Gabriela Prisacariu

The Detour That Became the Point

She trained to be a developer. Computer science, a firmly technical path, the kind of degree nobody walks away from casually. Then volunteering work intervened and clarified something she had not expected: she wanted to work with people. So she changed course entirely, leaving the computer science diploma behind for a degree in communication. "Everyone thought it is a crazy idea," she recalls.

It looked like a detour. It was not. When she graduated and landed that six-month contract on Oracle's resourcing team, technology recruitment turned out to be the exact place where her two halves met. Her passion for working with people and building community sat alongside a genuine understanding of programming and engineering, and she could add value in discussions most recruiters could only listen to. She fell in love with the work almost immediately. The six-month contract never really ended.

The trajectory since has been steady and internal: resourcer, recruitment business partner, recruitment management, and now director, with responsibility for Oracle's recruitment across two of its most significant European markets. The bridge she built between people and technology as a new graduate is the same bridge she is now paid to run at scale.

The Toughest Stakeholder

Ask most talent leaders who shaped them and they name a boss. Prisacariu names three tiers, and the answer she lands on is one that is rarely given.

The first tier is her management team. Over fifteen years she has had managers who pushed her to be better, who pushed her to say yes to challenges when she was afraid, and who, crucially, saw her professional growth and her potential well before she saw it herself. The second tier is her colleagues. Oracle, she says, operates like a family and a community, and starting very early in her career she had to learn to work as part of a team, with people she could rely on for advice and support.

But the biggest impact on her career has come from her stakeholders. As a recruiter and now as a director, she has always worked with sales leaders on the commercial and go-to-market side of the business, and they taught her things no recruitment curriculum covers: how to communicate clearly, how to bring gravitas into a room, and how to move beyond executing on requisitions toward understanding how a business actually operates and connecting hiring strategy to it.

One of them she describes flatly as her toughest stakeholder. He is a senior vice president in sales, and she has worked with him for eight years, first as his recruitment business partner and then in a recruitment management capacity. He never settles for an answer. From him she learned that there is always more room for innovation, always a way to look outside the box, and that when something seems impossible there is a solution. He taught her not to settle for the easiest strategy or the easiest approach, and in parallel he taught her the mechanics of a sales job, which made her better at execution, planning and positioning alike. He is, notably, still her stakeholder.

Redesign the Process, Don't Bolt On the AI

Prisacariu has watched the tooling change across her entire career: Excel tracking, then on-premise systems, then the migration to cloud, and now AI. She sees the market splitting into two camps, one hyped and excited, one genuinely fearful that AI will absorb the TA function. She has little patience for either. "I don't think either of those extremes are useful," she says. "AI, it's meant to be somewhere in the middle."

Her own posture is hands-on. She has been deeply invested in using AI at Oracle to redesign workflows and identify where repetitive tasks can be automated. But her sharpest criticism is aimed at how most organizations are deploying it. Companies are racing to lay AI on top of processes that were designed for a pre-AI world. In her view, that is backwards. To succeed with AI, teams need to redesign their processes and systems so that AI is embedded in them, not appended to them.

What most people still underestimate, she argues, is what the technology is actually for. Its true value is creating more space for human conversation. Scheduling, note taking, administrative churn: hand it over, and recruiters get to meet more candidates. On the wave of new tools that let AI run the first exchange with a candidate, she is willing to make a prediction. The companies that come out of this cycle with the strongest employer brands and the strongest hiring are the ones keeping humans at the center of the recruitment process, because a personalized, curated experience in which a candidate feels valued cannot, she believes, be delivered purely by machine.

Stay With the Hard Part

Alongside running her team, Prisacariu is a certified coach, and that training shows in the advice she offers people entering talent acquisition. She asked to give two pieces instead of one.

The first is about growth, and it pushes directly against a comfortable myth. Newcomers to a changing industry will hit hard moments, and many have been taught that the right path is the one that feels easy and falls into place naturally. She rejects that. When something feels hard, she says, it does not mean it is wrong. It means it is real, and it means it is producing change and growth. Her instruction is to stay with the difficulty rather than run from it, "because that's where the professional growth happens."

The second is about authenticity. Early in a career, or in the middle of a pivot from one field to another, the temptation is to find someone successful and copy the formula. She is unconvinced. "No one else has ever walked a day in your shoes," she says. Look at others and get inspired, then stay true to your values, find your own voice, and build your own path.

It is advice with an obvious provenance. She once left a computer science degree for a communication diploma while everyone around her called it crazy, and fifteen years later she is running recruitment for one of the largest technology companies in the world.