Think about how wild this is. Starting out as a wedding planner and ending up as an HR executive responsible for 450 people. Most people work their way into HR through recruiting. Almost nobody begins in sales or customer success and rises to lead talent. A career pivot like that isn’t just unusual. It is rare, bold, and seriously inspiring.

In this episode of Recruiting Is No Joke, Joel sits down with Erin McCann, an HR leader with one of the most unexpected career journeys you will ever hear. Erin did not rise through the classic recruiting pipeline. She started as a wedding planner, shifted into hotel catering, moved into corporate sales, then customer success, and only later found her way into HR. Strangely enough, every twist in that path ended up giving her the perfect toolkit for leading people teams in fast-moving startups.

Erin opens up about how she transitioned into HR, why she took a pay cut to reinvent her career, and how her sales and customer success background now give her a major advantage in understanding the business side of people operations. She also explains how she taught herself compliance, built processes from scratch, and built confidence through community, mentorship, and asking the beginner questions most people are afraid to ask.

The conversation then gets real about the state of recruiting today, from bot candidates using AI voice tools to the growing difficulty of spotting fake resumes. Erin shares the red flags she is seeing, how her team is adjusting, and why human judgment is still irreplaceable even in an AI driven hiring world.

Erin also talks about stability, layoffs, candidate trust issues, and what she believes HR’s real responsibility will be in the year ahead: being the steady, honest voice that keeps teams grounded and supported during uncertain times.

In this episode:

[00:00] Introduction

[00:54] Erin’s background and career path

[03:42] Transition to HR and early challenges

[04:40] Comparing wedding planning and HR stress

[05:41] Learning HR on the fly

[07:46] Applying customer success skills to HR

[10:00] Becoming a strategic business partner

[12:32] Networking strategies and community involvement

[16:18] Current recruiting challenges: spam and AI

[19:27] Mitigating bot candidates and application fraud

[22:14] AI in recruitment processes

[24:13] Personalization vs. automation in outreach

[25:59] Current job market sentiment

[28:25] Evaluating company stability when job searching

[31:21] Building custom GPTs for HR and sales

[34:25] AI governance and best practices

[36:10] Predictions for HR and recruiting

[39:52] Closing and where to connect

About Erin McCann

Erin McCann is an executive HR and People leader with over 12 years of experience, currently leading the function at Genomenon, a global biotech company. With a first career in high-stakes sales, marketing, and customer success, she brings rare business acumen and a commercial mindset to building people strategies. Aaron is known for her practical, operational approach to scaling teams, her advocacy for strategic HR partnerships, and her early, hands-on experimentation with AI to solve real business challenges.

About Joel Lalgee 

Joel Lalgee is an internationally known recruitment leader and coach who has helped thousands of recruiters build their brands online. In 2015, Joel started recruiting for a small start-up agency in Milwaukee. He quickly found his passion for recruitment. In 2019, he discovered content marketing, publishing his first posts on Linkedin. Since then, he has grown to over 400k followers, and his content has been seen over 1 billion times. In 2023, he started a business specializing in coaching recruiters, marketing consulting, and influencer partnerships.

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