Talent Acquisition Career Paths, AI Bias, & Recruiter Roles

Key Topics Covered

• Why there’s no real talent acquisition career path — and what to do about it
• TA vs. HR: Why the two functions need to stop being conflated
• What every recruiter learns from being a coordinator (the hard way)
• AI, ChatGPT resumes, and the illusion of candidate quality
• AI bias in hiring: voice tools, video screening, and who gets left out
• Why onboarding is where retention actually begins
• How to pick the right AI recruiting tools for your size and context
• What hiring managers actually want from intake calls

The Talent Acquisition Career Path Problem Nobody Wants to Admit

Keirsten doesn’t sugarcoat it: there is no clearly defined talent acquisition career path in most organizations. You can go from coordinator to recruiter, maybe specialize in executive or college recruiting, and if you’re lucky, make it to director. But after that? The ladder ends.

Keirsten put it plainly: there’s only going to be one director, only going to be one vice president. The reality is that most TA professionals hit a ceiling earlier than they realize, and the traditional answer has been to crossover into HR or operations — not because it’s the right move, but because there’s nowhere else to go.

Keirsten even described how in her own defense-sector career, people were parked in recruiting roles while waiting for security clearances to process — using TA as a holding pen, not a profession. That mindset hasn’t fully gone away.

TA vs. HR: Why This Talent Acquisition Career Path Confusion Costs Companies

Ask any talent acquisition leader and they’ll tell you: the constant lumping of TA under HR creates real structural problems. Keirsten puts it plainly — recruiting deserves to be its own function with its own seat at the table. Not as a subset of HR. Not as the team that gets handed every new trend to figure out.

“Every time something new comes along — DEI, tech recruiting, AI — they throw it at recruiting and let them figure it out. But we don’t even get to be our own department.”

This matters for the talent acquisition career path because when TA doesn’t have organizational autonomy, its practitioners don’t get the budget, headcount, or executive sponsorship to build real programs or advance meaningful careers. The result? High turnover, low morale, and recruiters who leave for greener pastures — or start their own businesses.

Every Recruiter Should Be a Coordinator: A Talent Acquisition Career Path Lesson

One of Keirsten’s strongest convictions: every recruiter should spend time as a recruiting coordinator before moving up. Not because it’s a prerequisite, but because you can’t truly appreciate what coordinators do until you’ve lived it.

“They’re the ones catching your mistakes. They’re supporting your candidates and your hiring managers. They sometimes have a bigger impact than the recruiter does.”

Coordinators manage the timing, the paperwork, the follow-through, and the relationships — and they do it for every recruiter on their plate simultaneously. Understanding that reality makes for better recruiters, better leaders, and a healthier team culture.

For anyone thinking about a recruiting career path, this isn’t a detour — it’s a foundation.

AI-Generated Resumes Are Flooding the Funnel — And Talent Acquisition Decisions Are Suffering

Jonathan raised an observation that’s becoming a widespread headache: since ChatGPT, companies are seeing far more resumes that look impressive — but the actual quality of candidates hasn’t changed. Keirsten agreed, and went further.

Job seekers now have CRM-like AI tools that automatically tailor resumes to job descriptions, scraping for the right buzzwords to hit 100% match scores, and submitting applications on autopilot — without the candidate even being aware it happened.

“We’re not getting to a point where we’ve sacrificed quality over quantity. Look at the funnel — how many of those are really qualified? And by the way, how many of those are the same resume?”

The practical result: recruiters are spending more time screening a higher volume of look-alike resumes, while the number of genuinely qualified candidates remains flat. Quantity without quality is just more noise.

AI Bias in Hiring: The Problem Talent Acquisition Can’t Ignore

This is where Keirsten gets direct. AI bias in hiring isn’t theoretical — it’s already embedded in tools many companies are using right now. Voice recognition software, video interview scoring, and AI in candidate screening all carry the biases of the humans and datasets that built them.

“Imagine what someone who might be neurodivergent, or someone with a thick accent, experiences when a bot is analyzing and providing feedback that you’re then going to use to decide whether to move them forward.”

She points to a real example: a voice assistant that consistently fails to understand certain speech patterns. That same failure mode, when baked into candidate screening tools, creates a systemic filter that has nothing to do with job performance — and everything to do with whether someone’s voice, zip code, or video background matches a normalized standard.

