What does it take to lead hiring through relentless change without losing the human thread that holds teams together? In this special re-aired episode of Hiring Happy Hour, Nicole Hammond sits down with Kim Nicholas, GM of Talent Acquisition Systems & Payroll at The Warehouse Group, for a candid conversation about resilience, leadership, and high-volume hiring under pressure. Kim reflects on navigating COVID-era disruption, enterprise-wide agile transformation, and exponential growth in applications, all while supporting over 10,000 employees across 190+ retail sites in New Zealand. The conversation blends hard-earned operational lessons with deeply personal leadership insights, offering a grounded perspective on what it means to build hiring systems that endure. Takeaways: Change doesn’t pause for perfect conditions. Momentum matters more than flawless execution when organizations are under pressure. Education beats enforcement during transformation. People adapt faster when they understand the “why,” not just the process. Attitude can outweigh experience. Especially in frontline and early-career roles, curiosity and coachability drive long-term success. Candidate experience is brand experience. How applicants are treated directly impacts customer trust and loyalty. Automation should protect humanity, not replace it. The best systems remove friction so recruiters can focus on connection and judgment. Resilient leadership depends on mental health. Sustained change is impossible without boundaries, balance, and self-awareness. Quote of the Show: “ It was really about how can we make an impact to the business when we're not the ones that decide the product goes in store, but we can help the experience of who comes in.” - Kim Nicholas Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-nicholas-26a23038/  Website: https://www.twgcareers.co.nz/  Email: kim.nicholas@thewarehouse.co.nz  Ways to Tune In: Substack: HiringHappyHour.com  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793  iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/  Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769 

The hiring playbook most teams still follow was built for a market that no longer exists. Attention spans are shorter, competition is fiercer, and rigid systems slow every decision down. In this special compilation of Hiring Happy Hour, Nicole brings together five talent leaders to explore why the old playbook can't match today's pace. From shrinking attention spans to hidden talent pools and rigid legacy systems, one message comes through: static hiring leaves opportunity on the table. The path forward pairs speed and flexibility with AI that reflects your culture, while human judgment and relationships stay at the center. The teams that win won't choose between speed and the human touch. They'll build both into the process.   Takeaways: Audit your job ads for length and clarity. If candidates leave after half a scroll, your best message never gets read. Time to hire is only half the picture. Track how quickly someone goes from seeing a job to starting it. Stop treating job boards as your whole strategy. Only about 5% of qualified people are looking, and everyone is chasing them. Reach the other 95% before a role opens. Build relationships with people who aren't searching yet. If one system change disrupts several teams, your setup is too tangled. Choose tech that lets you adjust without breaking things. Tell candidates where they stand. A simple status email beats silence, and today's workforce expects it. Train AI on your culture and values like you would a new hire. Keep human judgment in charge of the final call. Quote of the Show: "When you pair smart, adaptive AI and genuine human insight, you just don't fill roles. You build stronger, more connected teams for the long, long haul." - Nicole Hammond Links: Nicole Hammond: linkedin.com/in/nicolemhammond Adam Reynolds: linkedin.com/in/adamreynoldsrecruitment  James Ellis: linkedin.com/in/thewarfortalent Chris Bailey: linkedin.com/in/chrisbaileysmartrecruiters  Jeremy York: linkedin.com/in/jeremyyork Alison Bosch: linkedin.com/in/alison-bosch-4360366  SmartRecruiters: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/  Ways to Tune In: Substack: HiringHappyHour.com  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793  iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/  Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour  Transistor: https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/

