New era, new skills: How to be a strategic recruiter today
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Key highlights:
- Strategic is the new baseline: as volume, fraud and tool sprawl reshape the job, the recruiters getting ahead drive outcomes instead of reacting to reqs.
- Funnel math is the foundation: knowing your conversion rates lets you forecast hiring to the product roadmap and plan instead of scramble.
- Fraud is a business problem: treat verification as a discipline across stages, since the point of application is where the security gap opens.
- AI surfaces signal, people decide: use AI to de-bias the shortlist and sharpen the hiring-manager conversation, and keep the final call human.
The recruiter’s job description got rewritten in the span of about two years. The work used to be finding people and moving them through a process. Now it comes with a security checkpoint, a flood of AI-written applications and a stack of tools that changes every quarter. The reqs still have to close, except the ground underneath them keeps shifting.
It’s wearing people down. In Greenhouse and Aptitude Research’s State of the Recruiter Experience, 47% of recruiters describe their day as reactive and overloaded, and 32% name pressure to move faster as a top challenge. Reacting faster to all of it is a losing game. The way out is to change the job itself.
That’s the thread running through the back half of Season 2 of the Recruiting Roadshow. Five recruiters make the case that strategic is simply what the job is now – Clifton Jadoo II, Staff Technical Recruiter at Robinhood; Erin Walsh-Beguin, Senior Director of TA Operations and Employer Brand at GoDaddy; Stefanie Fackrell, Founding Recruiting Lead at Glimpse; Adrian Russo, VP of Talent at Swish; and Kelsey Biggs, VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Gong. Kelsey sees a line already forming between the recruiters who adapt and the ones who wait.
We’re already seeing recruiters split into two different camps.
– Kelsey Biggs, VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Gong
The recruiters in the first camp aren’t working harder. They’ve changed what they spend their judgment on. Here’s the skill set that puts you there.
Use your funnel data to forecast hiring
The fastest route from reactive to strategic runs through your data. Once you know your conversion rates at every stage, you stop guessing and start predicting – and you can walk into any planning conversation with numbers instead of hopes.
Adrian is blunt about where that starts.
I am a funnel math absolutist. I believe your data is going to tell you everything.
– Adrian Russo, VP of Talent at Swish
The payoff is forecasting that actually holds up. Know your nurture conversion and your submit-to-fill ratios, Adrian says, and “I could tell you exactly how many people I need to contact to get a position filled by this time.” That means tracking at a granular level – the whole org, then down to departments and teams – and tying the plan to where the company is headed. “If you’re not planning to the product roadmap, you’re really not planning,” he says.
There’s a line to hold here, though, and Adrian draws it himself: “We need to be leveraging AI to make our job more efficient, not make decisions.” Pull your ATS data into a model to build the dashboards and spot the patterns. Keep the call about who and when with a person.
Read the pattern and spot what’s fake
Read the funnel closely and it tells you things a single resume never could. A spike against your baseline, a conversion rate that falls off a cliff, a source that suddenly over-delivers – the pattern is the signal, and some patterns are how fraud announces itself.
And fraud is no longer a fringe worry. 91% of recruiters say they’ve spotted or suspected candidate deception in the past year. Adrian’s reframe is the useful part: this is a business problem that lands on the recruiter’s desk, because the point of application is where the security gap opens. The response is to treat verification as a discipline – checks at multiple stages rather than one background check at the very end.
Clifton has watched the old signals lose their meaning the same way. “What used to be signal back then is no longer a signal now,” he says. “So now we are indexing, what other signals could we find?” A polished resume used to catch the eye. Now anyone can generate one from a job description in seconds, so the read moves to the market itself – the org mapping and company research that “used to take me two or three hours” and now takes under five minutes.
Used well, the same shift widens the funnel instead of narrowing it. Stefanie points out that top-of-funnel AI screening can give more people a shot: wouldn’t a candidate rather “be one of 200 people that get interviewed by AI” than sit in a pile of 50 resumes that never gets opened? The skill is pairing that reach with a sharp read of who’s genuine.
Know the business deeper than the job description
Authority doesn’t come from recruiting craft alone. It comes from understanding the business well enough to challenge a plan and to tell whether a candidate actually fits it. Kelsey has a phrase for the gap most recruiters operate in.
We know just enough to be dangerous.
– Kelsey Biggs, VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Gong
Enough to field basic candidate questions, then defer to the hiring manager on anything deeper. The recruiters pulling ahead go two or three levels past that – the function, the team, the strategy behind the req. “I think they need to focus on their business acumen,” Kelsey says, “understanding your company and then understanding the role’s function, the teams that you’re supporting.” That fluency is what lets you forecast headcount against the roadmap and earn a seat in the planning conversation. The research backs the shift: when recruiters were asked where their time should go, 36% pointed to advising and guiding hiring managers.
