Angela Gorospe

Two Weeks That Became Twenty Years

The employer was TEKsystems, a technology staffing firm known for hiring college students and teaching them how to recruit from scratch. When the water cooler news landed, Gorospe was uncomfortable but refused to sulk about it. She made a joke instead: fine, she would at least make her rent money. Then she showed up for each of those fourteen days and gave the role everything she had.

The contract kept extending. Her manager, Athena Becks, stretched two weeks into a month and a month into three, and when Becks prepared to go out on maternity leave she asked Gorospe to run the office. Gorospe pushed back, pointing out that three colleagues had been there longer and might be the better choice. The answer was direct: no, we have selected you. She became HR manager of the TEKsystems office in Silicon Valley.

When Becks returned, Gorospe raised her hand again, this time for a recruiting seat. She was candid that the job typically required a college degree and that she did not have one, and asked to be judged on her work ethic instead. She was given the shot, and she took it. In the role she supported companies including Cisco, Facebook, Google and Netflix, at a moment when none of them were the conglomerates they are today. "That really propelled my recruiting career into where I'm at today at Palo Alto Networks," she says.

The People Who Opened Doors

Asked to name the people who shaped her, Gorospe reaches for one from the beginning and one from the present. Becks is the first, the manager who kept extending a temporary contract and then handed a twenty something the keys to an office. "I'm a big believer everything happens for a reason," Gorospe says. "Because of her, that opened the door to where I'm at today."

The second is Marissa Herga, her current manager at Palo Alto Networks. Herga recognized that Gorospe wanted more than a full recruiting load and has consistently cleared the runway for it, backing the funding requests, the conference approvals and what Gorospe cheerfully calls her crazy ideas. That sponsorship is why Gorospe can lead Juntos, one of the company's employee network groups, speak at external events, and travel to India and Singapore last year to teach hiring skills training, all alongside the daily work of filling open roles.

Reverse Engineering AI for Candidates

Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora has a line his organization knows by heart: AI is not going to take your role, but someone who knows how to use AI will. Arora has challenged the entire company to integrate the technology into how it works. Gorospe took the challenge personally, and then took it somewhere unexpected.

Her insight was simple and slightly subversive. As a recruiter, she can drop a job description into an AI tool, ask for behavioral questions built on the STAR methodology, request probing follow ups, and walk away with a complete interview guide in minutes. So she decided to reverse engineer that advantage and hand it to candidates. She has presented twice at the Women in Cybersecurity Conference, once with a fellow recruiter and once from a combined hiring manager and recruiter perspective, on how to use AI in simple ways to land a dream role. She launched the Instagram channel She Leads with AI to carry the same material to a wider audience.

The sessions are deliberately practical, aimed at early career professionals and at people who are frankly afraid of the technology. How to refresh a resume with a few plain prompts. How to build a STAR based guide from a job description so you arrive prepared for the questions that will actually be asked. How to read the skills section closely, because that is exactly what she uses when she writes her own guides, so that candidates can showcase what they can do. How to use compensation data to advocate for yourself, tempered with an honest recruiter's caveat that you may ask for a million dollars but companies work within real parameters. In her most recent presentation she walked the room through running practice sessions with Gemini and other tools. "This is such an open space," she says. "If I can do anything to give back, I want to do that."

Living in the Space of Uncomfort

Gorospe is candid that comfort was once her instinct. Early in her career she liked feeling settled in a role, and learning that this was not a good place to be became the lesson she now repeats most often. The evidence is in her own record. Every meaningful step she has taken arrived disguised as something unsettling: a two week assignment, an office to run over more tenured colleagues, a recruiting job she was not formally qualified for on paper, and most recently a company wide mandate to rebuild her craft around AI. Each time, saying yes to the discomfort was what moved her forward.

So her advice to other talent leaders is unsentimental. Processes change, systems change, the world changes, and resisting that costs you your seat in the room where the change is decided. She describes herself as living in the space of uncomfort by choice. The trick is not pretending the unease is absent but asking a better question inside it: how can I add value here so that I can help drive this? That reframing, she says, is what calms the nerves. It moves you from the receiving end of change to the front of it.

The Team Around Her

Gorospe is quick to credit the culture she works inside. She points to Tina Khan, a senior director and thought leader for the global talent acquisition team supporting go to market, who embraces change and backs her recruiters so they can succeed. She points to Grace Williams, respected across the organization and capable of taking programs to the next level, who greets whatever lands on her desk with a smile. And she points to Edgardo Perez, an inclusion and diversity leader recently promoted to senior director, whose work has powered partnerships with organizations such as Latinas in Tech and lifted the company's employee network groups, including every effort Gorospe has led. "I think this is one of the best teams that I've been on," she says, noting that the work of filling open roles can be stressful and that this group insists on making it fun.