AI in candidate screening is valuable when it collects and surfaces information. It becomes dangerous when it’s making — or heavily influencing — pass/fail decisions on human beings.

Onboarding Is a Talent Acquisition Career Path Outcome, Not an HR Afterthought

Too many companies treat onboarding as a back-office formality. Keirsten sees it as the moment your entire recruiting investment either pays off or starts unraveling.

A great hire who shows up on day one to a 16-hour paperwork marathon with no clear reporting structure, no cultural context, and no warm welcome is already mentally checking out. The retention clock is running before they’ve even logged in.

“If you don’t have a strong onboarding, you’re starting the clock on how long before you can’t retain these folks.”

Culture-first onboarding — where new hires are connected to peers, given a buddy, and shown what collaboration actually looks like before they’re buried in compliance videos — isn’t just nice to have. It’s a retention strategy, and it’s a recruiting outcome.

Choosing the Right AI Recruiting Tools for Your Talent Acquisition Career Path

Keirsten has spent years doing TA tech implementations for enterprise clients, and her take on AI tools is nuanced in a way that most vendor pitches aren’t: there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The right tool depends entirely on your recruiting context.

Text-based recruiting automation works well for high-volume, same-role hiring. It breaks down quickly when you’re managing 20 diverse roles across multiple geographies and levels. Enterprise tools often come with 50 features — and most teams end up using five of them.

“Stop trying to sell your product to everybody. Ask your clients: what problems do you need us to solve?”

The advice she gives HR tech companies applies equally to TA leaders evaluating tools: don’t buy for what sounds impressive. Buy for what your recruiters will actually use, and what genuinely removes admin burden without replacing human judgment.

What Hiring Managers Actually Want From Intake Calls

Keirsten describes a moment that reframed how she thought about the recruiter–hiring manager relationship. She interviewed a hiring manager for a piece she was writing, expecting to confirm what she already knew. She was wrong.

“She said: ‘I don’t want you to send me everything. I want you to tell me what you learned in the conversation. I want you to learn the job.'”

Hiring managers don’t want a data dump. They already have the resume. What they want is a recruiter who took the candidate call seriously, listened, connected what they heard to the actual job, and came back with synthesis — not stats. That’s what good intake call practice looks like, and most recruiting teams aren’t there yet.

Key Talent Acquisition Career Path Takeaways from This Interview

• There is no default talent acquisition career path — TA pros need to actively build and advocate for their own trajectory
• AI bias in hiring is real and already embedded in voice, video, and screening tools
• AI in candidate screening is most valuable for information collection — not hiring decisions
• Every recruiter should experience the coordinator role to build genuine empathy and process fluency
• Resume inflation from AI tools is real — quality of candidate pool isn’t rising with volume
• Onboarding is a talent acquisition outcome, not an HR afterthought
• Tool selection must match company size, role type, and recruiter context
• The best intake calls produce insight, not data dumps

🙌 About The Guest

Keirsten Greggs is the founder of TRAP Recruiter, LLC and a 24-year recruitment veteran recognized as a 2024 Top Recruitment Influencer and 2023 HR Unite TA Trailblazer award winner. She is passionate about restoring trust, accountability, and relationship-building within the recruitment lifecycle, while helping organizations attract, hire, and retain top-tier talent. Keirsten is also a fierce advocate for empowering historically excluded and underrepresented job seekers to confidently navigate and influence the hiring process.

Beyond solving #RecruiterProblems, Keirsten hosts TRAP Chat and leads workshops, trainings, webinars, and coaching sessions for recruiters and job seekers alike. Her expertise spans talent acquisition operations, diversity recruitment, candidate and recruiter experience, workforce analytics, ATS implementation, and recruitment strategy, and has been featured in global media outlets including BBC World Service Radio, Forbes, Fast Company, HR Brew, and SiriusXM Urban View.

The GoHire Talks Interview Transcript with Keirsten Greggs

Below is the full, lightly edited transcript of the GoHire Talks conversation with Keirsten Greggs, founder of Trap Recruiter and 26-year talent acquisition professional.

