Recap: How Heads of Talent Acquisition Are Redesigning Their Recruiter Roles for the AI Era

The Question Behind The Shift

At our recent executive panel on Rewriting the Recruiter, I was joined by Dr. Andrew Monroe, who opened the conversation with a challenge that set the tone for everything that followed: as AI absorbs traditional recruiter workstreams, what role should they play in serving the business, and how will their work evolve?

The data is concrete. Andrew cited recent research showing AI currently covers roughly 2% of US work time, while its theoretical reach is closer to 23%. In recruiting, much of what AI can absorb is exactly the work that fills a recruiter’s typical day: sourcing, screening, scheduling, reporting. The gap between where AI is today and where it’s heading is progressing rapidly.

Andrew outlined three markers that distinguish the organizations pulling ahead. First, they start with outcomes rather than tools, asking where their capacity gaps and failure points are before deciding where AI fits. Second, they’re performing full-scale role redesigns rather than layering AI onto existing workflows. Third, they’re treating the decision as an organizational design question, owned at the leadership level.

To explore how that question is reshaping the function in practice, we convened Leigh Harris, Global Head of TA at Siemens Energy; Richard Duncan, Director of TA at Heidelberg Materials; and Kieran Schultz, Global Head of TA at Prudential for a candid panel discussion.

Guiding Recruiting Teams Through Transition

Before the conversation turned to tools and workflows, the panel spent time on something harder to manage: how recruiters are processing this shift on a personal level.

Richard captured that tension directly. He described being energized about AI as a leader while his recruiters in the room were drawing a different conclusion:

“As a leader, I was excited about talking about AI and bringing it in and talking about what we could do to make the change happen. At the same time, recruiters are sitting there thinking, ‘you’re taking away part of my job.’ And so we ended up having a very candid conversation.”

His response was a full-day workshop with his leader and team, focused on mapping the transition from transactional recruiter to his ultimate goal of building “strategic talent partners.” The framing his leader brought to the room stuck with the group:

“‘If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu’. And I think that really stuck with everybody — that now is our time to go into this and take control of it as much as we can.”

Leigh’s perspective was equally candid with her team at Siemens Energy. She’s equipping them with tools like Copilot and highlighting AI usage in team meetings so people can share what’s working. The encouragement is paired with the same honesty about where the role is heading:

“If you stay in that transactional mode of work, that’s when your job is at risk. This is about how you use it to add value in your role and really bring the human element of recruiting more to the forefront.”

The signal from both leaders was the same: the teams handling this transition best are the ones where leadership is transparent about the change rather than deferring it.

Building Talent Advisory That Lasts

AI’s capability in recruiting workflows has outpaced most teams’ readiness to use it, and the pace of adoption varies widely. Leaders have learned that building lasting behavioral change is an ongoing process. Kieran offered a detailed look at what structured enablement looks like when it’s designed to change behavior over time.

Last year, her team at Prudential launched a nine-module internal bootcamp, created and facilitated entirely by the TA team. The modules covered competencies she sees as durable regardless of how the role evolves: business acumen, leveraging data and insights to drive outcomes, influencing stakeholders. The initial reaction from some team members was skepticism about the time investment. By the end, their response was different:

“I had almost every single team member say to me, ‘wow, I developed things that I didn’t even know I was going to develop walking into this bootcamp’.”

The bootcamp was only the starting point. The team then ran what they called a “reboot” — a follow-up session where each person shared what they’d actually taken away and put into practice. Their organization also introduced a recognition system: gold, silver, and bronze designations for team members leaning into new ways of working. Small mechanisms, but substantial enough to keep the behavioral shift visible and ongoing.

Andrew reinforced this from the research side: training on its own doesn’t drive adoption. Training plus scaffolding and accountability has been one of the largest determinants between teams that learn about AI tools and teams that actually utilize them.

