Kelley Morse, Chief People Officer at Bullhorn

Show Notes

Wrestling with AI hype, budget pressure, and messy HR workflows?

Kelley Morse, Chief People Officer at Bullhorn—the market leader powering 10,000+ staffing and recruitment firms—offers a grounded blueprint.

With 25+ years in market, 1,300 employees, and an AI-forward product (Amplify), Kelley shares a rare dual view: building AI into a platform recruiters already live in, while introducing it inside her own People team.

She recounts her unconventional rise from individual contributor to CPO during COVID—guided by a mentor and centered on impact—and breaks down what’s next in 2025: navigating SaaS headwinds while upskilling for AI.

Expect specifics: why AI must be “built where you live” to win adoption, how her team mapped the full employee lifecycle, and the first pilot they’re launching to deflect 15,000 HR emails with self-service.

Kelley also explains how to run bottom-up pilots, make smart build-vs-buy calls, and avoid “scaling garbage processes.” She closes with a pragmatic reimagining of performance management—let AI assemble the receipts, then keep the human conversation—and candid career advice for leaders who feel “behind.”

Timestamps

[00:45] – Who Bullhorn serves and where AI fits in the platform

[01:34] – Kelley’s path to CPO: joining as an IC, COVID turmoil, and mentorship

[05:08] – 2025 outlook: SaaS headwinds and the AI talent opportunity

[06:41] – Amplify and the “built where you live” rule for effective AI

[09:09] – People Ops pilots: HR self‑service to deflect 15k emails and lifecycle use cases

[12:13] – Adoption strategy: bottom‑up pilots, build‑vs‑buy, and investment discipline

[14:13] – Redesign the work: from surveys to performance reviews—don’t scale broken processes

[19:18] – Parting advice for HR leaders: ditch impostor syndrome and lean in

Takeaways

- Embed AI where people already work to drive adoption and leverage existing data.

- Start with high-volume, low-risk wins (e.g., HR self-service to deflect tier‑one inquiries).

- Pilot bottom-up: let functions test, prove value, and scale only when outcomes are clear.

- Rebuild workflows before layering tech—otherwise you just automate bad processes.

- Use AI to prepare performance reviews (aggregate and summarize inputs) while humans lead the conversation.

- Be disciplined on build vs. buy—leverage internal expertise and invest where your org can absorb and sustain change.

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What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Emily Fenech (00:34)
Welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Emily Fenech and today we are chatting with Kelley Morse from Bullhorn. Kelley welcome. Thank you so much for being here.

Kelley Morse (00:44)
Thanks, I'm glad to join you today.

Emily Fenech (00:46)
Yeah. So Kelley, you're the chief people officer at Bullhorn and Bullhorn is a platform used by more than 10,000 companies to help them manage their entire recruitment life cycle. before we, before we jump in, ⁓ for those who aren't yet familiar with Bullhorn, I'd love it you could give us just a little bit more context on the company, the people that work there and your role as chief people officer.

Kelley Morse (00:56)
Yes.

Yeah, so Bullhorn has been in business for just over 25 years. We are the market leader in our space.

⁓ Our clients are primarily the staffing and recruitment industry. So it's an industry that's not far from my heart in terms of being on the people side of the business. And our platform services our customers basically helps them run their operations from start to finish. So, and we'll probably talk about AI at some point, but we're also leading the way on AI throughout the recruitment process with our new product called Amplify.

So it's really exciting time in the company right now. We have about 1300 employees. And it's funny, I just looked at this stat the other day, but our average tenure is 4.8 years. I know, I know that one surprised me. I always tend to think we have a lower tenure and then I saw 4.8 years, I was like, holy cow. Yeah.

Emily Fenech (01:56)
Wow.

That's That's

awesome. Well, Kelley, while I was researching you, I did notice something about you. You have been at the company for about six years. In those six years, you have received four promotions. So you started at senior director, one year VP, one year SVP, one year chief people officer. I couldn't help but notice a trajectory like that. And I wondered if you wouldn't mind speaking to it. Like what is going on with you over there at Bullhorn?

