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Fresh out of the sessions at SAP Connect, industry analyst Kyle Lagunas has sharp insights on where HR tech is headed next. Nicole and Kyle sat down in person at the event for this episode of Hiring Happy Hour, reflecting on everything they’d heard throughout the week. Kyle, Founder and Principal Analyst at Kyle & Co, shares why an outcomes-first approach is overdue, why transformation can’t be a lift and shift, how AI readiness differs from past waves like offshoring and cloud, and why HR needs a seat at the AI table. Add a few Gossip Girl references, a manifesto for four-day work weeks, and a This or That round that ends with a dirty gin martini!
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Ready to begin your AI in HR transformation? Learn more about the move from SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting to SmartRecruiters.
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Thousands of applications, no consistent way to review them, and great candidates slipping through. How does a global TA team fix that? In this episode of Hiring Happy Hour, Nicole talks with Danilo Bulatovic, Global Lead of Talent Acquisition Sourcing and Operations Technology at Syngenta, about turning that challenge into a success story. Danilo shares how SmartRecruiters’ Winston Match and Winston Screen brought consistency to top of funnel review while keeping humans in every decision. After five months of using Winston Match, more than 60% of candidates who scored a four have moved on to interviews at Syngenta, and early signs show less time spent on review and stronger candidates moving forward. Danilo also makes the case for responsible AI adoption: human oversight on every decision, regular checks on low-scored candidates, and screening that helps strong candidates move forward, not filter them out. He shares where the recruiting roadmap is heading, including agents that help candidates find roles that fit.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Great design isn't about pretty interfaces; it's about earning trust one interaction at a time. In this episode of Hiring Happy Hour, Nicole sits down with Shefali Netke, VP of Product Design at SmartRecruiters, to explore how her team rebuilt their design process to keep pace with AI without losing sight of the humans on the other side of the screen. Shefali unpacks the three pillars driving her design strategy: agent coherence, intent-aware experiences, and scaling trust. She also shares how giving teams space to learn turned a moment of industry disruption into their most exciting product chapter yet. For HR and TA leaders navigating their own AI transformation, this conversation offers a blueprint for building technology people actually want to use.
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AI moves fast, and the organizations building for it need to move just as fast. In this episode of Hiring Happy Hour, Nicole Hammond sits down with Michal Nowak, SVP of Engineering at SmartRecruiters, to unpack the organizational shift behind building Winston and preparing for an increasingly agentic world of hiring. Michal shares why SmartRecruiters moved away from long-standing product teams and reorganized around six key outcomes, with small, short-lived squads focused on shipping specific features. He also explains how an “acceleration squad” protects teams from distractions, why process changes can be just as powerful as AI coding tools, and what the team has learned from making constant evolution a core part of how they work.
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Many conversations on Hiring Happy Hour circle back to a familiar question: as hiring gets faster and more automated, where is human judgment most valuable? This special compilation pulls that thread together, bringing voices from across the show into one conversation about the moments that still need a human in the room. From the "hello" of a first interaction to the trust built long after the offer letter, this episode makes the case for a specific kind of balance: use AI to move work forward across the hiring journey so teams can spend more time on the decisions and relationships that shape a great hire.
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