruiting.

AI can make recruiting faster and smarter. Whether it also makes recruiting more human will depend on how this next generation of talent leaders chooses to use it.

About my guest:

Denise Chaffin is the President and founder of Top Source Talent, a Phoenix-based minority, woman-owned talent acquisition firm specializing in hard-to-fill technical and professional roles across industries like semiconductor, medical device, cybersecurity, and government.

With more than three decades in recruiting, she leads a distributed team of senior sourcers and recruiters supporting U.S. and global clients with recruitment-as-a-service, executive search, and contingent workforce solutions. Denise is also the host of the Talking TA podcast, where she interviews TA and HR leaders about modern recruiting, AI, and talent strategies that help organizations build and retain high-performing teams.

Connect with Denise:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisechaffin/

Podcast: https://topsourcetalentllc.com/podcast/