Kelley Morse (02:14)
Yes.

Emily Fenech (02:33)
How is this career progression story taking place?

Kelley Morse (02:36)
Yeah, so just a little bit of context about how I got to Bullhorn is seven years ago now at this point, maybe six. I can't remember. start to lose track, but I was pregnant with my third child and I had spent a lot of time in startups and startups can be, you know, sort of crazy working all the time. And I was head of HR at a startup and I just thought like, I can't keep this pace anymore. I need to find somewhere that's a little bit more structured, has a little bit more balance. And so I took a step back and

and took an individual contributor role at Bullhorn. It was a much bigger company than anything I'd worked in before. And it got off to a little bit of a rough start. We had some turnover at the chief people officer level, including the woman I had come to work for. And that was very scary for me at the time. And like I said, I was like seven months pregnant.

And the company found themselves without a chief people officer and it was in the middle of cobit, like, right at the beginning of it and we were doing a layoff. So, our CEO are made a very smart call and he put HR underneath someone who had been in the company for like, I think at the time, like, 12 years.

And really good, really good guy, name's Pete. He's one of my mentors and someone I admire and love dearly. So they put HR underneath Pete. Pete had never run HR before and he's British and he's not someone that people would think of as running an HR function. But he had me and the rest of the team as sort of partners. And so we brought the HR expertise. Pete brought the bullhorn sort of like knowledge and culture. ⁓

And

I just got really lucky. Pete and I clicked really well and he was able to mentor and guide me. I ended up staying, obviously, spoiler alert there. But when I came back from my maternity leave, Pete promoted me.

And so that was my VP promotion. And then again, I had run HR before. And so as the more I got to know the company's culture and understand it, the more things I was able to sort of bring and do and sort of have that impact. so promotions fall pretty quickly after that. And then I took the chief people officer job in 2023. So yeah, I've been in C for about two and a half years now.

Emily Fenech (04:52)
Yeah, well that's wonderful. I love to hear that. We actually have opposite career stories. Mine started big and then went small in terms of company size. But for the same reasons, oddly. So we'll have to talk about that another time. ⁓

Kelley Morse (05:00)
Okay.

I love it. I love it.

Emily Fenech (05:09)
As we think about, you know, when you and I were chatting earlier, we were talking about, can't believe it's the end of the year already. We're all thinking about next year already. I'm curious what's on your mind. What are some of the biggest challenges that, you know, as a chief people officer at Bullhorn that you're facing specifically, and what are you thinking about for next year?

Kelley Morse (05:29)
Yeah, so a couple things, think one of the longer ⁓ challenges we've had now for the last couple of years, and I think many, not most, SaaS companies are feeling this is just like this economic uncertainty and downturn. So we continue to weather that. And so there's a sort of an exhaustion on that. And so I think that's, you know, I'd mentioned I'm ready to turn the page on 2025. And I think just for those reasons, I'm sort of like, OK.

but I'm really excited and sort of energized by some of the challenges that I think we're gonna look at next year. And I know everyone's talking about AI right now, but I think for me and our company is we not only have AI that we're bringing to our own customers and could really shape the game of the recruitment industry and really change it, which I think is really exciting, but also on a talent level.

we're going to be introducing AI and we've already started to see some early wins, but like that might change the talent landscape here at our company as well. And so as I think about those challenges, I'm very invigorated about, know, by them and like, what could it mean and how can we work through it and how do we upscale people and how do we not bite off too much? so those are all sort of the things that I've been thinking a lot about over the last couple of months. And the exhaustion is the less exciting part. The thought about the future of talent is more exciting for me.

Emily Fenech (06:50)
Yes, I saw the keynote that your CEO gave about Amplify getting more familiar. I mean, it looks really cool. I'm not, keep, tell me more about it, yeah.

