Becca Smith

From the Front Desk Up

The beginning was modest. Becca was a young college graduate in a first job out of school that she had already decided was not the right fit. Rather than wait for that to change on its own, she applied to a staffing agency for a position that interested her. She did not get it. The team there saw something worth keeping anyway, told her what they saw, and hired her for the front desk.

From that seat she worked her way up to managing a branch. Along the way she took roles in direct recruiting, talent acquisition and HR. The center of gravity never moved. Becca has always stayed in the talent and recruiting space, and she remains on the staffing agency side of it today.

Her current work sits a step back from the day to day of filling roles. Becca describes her recruiting capacity as a leadership support role: she does direct recruiting only when she has a position of her own open. The rest of the time she is supporting the leaders and teams across New England who carry the desks, a seat she reached after a path that ran through the front desk, a branch manager's job, direct recruiting, talent acquisition and HR.

Leadership, Studied Up Close

The people who left the deepest marks on Becca are not the memorable candidates, though she has those stories, and not the memorable clients either. They are her direct managers, her directors, even her vice presidents. Leadership was always the ambition, so she treated every leader she worked for as a case study, taking the traits she appreciated and respected and testing them against a plain question: do I want to lead this way, or do I want to do it differently?

That habit explains the specificity of her admiration. She points to Amanda Fish, her current leader and a director at Adecco, and calls her a shining light and a truly great leader and support person with real passion for the talent acquisition industry and for the organization. It is praise aimed less at charisma than at the daily work of backing up a team, which is the same standard Becca now has to meet in her own seat. She would happily say the same about nearly everyone she works with at Adecco.

Not every working relationship has been a positive one, and her rule for those is simple: take the lesson, and do not let the rest linger. "I try not to let that last too long," she says.

AI as Assistant and Consultant

Becca approaches artificial intelligence the way she approaches most things, which is to say optimistically and practically. She uses it personally and professionally, and describes it in unfussy terms: her assistant, her consultant. It has taught her things she says no single person could have taught her, including how to handle genuinely complex Excel work and how to build automations with Microsoft tools.

That detail matters, because Becca has no background in IT or in computers. By her own description she is a regular old user who happens to be convinced that a given task must be possible. Rather than ask a colleague to spend an hour and a half teaching her something new, she asks the tool how it can be done. The result is a leader who has quietly widened her own technical range without ever being trained for it.

She is not dismissive of the anxiety around the technology. She sees fairness in the fear, and treats it as the ordinary human response to anything new. Her one condition is the one most enthusiastic takes skip: it has to be used in a way that is protective of people and of information. Used that way, she argues, it should not be cast as a negative at all, but as a tool capable of supporting people in a remarkable number of capacities.

Advice for 2026: Be Steadfast on Candidate Experience

Heading into the new year, Becca's counsel to other talent leaders is unfashionably simple. Behave with integrity. Go into the new year wanting to do the right things the right way for the right people.

In practice she translates that into candidate experience, a subject she is openly passionate about, because she knows it can make or break someone's decision to join a company. The questions she wants leaders to ask are concrete ones. What is genuinely important about our culture? How do we share that with our candidates? Are we getting back to people and staying communicative while they decide?

She names the honest objection herself: those things take time, and they are easy to cut. Her answer is that cutting them costs more than it saves. The better you are to candidates as they consider joining your organization, she argues, the better your results will be, and her charge to the industry is to be steadfast about it.

It is a fitting position for someone whose own career started with a hiring team that took the time to tell a young graduate what they saw in her. Becca has been paying that forward ever since, from the front desk to the operations seat.