Kristen Habacht grew up watching her entrepreneur parents navigate the unpredictability of building something from scratch, swearing she'd never do it, too. She wanted to be a boss lady in a blazer, sitting in an office, doing whatever it was people in J.Crew catalogs did for work. She did not want to be a founder.
And yet today she is CEO of Elly, a recruiting platform built to put the human connection back into a hiring process that's quietly been losing it. Before Elly, she led revenue and sales at Typeform, Atlassian, and other big names. She's been the hiring manager who didn't prep in time and the junior manager rewriting everyone's emails. She's learned, sometimes the hard way, what actually makes people want to stay with their teams.
Here are three things we learned for our conversation with Kristen.
Regarding the current state of hiring, Kristen knows that volume is outrageous. A significant chunk of what's coming through the pipeline isn't real: spam, fraud, AI-generated applications that are impossible to distinguish from genuine ones. Recruiters are using filters to cope while candidates are using AI to get past those filters. Everyone is losing.
Her answer isn't to take the tech away, but to be intentional about where the human element is non-negotiable and then use AI to protect that space. For example: What if AI handled the intake — the "tell me about yourself" and career walkthrough — so that when a recruiter actually gets on a call, they can skip straight to the conversation that matters? Instead of, "Walk me through your background," you get to, "You mentioned this thing in your recording. Tell me that story."
The goal should be making sure that when real human connection happens it's worth something, rather than efficiency for its own sake. Then recruiters can show up as the best possible representative of the company and culture, instead of someone grinding through their fifteenth identical screening call of the day.
Kristen has been in the industry long enough to remember when ghosting wasn't the norm. It is now, on both sides, and she's not interested in pretending otherwise. Candidates disappear late in the process. Companies send applications into a void and never respond. Everyone has normalized something that, when you say it out loud, is pretty strange.
Her read is that it's not just a recruiting problem. It's a broader cultural one, amplified by technology that made it easy to deprioritize the person on the other end of the screen. While essay-length rejections aren't realistic (or wanted), she's asking for the basic acknowledgment that there's a real person on the other side who put time and effort into this process.
Kristen also pointed to unprepared interviewers (less talked about but still an issue). You've likely run into it: hiring managers popping in from back-to-back meetings, no time to review the candidate profile, asking the same questions TA already covered. It's not malicious, but intention doesn't trump impact. It's unfair to candidates, hurts the candidate experience, and wastes everyone's time. Elly is building specifically to address this by making sure the whole team shows up ready, not just the recruiter.
Early in her career, Kristen genuinely believed that if you worked hard and did great work, the trajectory would follow. She had good reason to believe it, too; she got lucky early and had exceptional managers, working in environments that rewarded hustle with opportunity.
Then she started watching what happened to people who did everything right and still didn't get their moment. It was never that they weren't talented. Instead, the company wasn't the right size, or the timing was off, or there was nowhere to promote into. She watched people make moves that were a step back in an effort to land somewhere new, only for the same thing to happen again.
The belief she's revised: Talent is necessary but not sufficient. Context, timing, the stage of a company, access to sponsors (and more) are all factors that shape career trajectory in ways that have nothing to do with how hard someone works. If you're hiring based purely on a resume, you're missing the people who deserved better breaks than they got.
This small but powerful perspective shift changes how you interview and how you build a team.
Kristen's hope for the future of work? She's watching non-technical people do things they never could have done before, and she finds it genuinely exciting. She doesn't think AI is coming for anyone's job, though that's a conversation for another day, but she does think it's about to make a lot of people significantly less limited by what they couldn't previously access or build on their own. For someone who spent years feeling a little constrained by being non-technical, that feels like a real unlock.
Jill and I hope listeners walk away from this episode more intentional about where the human element belongs in their interview process (and maybe a little quicker to reply).
Listen to the full episode of Work Made Human to hear more from Kristen Habacht — including why she no longer rewrites her team's emails, what understanding how your team likes to work actually looks like in practice, and the advice she'd give to anyone feeling like just another application in a sea of hundreds.