Turning the Future of Hiring Into Reality, Part 1 - Rebecca Carr - Hiring Happy Hour - Episode #020
“A lot of what I've been thinking about with my own product organization today is how do you keep that level of really high touch alive in an agentic era?"
Rebecca Carr didn’t plan to end up at SmartRecruiters. What started as an accidental application through a demo recruiting account became the beginning of a decade-long journey helping shape one of the most influential companies in hiring technology.
In part one of this special two-part series, Rebecca, CEO of SmartRecruiters, an SAP company, joins Hiring Happy Hour to reflect on the early career moments, bold bets, and customer partnerships that helped define both her leadership journey and the evolution of SmartRecruiters itself. From a 94-day global deployment for Bosch to rethinking recruiting around trust, candidate experience, and long-term partnership, this conversation traces the career arc that brought Rebecca to become the leader she is today, helping shape enterprise hiring through one of its most transformative moments yet.
Along the way, Rebecca shares lessons on grit, belief, and what enterprise change actually requires – including why keeping the feedback loop between product and customer tight has always been central to her thinking, and why it matters even more as AI begins to reshape how companies hire. For HR and TA leaders navigating that same shift, this is a conversation about what it looks like to build the future of hiring, not just talk about it.
Takeaways:
Great implementations don’t just go live — they create methodology. When you build around global standardization, candidate-first design, and real change management, you’re not just deploying software. You’re creating a repeatable playbook that the whole organization can use long after the project team moves on.
Candidate experience has to be a non-negotiable line item in every design decision, baked into how your hiring technology should be built and deployed. The companies that get hiring right don’t just treat it as something to optimize for when it’s convenient. Every process choice should be tested against one question: what does this mean for the candidate?
The best vendor-customer partnerships are bidirectional. Real progress happens when both sides are willing to do things differently than they planned. That means customers trusting the vendor’s product vision enough to standardize, and vendors trusting the customer’s operational reality enough to build with them, not just for them.
The tightest feedback loops produce the best products. Depth of collaboration during implementation is hard to sustain post-go-live, but closing that gap through technology is one of the most important problems companies (including SmartRecruiters) should be focused on solving now.
Be unromantic about your processes. Great talent with grit and belief still needs well-defined processes to execute against — but the moment you fall in love with how something is done, you lose the agility that makes you competitive.
The relationships built doing hard work together outlast the work itself. When both sides are fully invested in making something succeed, the personal connections that form become a lasting foundation that enables further success.
Quote of the Show:
“A lot of what I’ve been thinking about with my own product organization today is how do you keep that level of really high touch alive in an agentic era? I’d love to keep that customer experience consistent through the life of a contract, not just the first critical months.” - Rebecca Carr
Links:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rebeccajcarr
Website: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/
Ways to Tune In:
Substack: HiringHappyHour.com
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