Chandni Raja

A Deliberate Path, Across Three Continents

Plenty of talent leaders describe their arrival in the field as accidental. Chandni's story runs the other way. She earned a master's degree in human resources and recruiting, then moved straight into the roles, and she is direct about the intent behind all of it: everything she has done has been chosen.

The variable was never the discipline. It was geography. She began her career in India, then spent several years in Sweden, operating in a markedly different environment with different talent dynamics and growing companies across Europe. Canada came next, and with it the work of building in North America. Three continents, three sets of talent dynamics, one consistent throughline of intent.

What stayed constant is the kind of environment she gravitates toward. Startups, scale-ups, high-growth companies: that, she says, is her sweet spot, and she cannot emphasize it enough. The pace suits an operator who describes herself as driven by ownership, an entrepreneurial mindset, and execution orientation.

The Founder's Side of the Table

Most of Chandni's career has been spent working closely with founders and executives, many of them first-time founders whose companies she helped build. The relationships outlasted the roles. Those same founders still come to her for talent advisory when they hit something genuinely difficult.

That proximity to building had a logical consequence. She fell in love with the building part of companies, and in 2018 she started her own, scaled it, and exited successfully. Across her work as an HR leader, a talent leader, and a founder, she has been part of multiple successful exits, and she has stayed in touch with the founders behind them. The network is not a contact list. It is a run of relationships, some dating back to 2011, built by people who trust her judgment about other people.

The People She Points To

Two people draw her strongest praise. The first is Alan, a director-level recruiting lead at a boutique recruiting company she has partnered with personally over the years. She admires the business model and calls him a super empathetic leader, and a very efficient one.

The second is closer to home. Sierra, the people operations lead on her own team for around four years, works in a player coach role and is, in Chandni's description, second in line. The endorsement that follows is unambiguous: if Chandni were to leave today, Sierra is the person she would put forward for the job.

Why AI Makes The Human Part Harder, Not Optional

Chandni has a wry read on the current moment. It has become almost illegal, she says, to hold any discussion without using the word AI. Conferences, meetings, hiring processes: for the past two or three years, the topic has been overpowering.

Recruiters and individual contributors bring her the anxious version of the question, asking whether AI will take their jobs. Her answer is no, and her reasoning is more interesting than simple reassurance. Candidates have become far smarter with these tools. Resumes are sharper, preparation is deeper, and that creates a genuinely hard problem for whoever is evaluating: are you assessing the real person, or a performance assembled with help? In that environment, the recruiters who can cut through the noise and see the human side of an individual become more valuable, not less.

So she assigns AI the work that deserves it. Note taking, so that nobody spends a discussion typing two pages instead of listening. Administrative load. Writing tasks such as blogs. Her team uses Claude for sourcing. The point of all of it is to protect attention for the parts that cannot be delegated: building relationships, leading with empathy, supporting people. Scale, in her framing, is only worth having if you uplift the people you bring with you.

Advice for 2026

Her guidance to other talent leaders is a single instruction: think beyond what you are doing. The lay of the land is changing, largely because of AI, and she believes it is changing for good. But she does not think specialization inside recruitment will scale much longer.

The generalist, she argues, is the way to go. If you recruit for engineering or machine learning, keep that as your expertise, then deliberately try your hand at go-to-market. If you live in go-to-market, try general and administrative. Tech only, go-to-market only, executive only, recruiting operations only: none of those, in her view, carries much room to grow from here. As the administrative work gets absorbed, what remains is judgment about the whole business.

"In order to become a real people empathetic leader, you need to have a 360 view of the business," she says. It is a fitting conclusion from someone who assembled that view the long way, one country and one company at a time, entirely on purpose.