Who's Training Tomorrow's Directors?

Our first recruitment marketing coordinator hire was a month out of college with a marketing degree and zero idea what recruitment marketing was. We had to teach her the basics before she could do anything useful. Within a few months she was pulling reports, interpreting our weekly dashboards, and asking me every other day if she was supposed to pause a campaign because a recruiter changed the req again. It was a lot of manual button-pushing and processing data. The kind of work an AI model handles in seconds now.

She is a client-facing director today. I trust her to run relationships with our biggest accounts.

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I think about what actually happened in the years in between. It was not the reports. Nobody learns judgment from a dashboard. What she got was a seat on client calls she had little business being in yet, watching how a good account director defused a nervous CHRO, saw what it looked like when a campaign underperformed and someone had to explain why without flinching. The button-pushing was the tuition. The Zoom calls were the education.

I read a piece in HBR this week about a CHRO who cut a 200-person entry-level program to show fast ROI on AI. Eighteen months later the bench was empty, and nobody could initially point to how it happened.