[00:00:00] Jonathan Duarte:
Hey everyone, great to have another guest. Keirsten Greggs from Trap Recruiter. Keirsten’s been recruiting for many years, and we’re gonna dive into the career, the process, and where you can go as a recruiter. So give us a little shout out on how you got into recruiting and where you think — in today’s world, everyone’s, oh my gosh, what’s happening in recruiting? Give us your insights.

[00:00:26] Keirsten Greggs:
Well, that’s a very long answer that you’re requesting for me right now. But first and foremost, thank you for having me, Jonathan. It’s great to be here. Appreciate you reaching out on LinkedIn. I know that a lot of us are feeling very bad about LinkedIn right now — it’s not our most enjoyable place — but I’m still making connections there obviously. So thanks for having me. As you said, I’ve been in the recruiting or talent acquisition field for now 26 years. And it’s been fun and it’s been a challenge. I got here by mistake. If you ask nine out of 10 recruiters, they’ll tell you they became a recruiter by mistake. So yes, I absolutely became a recruiter by mistake. Had no idea what recruiter even meant. I got hired by a third party company during the dot com boom, and I was a technical recruiter.

[00:01:22] Keirsten Greggs:
One of our clients did not have a recruiting department, so they brought us in-house. There were four of us and we did a good job. And then after that, having my first real corporate recruiting job inside of a government contractor — which is really kind of adjacent to third party because you’re supplying people to the government. Either directly as a prime or a subcontractor. So I was an in-house recruiter and spent most of my career in defense and intelligence. I live here in the DC metro area, so everyone knows what that means.

[00:02:46] Keirsten Greggs:
I’ve been recruiting for a long time. I’ve seen a lot in terms of how we have evolved and how we have tried to make this our own. And that’s kind of my mission — making talent acquisition its own thing. We are separate from HR. I know a lot of times we get lumped together, and it’s great, thank you HR for continuing to allow us to be a part of your conferences. But at some point we gotta be on our own and do our own thing — and then maybe we can invite you to our party.

[00:03:10] Jonathan Duarte:
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. When we were talking about this in the green room, it used to be a TA conference and then I guess they just decided, yeah, we’re not doing recruiting — we’re gonna call it employment management. Which is still all the recruiting people showing up.

[00:03:28] Keirsten Greggs:
I feel like they throw everything new at recruiters or they throw it at the talent acquisition team and say, go figure this out. We see it with AI — why are we the only ones being held responsible for how AI is going to affect your business? And the fact that we’re putting the onus on talent acquisition tells you how important we are. But we don’t always get that recognition. We don’t always get that affirmation in a lot of companies. We see it with DEI — then everybody had to be a DEI recruiter. When tech was big, then you had to be a technical recruiter. It’s always whatever the trend is, they throw it at recruiting. But we don’t even get to be our own department.

[00:05:11] Keirsten Greggs:
There’s no career track for talent acquisition. I worked in global companies, I worked in enterprise companies, I worked on TA teams that had sometimes hundreds of people. And you could go from civilian to defense, or from college recruiting to executive recruiting, or from internal recruiting into operations — but you were still kind of in levels. Because there’s only gonna be one director. There’s only gonna be one vice president. There was no real path upwards. A lot of times — I think I wrote a blog post about this — people use recruiting like a gateway drug.

[00:06:17] Keirsten Greggs:
Security clearances got processed a little bit quicker back then, and the best way to do that was to be an employee so that we could start the process — and they would literally park people in recruiting. Have them do proposal recruiting or review documents while they were waiting for their clearances. And then they would just go on their programs. That was literally what was happening.

[00:07:57] Keirsten Greggs:
I think every recruiting coordinator, and every recruiter, should do the coordinator job one time. Being a coordinator gave me a greater appreciation for how much time management and relationship building the coordinators actually do, and how much we depend on them. They’re the person waiting for the offer letter to get signed. They were the ones doing mail merges on a huge proposal win. They’re chasing down your paperwork because the background investigation is taking too long. So I think every recruiter should be a coordinator and see what they really do — see how they really have to manage — because they’re the ones that gotta catch your mistakes.

[00:10:11] Keirsten Greggs:
And for every recruiter that they support, they’re supporting those persons’ candidates and those persons’ hiring managers. So they even have a bigger impact sometimes — as far as the number of people they’re interacting with on a daily basis to get one hire — than even the recruiter does.