Kelley Morse (06:56)
It's incredible.

Go ahead, sorry.

Yeah, so, you know, I think, again, I'm not an AI expert at all. So let me just say that I've been doing, you know, just a lot of research and watching and talking to a lot of people and thinking about our own workflows. I think one of the things for me and our company is that in order for AI to be successful, whether it's agentic or, you know, whatever, I think it needs to be built where you live already.

It needs to just be built into the systems you're already working in and sort of, you know, connect seamlessly. And so that is actually one of the awesome things about our Amplify is it's built into Bullhorn where people already live and all the data is and all that data helps feed that, you know, the agents and all of that that help power it. And so it's interesting. I was talking to my talent acquisition team recently and like,

We're currently not on bullhorn because it's built for recruitment industry, the staffing agency industry, but it's not built really for corporate as much. So we don't use it. But anyways, I want to use it very, very badly. And so I recently started talking about, how can we make this happen? Like, how can we hook our systems up into it? Because I just think it's so powerful, but.

⁓ It's got to be built into where you live because in order to have to go out and bring your data over to another system, it's just not as seamless. You're not getting those efficiencies and those gains and all of that. So yeah, that's Amplify kind of in a light nutshell.

Emily Fenech (08:27)
Yeah, that's awesome. So in terms of AI use in your product, I think what's really cool is I also work at an organization with an AI native product, right? And so the fact that that's a constant conversation because of the nature of our product, right? It keeps me, feel like it, and prior to this role, I was at another AI startup. So I just feel like it's sort of been a big piece of my mind share for three or four years, right? And so how I use AI,

It's just always on my mind. Every process I start, how could it help me? How could it assist me? Right? So when you think about, has that sort of bled into your people team, the people that you're leading in terms of your adoption of AI, not for recruitment, because as you mentioned, you're not even using Bullhorn yet, but in other processes, like have you been excited about the potential for AI sort of elsewhere within the people team?

Kelley Morse (09:16)
Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity for it. Again, figuring out.

how to bring ⁓ AI into that. It's not just like a feature piece or a tiny little piece. But we did actually, my team got together a couple of weeks ago and sat down and sort of did the entire employee life cycle and thought about what are some low-hanging fruits in terms of putting AI in? Some of the easiest ones is self-service for employees. So we have an email account that our internal employees email when they have questions and we get like over 15,000 emails a year. And so to take all of that

all

of our information and roll it out so that employees can sort of use a chat bot to get those sort tier one or lower level questions answered quicker. I think that's going to be like one of the things we start with. There's a lot of opportunity in recruitment. As we sort of talked about, I think there's a lot of opportunity in engagement. Thinking about like

surveys and sort of summarizing information, which a lot of tools already have that built in, but then how do you create sort of something agentic that can go out and pulse sort of quickly and behind the scenes and bring that information and those insights back to HR business partners and leaders? I think there's a lot of opportunity there. There's a lot of opportunity in ⁓ learning and development.

But some of them are so like new and early stage that they're not quite there yet. So we'll continue to sort of play around with things and see what takes off probably over the next like 12 to 18 months.

Emily Fenech (10:44)
Yeah, that's wonderful. There's a lot of great tools out there for some of those self-service. I know one of our favorites is Kinfolk. They're a great team. Have you heard of them? Yeah, so check them out. Listeners too.

Kelley Morse (10:52)
Yes, yes, I have definitely. Yep. I mean,

it's the interesting piece, like we have some incredibly talented people on our own team who are leading the way, you know, in this space. And so some of it we're like, what can we leverage internally? What do we want to buy elsewhere? So that's kind of like where we're at, as you think about, especially on the recruitment side, like our teams have spent the time to like.

Do some incredible things like, we'll just sort of bring that over rather than go outside and pull a just other a bunch of other vendors, you know. Yeah.

