Jennifer Rakow

The Conversation That Started a Career

The entry point was almost accidental. Rakow was in college and wanted something part time to keep herself busy. A friend working at Sony mentioned the team was looking for coordinators. She took stock of herself honestly: organized, detail oriented, more than capable of managing interview schedules. So she took the job.

Three or four months in, a candidate reached her with a long list of questions about the hiring process, who they would be meeting, and what came next. The candidate was uneasy about the whole thing. The path of least resistance would have been to hand the conversation off to the recruiter, which would have meant the candidate waiting to schedule time with someone else. Rakow did not do that. She answered everything herself, because talking to people was, in her words, "just kind of my nature."

Her manager overheard it. At the end of the day he came over and asked who she had been speaking with. She explained. His response was immediate: "I'm going to move you into recruiting." It is a small story carrying a large lesson, one that has organized her entire career. Candidate experience is not a program or a survey score. It is what happens when someone with questions reaches a human being willing to answer them.

Skipping Sourcing, Keeping the Coordinator's Eye

The promotion came with an unusual shortcut. Rakow bypassed sourcing entirely and went straight into recruiting, which meant she built her craft from the candidate conversation outward rather than from the top of the funnel down. She has been honing it ever since.

The two qualities she had named when sizing herself up for the coordinator job, organized and detail oriented, turned out not to be entry-level traits she would outgrow. They were the foundation. Coordination is the part of hiring where the seams show, where a badly sequenced interview loop or an unanswered question becomes the thing a candidate remembers. Rakow learned the machinery of the process from inside it before she was ever responsible for selling a role, and that sequence is unusual. Most recruiters learn to find people first and learn to shepherd them second.

The Leader Who Showed Her What Leadership Looked Like

Ask Rakow who shaped her and the first name out is Kim Page, the woman who hired her at Apple and became her first manager there. Page understood something Rakow says many leaders never grasp: what actually motivates a recruiter. She also knew how to protect her people, a quality Rakow returns to repeatedly when she describes her.

The education was in the details of how Page carried herself. How she handled hiring leaders. How she dealt with executives. How she addressed challenges and problems across the team without letting them fracture it. How she brought people together. Rakow watched all of it and built her own leadership identity around what she saw. "I really learned a lot from her," she says, "and kind of shaped my career around the type of leader I wanted to be."

Then came one of the more satisfying full circles in a long career. Ten or twelve years on, the roles inverted. Page has since worked for Rakow more than once, most recently at Uber. The manager who hired her at Apple, and who supplied the model of leadership she has spent decades trying to live up to, eventually joined her team.

Poise, Class, and the Refusal to Assume You Know Everything

The second name is Pavlina Mitchell, Rakow's manager at Uber and the most recent major influence on her thinking. Rakow describes her in terms that have nothing to do with process or metrics: poise, class, grace, and the way she managed a team through all of it.

What made the relationship valuable was its timing. It arrived in the later stages of Rakow's leadership career, at exactly the point when someone with 30 plus years in talent acquisition might reasonably conclude there was nothing left to learn. "When you've been doing this so long, you think, oh, I know everything," she says, "and you really don't." Working with Mitchell proved it, and Rakow says she loved that about it.

The lesson has hardened into something close to a professional creed, and it is the single piece of advice she would hand to anyone in the field: stay hungry to learn, no matter how long you have been at this. Both women remain part of her working life. When Rakow hits a difficult situation, or wants a second read on one she has already handled, she still reaches out to them, describes the challenge, explains what she did, and asks directly whether she could have played it differently. Thirty years in, with a career spent leading others, she has kept the habit of looking for a good sounding board.

What Three Decades Teaches

Rakow is candid that not every relationship along the way was a positive one. She has had, in her words, "some not so great people" in her career, an experience she is quick to note is common across talent acquisition rather than unique to her. She does not dwell there. Her instinct is to extract the model rather than catalog the grievances, to sort the leaders worth emulating from the ones worth learning around, and to carry only the first group forward.

That is the throughline, from a part time coordinator role taken to fill an empty college schedule to leading a team at Uber. She has consistently chosen the harder, more human option: answer the question yourself, protect your people, and assume there is still something you have not learned. It worked on a phone conversation in her first few months on the job. It is still working now.