25,000 hires. 170+ countries. 400+ recruiters enabled. SAP’s hiring team is officially live on SmartRecruiters, so we're hitting replay on Rebecca Carr's story of how this whole thing began. Trust us, it's even better knowing how it ends. In part two of this re-aired conversation, Rebecca Carr, CEO of SmartRecruiters and now President of HCM Products at SAP, joins Hiring Happy Hour for a candid look at one of the most defining chapters in company history: rebuilding momentum internally, pivoting SmartRecruiters into an AI-first organization, and navigating the company’s acquisition by SAP, all at the same time. What follows goes far beyond strategy decks and vision statements. At a moment when many companies slow down under the weight of acquisition and organizational change, Rebecca shares how SmartRecruiters accelerated, launching Winston into a market that was not fully ready and driving adoption to nearly 60% of all jobs running through the platform, a remarkable number at a time when most AI products struggle to achieve sustained enterprise usage. But this conversation is about more than AI. It is about what innovation actually looks like inside a global enterprise: moving quickly without losing trust, creating clarity during uncertainty, and building a culture willing to execute before every answer is fully known. From rebuilding organizational confidence to navigating acquisition, Rebecca shares an honest look at what transformation demands from modern leaders: conviction, adaptability, and the courage to keep moving while the future is still taking shape. Takeaways: Ship the vision before the market catches up. Waiting for industry consensus before moving on AI is how organizations fall behind. SmartRecruiters launched and drove adoption of Winston, the platform’s AI interface, while competitors were still debating the concept — and built a separation that's now measurable. Adoption is the real proof point, not the product itself. A strong launch means nothing if people don't use it. Getting there requires change management, internal champions, and a rollout strategy that's as deliberate as the product itself. Enterprise transformation and innovation can coexist if you're intentional. Navigating a major acquisition while simultaneously evolving your product vision is only possible when leaders are radically transparent about where the business is and what it needs to do next. Rebecca held both in motion by keeping the team informed, focused, and moving. Create conditions for bold thinking, then actually act on what comes out. The best strategic ideas rarely emerge from structured planning sessions. When Rebecca asked her team at a company offsite to bring back the craziest ideas on the planet, she got a product roadmap. Some of those ideas are still in flight today. Speed is a strategic asset, not a byproduct. In a crowded market, the organization that moves with both conviction and urgency creates its own differentiation. From launching Winston to closing an acquisition with one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world, pace itself became part of SmartRecruiters’ value proposition.  Confidence shown to the market is its own signal. Rebecca's "dance floor" analogy captures something every TA leader navigating a competitive landscape needs to hear: confidence shown to the market, even imperfect confidence, projects readiness and attracts the right partners before the window closes. Change management is an innovation problem, not just a people problem. Getting an enterprise to adopt new technology at scale means solving for trust, clarity, and momentum, not just capability. Treat rollout as a strategic challenge equal to the product build itself.  Quote of the Show: “If you have a goal, and you have passion behind it, you have to believe in it as a leader.” - Rebecca Carr Links: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rebeccajcarr Website: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/  Ways to Tune In: Substack: HiringHappyHour.com  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793  iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/  Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour  Transistor: https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/

This week on Hiring Happy Hour, we're re-airing this conversation for a very good reason: Rebecca Carr’s story just picked up an exciting new chapter. Alongside her role as CEO of SmartRecruiters, she's now also the President of HCM Products at SAP. 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 and now President of HCM Products at SAP, 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 enabled 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: Rebecca’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rebeccajcarr Rebecca’s LinkedIn Post: https://lnkd.in/p/gaau238m  Website: https://www.smartrecruiters.com Ways to Tune In: Substack: HiringHappyHour.com  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793  iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/  Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour  Transistor: https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/

What happens when "migration" actually means starting over? In this episode of Hiring Happy Hour, Nicole sits down with David Novak, Senior Director of Strategic Customer Engagements at SmartRecruiters, to unpack what it takes for enterprise customers to move off SAP SuccessFactors Recruit and onto SmartRecruiters. Dave leads the team built to support these moves, and his message is clear: this isn't a lift and shift, it's a transformation. They dig into why SmartRecruiters is built to be configurable rather than customizable, how that trade-off actually unlocks scale, and why governance now matters as much for monthly product releases as it does for AI. If your organization is weighing a platform change, this is a grounded look at what separates a rocky transformation from a successful one.   Takeaways: Treat a platform migration as a transformation, not a copy-paste job. If you rebuild your old system exactly as it was, you lose the reason you switched in the first place. Before redesigning any workflow, revisit why you wanted to change: a compelling candidate experience, less admin work for recruiters, and hiring managers who actually engage. A configurable system beats a highly customized one once you're thinking about scale. Custom builds are hard to unwind, and they slow down every future release you'd otherwise adopt in minutes. Pilot new capabilities in a safe test environment, one region or business unit at a time, before rolling them out org-wide. Small, intentional tests build confidence without disrupting the whole hiring organization. Assign one clear owner for monitoring and rolling out product releases. Governance breaks down fast when everyone assumes someone else is watching for what's new. Hold AI to the same governance standard as any other release. Know where the data comes from, keep a human in the loop on hiring decisions, and watch for bias baked into historical data. Look for a technology partner who flags relevant updates before you have to ask. That shift, from reactive support to proactive guidance, is often what unblocks a complex transformation. Quote of the Show: "Bring them [hiring managers] back to why they wanted to make the change in the first place... empowered recruiters, engaged hiring managers, and a compelling candidate experience."   - Dave Novak Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davewnovak/  Website: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/  Ways to Tune In: Substack: HiringHappyHour.com  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf  Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369  Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793  iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/  Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour  Transistor: https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/