Andrea Rocha Pitta

Why Hiring Was Never Just Hiring

Starting a talent career in Brazil taught her the stakes early. It is a country with a great deal of social injustice, she notes, and with social hierarchies that sit far apart from one another. In that context, placing someone in a role reaches well beyond the offer letter. "Helping someone find a job is way more than just helping them find a job," she says. It is the difference between precarity and a family with ground beneath it.

That realization pushed her toward diversity and inclusion work, and toward a sharper question: how do you build inclusive hiring that actually reaches the people who have been denied opportunity for generations because of background and history? The answer, she concluded, required proximity to decision making. She was direct with herself about the calculation. The people making real change are the ones with the authority to make it, which meant leadership was never an ambition for its own sake but a prerequisite for the transformations she wanted to see in the workplace.

The Leaders Who Built Her Leadership

Rocha Pitta credits her move to Europe to Rosalind, then her manager at Miro, who looked at a candidate all the way in Brazil and decided the potential was worth backing. That bet became a relocation from Brazil to the Netherlands and, eventually, a leadership seat. The lesson has stayed with her: sometimes you can see potential in others before they see it in themselves. What impresses her most is that Rosalind did not simply spot capability, she coached people into it, turning them into top performers, which Rocha Pitta considers genuinely rare. The two still hold monthly mentorship sessions even though Rosalind has since moved on from Miro.

Her second leader at Miro, Joe, dismantled a misconception she had carried into management. She had assumed that stepping into leadership meant becoming a kind of corporate persona, the voice of the company, leading by flawless example and making everyone love the organization. Joe showed her that vulnerability and transparency do more work than performance, building the psychological safety that makes a team feel seen and willing to trust. She describes holding both sides at once: pushing for results while recognizing people as humans and guaranteeing them an environment in which they can thrive. That, she says, is her responsibility above all else.

Two other names surface in her account of what shaped her. Megan led through vulnerability so consistently that people knew they could bring her anything, creating a safety net that held even when everything around it was on fire. Ben, formerly a talent leader at Miro and now leading international talent at OpenAI, taught her to sort what can be controlled from what cannot, and to pull teams out of the anxiety loop of things they have no power to change. She is also candid that one senior people leader she worked with taught her by counterexample, treating the human side of the work as background noise while business came first. She took the opposite pledge. Team first, then the business, because people produce the results and everything else follows from there.

AI as Ally, Not Replacement

Rocha Pitta sees two distinct movements in the market. One treats AI as a substitute for people: tools that source, tools that review applications, and experiments with AI conducting candidate conversations. She is clear that this is neither the future she is hopeful about nor the one she advocates for. The other movement, the one she finds genuinely interesting, treats AI as an amplifier of the talent function.

Her framing is practical. The point is not to hand sourcing to a machine and delete the recruiter, but to give the recruiter a tool that makes sourcing faster and more effective so they can be more thoughtful, find better people sooner, and spend their attention on the parts of the job no software can do: human connection, career plans, workforce building, development plans. The same logic applies to structured candidate conversations. Rather than automating them away, use AI to make them better, letting a note taker hold the record so the person leading the discussion can stay fully present instead of worrying about missing a detail. This, she observes, is where she is seeing the most success: teams asking how to be smart about a new way of working and how to make AI an ally rather than a threat.

Advice for Talent Leaders in 2026

Her first instruction is protective. Do not lose your humanity along the way, and treat any sense that you are becoming less of yourself as a signal to pause before advancing. People end up in talent because they care about people, she argues, which makes empathy the non negotiable at the front of everything.

Her second is about durability. The market is volatile by nature. A financial boom arrives and recruiters are needed more than ever; a crisis arrives and recruiting teams are often the first to be affected; technological advances arrive and ways of working have to be rebuilt. Rocha Pitta's counsel is to construct real resources around yourself, and around the people you lead, to absorb those swings without being consumed by them. Separate what you control from what you do not, learn to release the second category without spiraling into worry, and pour your energy into the first.

The payoff, in her experience, compounds. Focus on the solution, brainstorm your way through the hard situation as a team instead of feeling stuck inside it, and doors open in places you never mapped, often when you least expect it. Organizations gravitate toward the people who help solve problems. When you can be that person, no one can stop you.