Emily Fenech (11:27)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓

Shifting gears to next year and thinking about the employees, right? We've talked about your people team and how they're going to leverage it. One thing that I think is really exciting for people leaders in this moment is that I just think it's such a huge opportunity for people teams to shape the use of this technology and sort of how it shapes their culture, how it shapes workforce planning. I mean, it impacts, the use of AI does impact so much of the life cycle.

Kelley Morse (11:34)
Mm-hmm.

Emily Fenech (11:54)
and so much of the business, right? That I think it's such an opportunity to lead. think people partnered with tech, just seeing them sort of rise to the occasion. And so I'm just curious when you think about your people teams and their use of AI and their use of technology, have you seen that shift and has it changed how you partner internally? What's your role in that shift? Like, what's that been like?

Kelley Morse (12:13)
Yeah, I think, you know, it's early. I think, you know, one of the things I've been encouraging my team is there's all different, there's a span of interest and usage of it.

I have my head of talent development is like obsessed with it and like is using it all the time. And then there's me who's like probably had a busier year and hasn't been able to spend as much time there as much as I probably wanted to. But so we're kind of in a span. One of the things that we're really sort of focusing on as we go into 2026 is letting each function figure out what works for them.

and like letting people test it out and try it out. And I think it's something that you lead from the top down and it feels forced.

But it's just like round up momentum, which we're trying to build. so, you know, there's a lot of individuals within our company that are just like so curious and exploring it and trying it out and want to share it. And so that's been like very cool to see. I could probably name like 10 or 15 people that just like are so into it and are constantly like sending, you know, little quick tips and things like that. Like, and I tried this and so it's fun to see that. So I'd say we're probably on the earlier side of it. And, you know, our goal in the next year is to see

Like where are the gains? Where do we want to make some investments? Because I think you could throw a lot of money at AI right now and you have to be ready for it. You have to be ready to absorb it as an organization and I don't think all of it's going to stick. So we just take a little bit more of a try it, let's prove the value and we'll sort of add it and introduce it as it makes a good investment on the money you need to spend.

Emily Fenech (13:48)
Yeah, that's sound advice. could. And I know that you could also waste a lot of time sort of trying to build it yourself too. I feel like there's this tug of, like this push and pull of don't spend too many hours building what can be bought, but also don't spend too many dollars buying for processes that you haven't quite figured out yet. Do you know what I mean?

Kelley Morse (14:01)
Yes.

Yes, yes. Well,

it's interesting you bring up the process thing because to truly embrace it, you need to transform your workflows and how you do things. It's not just put a technology on top of everything that's already existing.

it's changing the way that we've seen with our clients, the way that their teams fundamentally operate and measure their employees and things like that. So it's not just like, let's adopt it and it's all gonna be perfect on top of what we already have. It's like, no, this is transformative work. And I think there's gonna be a lot more talk about that in the next year.

Emily Fenech (14:45)
I do too. I think if you stick it on top of a garbage process, you're just going to scale a garbage process and automate a garbage process. So a lot of the work in implementing it and finding your use case is identifying a problem, having the human shape, what the ideal outcome should be for employees, right? And then automating that. But you do kind of have to start from scratch a little bit, right? ⁓ Otherwise...

Kelley Morse (14:50)
Yes.

Right. Yes.

Yeah, or just not be

stuck on what we've always done. I think that's the biggest thing is like, yes, those were the workflows for how many years, forever and ever, right? We made efficiency or tweaked them here and there, but this is something that it's kind of like you wipe it clean a little bit and reimagine each phase as it goes. Yeah.

Emily Fenech (15:14)
Right.

Yeah, cause

if you can, I'll give you a couple of examples from other folks I've been talking to, but if you, mentioned surveys, right? Like there's a world where you don't even have to have surveys. If you have mountains of unstructured data that contain all of the authentic employee sentiment you're going to need, right? Slack channels, emails, meeting notes. Like you can sort of use AI to sort of surface problem areas without having to, to ask and have like, you know, performative.

Kelley Morse (15:41)
Yes.

