Anita Chandrasekhar

Finding Purpose in the Funnel

At Teach for America, recruitment was not just another function. It was the organization’s lifeblood. Anita worked in a People and Performance role supporting a recruitment team of more than 200 people, the group responsible for bringing in the teachers who powered the entire mission. Her challenge was clear: rethink how recruiters themselves were hired, developed and evaluated.

She redesigned the hiring process from the ground up, standardizing assessment, defining and measuring quality of hire, and building performance and promotion structures that had not previously existed. Her team also owned recruiter hiring directly, operating almost as an internal recruiting engine given the sheer scale of the organization.

Somewhere in that work, the accidental career became a deliberate one. “That’s when it clicked for me,” she says. “Bringing the right people into the right roles is the highest leverage work you can do, for individuals and for organizations.” She had found her place.

Scaling Talent in a Global Context

From there, Anita moved to Zapier, where she continues similar work in an entirely different environment: a global, remote-first SaaS company operating across borders, time zones and cultures. Today she leads a lean talent acquisition team, fewer than 20 recruiters supporting an organization of roughly 800 people worldwide.

That footprint demands a kind of fluency that does not travel automatically from one market to the next. “What you quickly learn is that talent acquisition looks completely different depending on geography,” she explains. “Hiring in Australia is not the same as hiring in India or Ireland, and none of them look like the U.S.” Navigating those differences while maintaining consistency, fairness and speed has been one of the most rewarding challenges of her career.

Navigating AI With Intention

As AI reshapes the recruiting landscape, Anita advocates for a balanced approach, one that refuses both nostalgia and hype. “You can’t survive without AI anymore,” she says. “But recruiting will always be human-led.”

At Zapier, itself an AI orchestration platform, AI fluency is now a baseline hiring requirement across roles. At the same time, Anita is careful about how AI is implemented within talent workflows. From AI screeners to sourcing tools, her philosophy is consistent: test small, audit often and build bias checks into every step. “AI is trainable,” she explains. “And if you don’t question it, you’ll just automate the same problems faster.”

She is equally clear-eyed about the other side of the equation. Candidates now have AI too, introducing new challenges around authenticity, fraud and assessment integrity. “These are new skills talent teams have to develop,” she says. “This isn’t optional anymore.”

Advice for Talent Leaders Heading Into 2026

If Anita had to leave talent leaders with one principle, it would be to lead with caution and curiosity. “There are hundreds of tools,” she says. “But unless you understand the actual problem you’re trying to solve, AI won’t save you.”

Her prescription is practical: diagnose pain points across the entire funnel, trust human judgment and never stop questioning systems, especially when bias and fairness are at stake. “Test. Retest. Question. Then move forward,” she says. “Otherwise, you might fix one problem while creating another.”