Last August, after nearly 10 years into her tenure at hiring platform SmartRecruiters, Rebecca Carr got the call every C-Suite executive wants to get: she was being elevated from interim to permanent Chief Executive Officer. For the self-described “recruiter-turned-product manager,” it was something of a commencement—the end of one thing, but the start of something far larger. And she’s taken to it with relish. Just as she made SmartRecruiters’ job easy in her promotion, she wants to make bringing new employees aboard simple for anyone, anywhere.
“Hiring shouldn’t feel like a chore,” she said in a recent interview, “and I’m here to make sure it doesn’t.”
Carr’s major focus has been making SmartRecruiters “fully API-able,” which she believes will help the business thrive. “We can't serve everybody we can in a world where there's more movement toward gig and fractional work, which means more kind of custom, more personalized experiences,” she said on a 2024 podcast. “They don't wanna build the back office 'cause that's really expensive. But if they can control the UI and I can give them a design system, not just APIs, but like components that they can plug and play to build that experience, then I can meet a lot more people where they need to be.”
A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Business School, Carr says there are three key themes she hews to as a leader: meet customers where they are, empower creativity through smarter systems, and design recruiting tools that keep up with the speed of modern work—a speed so fast that a job-seeker’s needs can change in an instant. Carr wants her company to be ready for that, and anything else: “We’ve invested a lot in the tech stack so that our customers can customize user experiences,” she said, “because change management is hard.”
SmartRecruiters’ domestic success in doing just that could lead to overseas expansion, Carr said, looking into her “crystal ball”: “I think you're gonna see some growth from us overseas. That's where we've invested a lot. I think that could serve us really well from a partner perspective and might be an interesting carrot for someone.”