Stop taking orders and start advising
All of that fluency is wasted if the recruiter still works like an order taker. The strategic move is to walk into intake with a point of view and the standing to say the role is scoped wrong.
You should be their partner. You shouldn't be an order taker. You should advise them – I don't think this is a good idea, I think we should do this differently.
– Stefanie Fackrell, Founding Recruiting Lead at Glimpse
That means pushing back when the data says push back. Erin calls out the pattern every recruiter knows, the hiring manager who keeps asking for one more candidate: “shiny rock syndrome,” she calls it. “That’s a beautiful rock. It’s just not quite shiny enough. Go find another one.” The answer is to come back with evidence. “Be empowered to say, based off of our initial intake, based off of the talent mapping that we did, I don’t think you need another ten people phone screened. Let’s focus on this first group.” Your funnel data is what earns that pushback.
De-bias the shortlist, keep the decision human
Here’s where the data and the judgment meet. Used well, AI can take a first pass at the shortlist, strip out some of the noise and bias, and hand the recruiter a sharper starting point for the conversation that matters.
Kelsey’s team leans on it exactly this way. An agent “removes some of that bias,” she says. “It really just looks at the raw data and who we should hire. And then it’s a good conversation.” The output isn’t a verdict. It’s the opening of a better exchange with the hiring manager – and when the manager pushes back, that’s the valuable part. “When they say the data is not right, I don’t want to hire that person, we can then have deeper conversations about the signals and why they’re wrong. Is the job description wrong? Has the scope changed?” AI surfaces the signal. People decide.
It’s where a lot of teams get it backwards: only 22% of organizations say AI meaningfully supports decision-making, while 38% use it mostly to automate tasks. The strategic recruiter does both and never confuses the two.
Slow down to go fast
A thread ran through the whole season, and it started with Laurie David in the first half: “You’ve got to slow down in order to go fast.” A deliberate process beats a rushed one because it’s right the first time. Everything above is a version of that idea – forecast instead of scramble, verify instead of assume, advise instead of react.
Kelsey takes it somewhere unexpected to close the season. For all the pressure to automate and accelerate, she thinks the next move is a step back toward each other.
It’s going to take us back to really connecting as humans.
– Kelsey Biggs, VP of Global Talent Acquisition at Gong
Candidates aren’t coming along on the race to go faster and faster, she argues, so the teams that win will spend more face time with people, not less. The automation handles the volume. The human connection is what gets someone across the line.
The new era, the new recruiter
The profession is splitting into recruiters who wait for the ground to settle and recruiters who move while it’s still shifting. The ones moving have swapped reacting for driving – reading the funnel, catching fraud before it costs the business, knowing the work deeply enough to advise and keeping the final call human. None of it requires working more hours. It requires spending your judgment on the things that decide outcomes.
Fraud sits at the intersection of recruiting, legal and security, and getting ahead of it means working across those lines. This guide walks through how to build that into your process before it becomes a problem.
FAQs
What makes a recruiter “strategic”?
A strategic recruiter drives hiring outcomes rather than processing requisitions. In practice that means forecasting from funnel data, understanding the business deeply enough to advise hiring managers, catching candidate fraud as a security issue and owning the hiring decision while using AI to handle volume. The shift is from executing steps to shaping decisions.
How can recruiters use funnel metrics to plan hiring?
Track conversion at a granular level – across the organization, then by department and team – including nurture conversion and submit-to-fill ratios. Those rates let you calculate how many candidates you need to contact to fill a role by a target date, and tie your pipeline plan to the company’s product roadmap so you are planning ahead instead of reacting to each new req.
Why is candidate fraud considered a business problem?
AI has made sophisticated candidate fraud easier, and the point of application is where a company’s security gap opens. That makes fraud a cross-functional risk touching legal and security rather than a recruiting nuisance to clear. The response is to treat verification as a discipline across multiple stages rather than relying on a single background check at the end.
Should recruiters push back on hiring managers?
Yes, when the data supports it. A strategic recruiter comes to intake with a point of view and is willing to say a role is scoped wrong or that the pipeline is already strong enough to decide. The leverage for that pushback is evidence – intake notes, talent mapping and funnel data – which turns “find me one more” into a grounded conversation about the candidates already in hand.
What should AI do in hiring, and what should stay with humans?
AI is strong at reducing manual screening, surfacing patterns and taking a first, less-biased pass at a shortlist. Humans should own the consequential calls – interpreting nuance, advising the hiring manager and deciding who to hire. A useful framing: AI surfaces the signal, people make the decision. Teams that blur that line tend to automate tasks without improving the decisions that matter.