Yes.

Emily Fenech (16:00)
data sets, yeah, or performance management, another good area where like we meet twice a year, we have a meeting, it's based on like the last six weeks of what we can remember and that's it and everybody hates it. Like you could totally reimagine a process like that if it was, if you, if you started defining it with AI.

Kelley Morse (16:01)
We have.

Yes, yes.

There's a ton of opportunities for disruption in those things. We were just talking about that when my team got together, but like, performance management is such a great example because think about think about.

you you go to sit to write this review and it's like, it's just recency bias unless you've kept notes or receipts or, you know, made things along the way and both the employee and the manager's trying to do that, to go back and like recreate and say, how did I do? and, if you had something that just pulled all that stuff sort of through and threaded it and then kind of summarized it, right? Now you're actually having a real conversation.

Because you don't want AI to have the review with your employee, but to get all that data ready and organized and summarize it so that you can actually have the real human connection and a real conversation, I think, is a ⁓ very huge opportunity and could be really powerful. Yeah.

Emily Fenech (17:08)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. Yeah,

nothing but opportunity. Personally, I get excited about this stuff. I love I love reading.

Kelley Morse (17:20)
I get excited.

I also get overwhelmed because like even now in talking about it, this conversation, I will sound aged in three months. Right? Like it's just moving that quickly. And I consider myself like AI knowledgeable light, you know, enough to be like somewhat dangerous and informed. But it's just it's moving so quickly, too. So.

It's, it's, some of it's like very exciting. Some of it's a little overwhelming and, ⁓ and we'll see you over here in about a year.

Emily Fenech (17:51)
Well, I I appreciate

your honesty because also as someone who's leading people at an organization that is pushing an AI product, I feel like it'd be easy for you to try to fake it till you make it. And that does not seem to be your style. And so I really appreciate the authenticity here.

Kelley Morse (18:05)
The teams that are working on our products are just like out of this world. So smart. The things that they come up with and they innovate on and they build like, I'm just, I'm actually really proud to be a part of it and acknowledge my place in the back of the line as like all, not all that knowledgeable, but under, I can understand it. Yeah.

Emily Fenech (18:26)
Right.

Right. Well, I asked another, ⁓ in a recent episode with Kate Kemp, who's chief people officer at restaurant 365. And I said, do you have any advice for, you know, HR leaders that might feel behind? She's like, unless you have sold your own AI company, like we're all behind. you talking about? Like we're figuring it out. Join us, you know, join the party as we all figure this out. No one has this figured out.

Kelley Morse (18:43)
We're all behind. That's exactly right.

No, no, and don't be afraid of it. Like you gotta lean in and embrace it. Yes.

Emily Fenech (18:52)
Yeah. Yes. Well, Kelley,

I've really enjoyed our conversation. Do you have any sort of parting words of advice for, you've had a great career, very impressive trajectory at your company. Any advice you want to leave for the HR listeners today?

Kelley Morse (19:08)
Yeah, I think it goes along the same vein that we just sort of discussed right now is like, don't be afraid. Don't have imposter syndrome. Like everyone else is probably at the same level that you're at and you're just probably looking up to people more than anything. But like, we're all human. We're all trying to figure it out. And so the more you can just lean in and not be afraid of the challenge or to learn.

to fail. mean, I've certainly done a ton of that in my career. I think that's how I got to where I'm at is just a little bit. I definitely have fear, but pretending to be fearless like we got this. We'll figure it out like. What's the worst that can happen, right? So I think there's a little bit of that. That's like really solid career advice. That's just like don't be so nervous and anxious about things like just trusting yourself and and things will work out.

Emily Fenech (19:58)
Yeah, don't we get in our own way. All right, well thank you so much, Kelley. It was a joy to talk to you today.

Kelley Morse (20:01)
Don't get in wrong way. Love that.

Yeah, thanks so much, Emily. Take care.

Emily Fenech (20:09)
Take care.