Recruiter Spotlight: Laura Sorg, Founder at CWIK
What does it take to go from agency recruiting to in-house talent acquisition to launching your own recruiting business?
In this episode of the Honeit Podcast, Nick Livingston sits down with Laura Sorg, an experienced recruiter and TA leader, and the founder of CWIK Talent Services, to discuss the business of recruiting. Laura shares the real lessons behind her career journey and what she is seeing now as recruiting models shift toward embedded and fractional support, and as AI becomes a bigger part of her daily recruiting workflow.
Here are three key themes that stood out.
1) Agency experience teaches the business of recruiting
Laura credits her early years in agency recruiting for laying the foundation that carried through every role that followed. Agency recruiting forces you to learn how to compete, how to prioritize, and how to connect effort to outcomes. It is not just sourcing and screening. It is understanding a client’s business needs, communicating value, and delivering results under pressure.
That mindset becomes a superpower in-house. Many internal recruiting teams are asked to justify headcount, tools, and time. Laura’s perspective is clear: recruiters create measurable business value, but they have to learn how to explain it in business terms. When recruiters can connect activity to outcomes and outcomes to dollars, they earn more trust from leadership and more influence inside the organization.
2) Scaling recruiting is really about scaling trust
As Laura moved from leadership into building her own firm, the challenge shifted from filling roles to scaling quality. The hard part is not volume. The hard part is consistency.
Trust is built through conversations, not spreadsheets. Clients and candidates trust recruiters who listen well, represent roles honestly, and run a clear process. But trust is difficult to scale when recruiting becomes fragmented across tools, inboxes, notes, and disconnected handoffs.
Laura and Nick discuss how a repeatable interview structure, greater visibility into candidate conversations, and coaching based on real calls can help teams scale without sacrificing quality. This is the path to growing a recruiting function without relying on guesswork, tribal knowledge, or random variation between recruiters.
3) AI should support, not replace recruiters
Laura is optimistic about AI, but for a specific reason. The best technology makes recruiters better at the work that matters most. It removes the admin that steals attention and energy, so recruiters can be more present in candidate conversations.
Tools that support note-taking, call summarization, and candidate presentations help recruiters listen more deeply, remember details accurately, and move faster with confidence. AI can also help recruiters prepare and stay consistent with interview guides and structured questions, especially when scaling a team.
The point is not to remove the human element. The point is to protect it by taking busywork off the recruiter’s plate, improving consistency, and strengthening collaboration with hiring teams.
Final takeaway
Laura’s story is a reminder that great recruiting has always been both relationship-driven and performance-driven. The next era of recruiting will reward the teams that can run the business of recruiting with discipline, while protecting the human connection that makes trust possible.
Listen to the full episode to hear Laura’s journey from agency to founder, her perspective on embedded recruiting, and her grounded take on how AI can help recruiters deliver better outcomes without losing what makes recruiting human.
