Nerida Rooney

The Traineeship That Became a Career

Rooney is Australian, and when she finished school she knew university was not for her, even though her mother worked at the University of Newcastle. She simply wanted to earn money. The job she landed was an Indigenous traineeship in the university's HR department, an opportunity connected to her Aboriginal heritage, and she took it without the faintest idea what the department actually did. Before that, her only work experience had been at a go-kart centre.

What she found was a natural fit for a temperament she cheerfully describes as inquisitive. "I am a bit nosy," she says, and the curiosity about what people earn, what they want, and where they are going next never faded. What grew alongside it was something deeper: a genuine appetite for watching careers develop, for being present at the moment someone's trajectory changes.

She has stayed in talent acquisition ever since, which makes her an unusual figure in a profession where almost everyone arrives by accident. "I don't think I'm the typical person that fell into recruitment because I've always done it," she says. That longevity gives her an uncommon vantage point on how much has changed. When she started, everything lived on a spreadsheet and CVs arrived on paper. Watching the transformation unfold, she says, has been genuinely exciting rather than merely disorienting.

Three People Who Changed the Trajectory

Ask Rooney who shaped her and she names three influences that could not be more different from one another.

The first was a chief people officer at Keir, the construction company, who arrived as an HR director and was promoted into the CPO role. Rooney had just had her second baby and was attempting to return full time while wondering whether it was even possible. With her first child she had taken around nine months off. Her leader offered a live answer: a mother, working part time, and, in Rooney's words, "just bossing it." More than a personal example, she was an architect of policy. She increased maternity leave, which attracted more women into an industry that is overwhelmingly male. She increased paternity leave so fathers felt supported and stayed longer. She introduced a baby loss policy. "She really did inspire me to know that you can be a good employee and a good mom as well," Rooney says.

The second influence is really a category: the leaders who, as she puts it, believed in her before she believed in herself. Rooney is candid that imposter syndrome is common among women in senior rooms, the persistent question of whether you are meant to have that seat at the table. Several leaders handed her the seat before she felt ready. One director in particular gave her a line she still repeats: fake it till you make it, because nobody knows you're faking it. Her own refinement of the advice is the more useful part. Once you are actually in the room, she notes, it stops being pretence, because you do know what you are doing. The phrase is simply a device for pushing yourself past the edge of your comfort zone.

The third is the team at RecFest, including Jamie and Bobby, who handed her the microphone for her first stage appearance. It was not a gentle debut. RecFest is one of the largest talent acquisition festivals in the market, with thousands of people on site, and her topic was how the construction industry could attract non traditional talent, specifically how to give prisoners meaningful work experience so they could return to employment on release and avoid reoffending. She was, she admits, terrified. "I remember thinking, wow, I'm standing on this stage. This is just crazy." She has since spoken on numerous stages, podcasts and roundtables, and she is clear about the causation: none of it happens without that first push.

The Saturation Problem

Rooney has a sharp read on the current AI moment, informed by being on the receiving end of it. Over the past year she has been pitched more than at any point in her entire career, each vendor arriving with the next big thing. Her assessment is refreshingly free of cynicism. Many of the products genuinely impress her. She can see how they would revolutionise what a team can deliver for the business and reshape how talent acquisition is perceived by stakeholders, because they allow teams to do considerably more with considerably less.

Her worry is saturation. When there are so many strong products, how does a talent leader know which one will still serve the need in three to five years, not just this quarter? And implementation, she stresses, is never a plug in and go exercise. It requires patient nurturing with the TA team, with stakeholders, with the board. In a market moving this fast, the risk is a leader trapped in a cycle of perpetually implementing whichever shiny new toy has just landed. "I would want to make sure that the solution that we bring in isn't just something that's going to fix the problem now," she says, "but is going to fix a problem that we've got potentially in three to five years' time."

Your Network Is Free Google Reviews

Her advice to other talent leaders is practical and, characteristically, social. Talk to your peers, and talk to the ones whose situation actually mirrors yours. If you are small and looking to scale, seek out the leaders who were small and have already scaled, and ask precisely which tools carried them through it.

The metaphor she reaches for is her best line of the conversation. Your network, she says, is "like free Google reviews, but rather than them being censored, you're getting the true picture as to what worked for them, what didn't work for them." That intelligence does two things. It helps you challenge suppliers directly, asking what happens in specific scenarios, so you can judge whether a product has genuinely evolved past its known problems and whether the roadmap contains real solutions. And it arms you with data before the harder conversation with a CEO or a board about why something did or did not work.

That instinct for community shows up in how she thinks about recognition, too. Asked to nominate peers, she was careful about the standard she would apply. She wanted people who had made an impact not just on her, but on the industry. "There are definitely some change makers out there," she says.