Kelsey (Knight) Cera

From Inside Sales to the Other Side of the Table

Cera started her career as an executive assistant and then moved into inside sales at Yelp, where her job was to understand a business, learn what it was looking for, and match it to the right advertising fit. She was good at it. She also learned something about herself in the process: the connection was the part she loved, and the selling was not.

"Not very many people say they want to start in HR recruiting from the very beginning," she notes. She found her way there by following the part of the work that energized her. A role at a staffing company in the Bay Area let her do both sides at once, recruiting for open roles while partnering with hiring managers at client companies on their requisitions. That combination clarified everything. Recruiting gave her the chance to sit inside an organization, learn its people and working styles and culture from the inside, and then speak with the many candidates who wanted to be part of it.

Over the years that has meant conversations with thousands of people about their skills, their ambitions, and where they might grow. She still frames the job in those terms: understanding what someone's dreams actually are, and then finding the role that connects to them.

Scale and Nuance

Cera is candid that AI has unsettled a lot of people in her field. She finds it exciting instead, and her reasoning is grounded in practice rather than enthusiasm for its own sake. Talent acquisition is a people business, and companies that are growing or changing need scale. But there are nuances to the work that, in her view, technology is not going to outperform.

Her clearest example is the phone interview. For years, Cera was so focused on capturing notes she could turn into a clean recap for a hiring manager that she would miss key parts of the conversation itself. Tools that record and summarize calls changed that. She stopped worrying about what she might lose and started being fully present, digging in, asking the follow up question that actually mattered. The downstream effects have been measurable in the ways her teams care about: better quality write ups for hiring managers, and faster ones.

She has also put AI to work on job description drafting and brainstorming. The point, as she describes it, is not to hand over the function. It is to find the pain points and address them, so recruiters can be more efficient and faster and operate at scale without losing the ability to probe on a question, read a personality, or understand how someone actually works.

Be Curious. Try It.

Her advice to other talent leaders is direct: embrace it. Explore what tools exist, identify where they map to a real problem for you and your team, and start there. She has found that candidates and hiring managers are increasingly appreciative of what comes out of these tools, and that acceptance is becoming more widespread by the month.

She is equally clear that experimentation carries no shame. "Ask questions, be curious, try it," she says. "And if it doesn't work, that's okay, at least you've learned something from it." With developments arriving as regularly as they are, she argues, there is always another chance to give something a try in some capacity and see how it performs in your own environment.

The underlying conviction is optimistic. Used well, Cera believes these tools will let talent teams elevate the level of service they give to the leaders and teams they hire for. Speed and scale are the easy wins. The real prize is the time they buy back for the conversation itself, which is where she started, and where she still believes the job is won.