[00:11:07] Keirsten Greggs:
Onboarding is a huge deal. How you get the person started is enormous. People always remember how they were treated during the process. They always remember their recruiter. But if you have the best process and you can’t get that person their assets — if they can’t figure out where to go on the first day, if there’s confusion about who they report to — all of those things matter. No one wants to sit there for 16 hours signing papers and looking at videos. If that’s your process, if you don’t have a strong onboarding, you’re starting the clock on how long before you can’t retain these folks.

[00:13:33] Jonathan Duarte:
So we’ve hit the inflection point of ChatGPT resumes making everyone look better. Yet the quality of the candidate — the actual number of qualified candidates — is about the same. How have you seen that play out in your business?

[00:14:03] Keirsten Greggs:
I think there are more candidates because it does become easier to apply. Job seekers have AI tools — kind of like CRMs — that do everything, including automatically tailoring your resume to the job description, scraping it for buzzwords to get a better match score, and applying for jobs for them. Like, they might not even know it’s happening — the same way that your automated outreach messages are going out on a schedule and candidates are complaining about getting rejection emails at 7 PM on a Saturday. But we’re not really getting to a point where we have improved quality over quantity. Look at the funnel — how many of those are really the right fit? And by the way, how many are essentially the same resume? Because the same tools are telling everyone what words to use.

[00:16:06] Keirsten Greggs:
I’ve seen resumes from my career advising clients and I’m like: what does this mean? This doesn’t make sense. Did ChatGPT write this? It’s obvious. This does not connect. And it’s 2026 and we’re still talking about people putting white keywords in resumes so that sourcers will find them. Like, we’re really back there.

[00:18:04] Keirsten Greggs:
There’s no one-size-fits-all tool. I work not only doing recruiting for companies, but also on the system side — implementations, helping clients refine and optimize their processes, and select tools that actually fit them. And even when you have an enterprise tool with 50 bells and whistles, every single one of those is not going to make your process more efficient. The last two enterprise implementations I did, the recruiters weren’t really interested in the fanciest, newest part. Text recruiting works well when you’ve gotta hire 50 of the same thing. But if you’re managing 20 roles that are all different and geographically dispersed, that’s a completely different situation. Tech companies need to stop trying to sell their product to everybody. Ask your clients: what problems do you need us to solve?

[00:21:32] Keirsten Greggs:
Recruiters want things to be automated — taking things off their plate — not necessarily having their job done for them. No recruiter wants you to do their job. A lot of them are leery of any tool that says, “We’re gonna do this for you” — because you’re telling them they’re obsolete. What recruiters want is help with the admin: the follow-ups they forgot, the spelling errors they didn’t catch, the copy-paste mistakes. Use AI for that. Use a note taker on your intake call — not to record video and score people, but because it catches something you didn’t.

[00:22:20] Keirsten Greggs:
I interviewed a hiring manager who opened my eyes. She said: I don’t want you to send me every candidate. I want you to tell me what you learned in your conversation. I don’t want stats — I can see the resume right there. I want you to learn the job. And I was like — we’re not even asking the right questions in our intake calls.

[00:23:32] Keirsten Greggs:
AI voice recording introduces too much bias. I speak clearly — I think I’m easy to understand — but voice recognition doesn’t understand me. Imagine what someone who is neurodivergent, or has a thick accent, experiences when a bot is analyzing their speech and providing feedback that you’re going to use to decide whether to move them forward. It’s based on what the system has normalized, what it perceives as right or wrong. And it’s not that black and white. I’ve seen someone — very influential in this industry — making disparaging comments about candidates based on their video background, whether they were taking the call in a car, or because they had a landline on their resume. If that kind of thinking is being fed into the technology as a “red flag,” you’re missing out on a great deal of potential talent.

[00:27:25] Keirsten Greggs:
I don’t like AI doing jobs that a human should make decisions about. I like bots that collect information — working things out and giving me the data to make a more informed decision. But not making the decision for me.

[00:28:38] Keirsten Greggs:
I’m not against AI. I’m against using it to make human decisions.

[00:28:42] Jonathan Duarte:
Perfect. That’s the line right there. Thanks so much for coming on, Keirsten — this was an incredible conversation.

Connect with Keirsten Greggs on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/traprecruiter