Where AI Is Actually Sticking in TA Workflows

Defining where AI fits within recruiting workflows has been a natural first step. How far teams have moved from definition to adoption looks different at every company.

Andrew mapped three categories where AI is producing real value today. Most commonly, candidate sourcing and discovery, where tools help surface passive candidates and search internal talent pools. Next, recruiter productivity and content generation, where drafting outreach, rewriting job descriptions, and summarizing intake calls are giving recruiters hours of time back. The third is candidate screening, which carries a high potential as well as the highest risk.

Leigh shared her experience on the volume challenge from her team’s experience. At Siemens Energy, the application avalanche isn’t driven by AI alone. Significant growth, hiring freezes at competitors, and broader labor market shifts are all feeding it:

“We’re a function that depends on speed, scale, and insight. AI can help us with all of these things. That’s become abundantly clear. We’re making deliberate decisions now based on how we can elevate TA and really move it up in the value chain.”

The legal landscape around AI in recruiting is still being written. Andrew flagged two pending cases that illustrate the growing grey area: Mobley v. Workday, which tests whether vendors can be held liable for discriminatory screening outcomes, and a class action lawsuit against Eightfold testing whether candidates have a right to see and dispute AI scores. Neither is settled, and the outcomes will shape what’s accepted as permissible going forward.

Drawing the Line on Human Decision-Making

For all the enthusiasm about what AI can absorb, the panel was unanimous on what it shouldn’t. Humans should retain ownership over ultimate hiring decisions.

Leigh was unequivocal:

“We definitely are squarely in the humans maintain decision making responsibility. We’re not giving that up to AI at this point. It’s a tool, and I think we’ve talked a lot about the efficiencies gained from it and that really what that’s enabling is the human component of recruitment. And that’s what we want to see more of, not less.”

She also raised a caution that landed with the group. As AI frees up recruiter time, companies will be tempted to simply increase req loads. A recruiter managing 30 requisitions today could theoretically handle 80 with AI support:

“When they free up time, are we now going to say, well, they can handle 80 now? We’ve brought ourselves right back to where we started.”

Protecting that freed capacity for advisory work is a leadership decision. Otherwise, the efficiency gains get absorbed back into volume, and the role never actually evolves.

Measuring the Shift

The panel closed with a practical question: how will you know the shift from transactional to advisory is actually taking hold?

Kieran was quick to answer:

“When TA is being invited to the table. So when an HR partner or a business leader is coming to us…they want our help in solving a business problem. That to me is a true talent advisor.”

Richard described the signal showing up in how recruiters engage with the business. The shift is visible when conversations with hiring managers move beyond the open req — into talent management, internal mobility, L&D opportunities, and workforce planning before a role is even posted.

Leigh offered a similar lens: listening for what stakeholders are asking for. When the requests shift from fixing transactional bottlenecks to demands for more consultative engagement, the transition is working.

Advisory impact doesn’t live in a dashboard. It shows up in whether the business treats Talent Acquisition as a partner worth pulling into the room.

What This Conversation Made Clear

Three Heads of Talent Acquisition described in concrete terms how they’re leading their teams through this transition: with candor about what’s changing, enablement that goes beyond training, AI adoption governed by clear principles, and the discipline to protect their team’s freed capacity when the instinct will be to fill it with more volume.

The common thread was deliberate leadership at every stage. Not waiting for a playbook. Making decisions now about what the role owns, what it requires, and what it’s worth to the business.

As Richard put it:

“We’ve been talking about becoming talent advisors for years, but it’s hard to make that transition overnight. Now we actually are beginning to see that we have the tools to do what we want to do.”

The technology is here. The future will depend on what TA leaders choose to build with it and how they equip their teams for what’s next.

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This panel was a glimpse of the ongoing conversations in the Recruiting Leadership Council. If you’re navigating the shift from recruiter to talent advisor, learn how peers are approaching it.

Where does your team stand in the shift? Take the Recruiter Role Evolution Audit — 3 minutes, immediate results.