Rachel Neuschaefer

The Long Way Back to the Sweet Spot

Her first recruiting job paid twelve dollars an hour. It was a contract position with a government contractor, landed after a run of interviews for every kind of HR role she could find, and her only relevant experience was a handful of internships where she had run phone screens. She was twenty two, and it was, by her own account, a lot.

What made it stick was the woman who hired her, who mentored her into the craft of recruiting and, just as importantly, into the business itself, coaching her on how to hold her own as a young woman in a professional environment. Neuschaefer cried at work exactly once. Her mentor walked her through it, told her to pull herself together, and kept going. It is a lesson she still carries: directness, delivered with care, is a form of respect. "I love vague messaging," she says dryly of her own communication style. "I'm very straightforward, so I appreciate it back."

The Manager Who Told Her to Be Herself

After a stretch that included a small accounting and IT firm and a year at a friend's staffing agency, Neuschaefer found her way to a team recruiting technical architects out of the notoriously tight Salesforce community. It was there that the work clicked into place permanently. She built a pipeline in a market where almost nobody could, and she measured herself relentlessly while doing it, checking her outreach and acceptance numbers every single day against a 92 percent figure she could not stop watching. "I'm a little competitive," she says, before clarifying that the competition was always against herself.

Her manager's contribution was less tactical and more foundational. At an earlier employer, Neuschaefer had been told to tone down her personality. She calls it the most offensive thing anyone has ever said to her, and she started looking for another job the next day. Her manager gave her the opposite: room to build her own brand and to recruit the way she naturally recruits, out loud and in her own voice. Anyone who has watched her work a candidate conversation can see the dividend.

The Risk That Made Her a Program Builder

At Accenture, two leaders took a bet on her. She had managed people before, but she had never run an entire program. They handed her one anyway. She was promoted to senior manager in about a year and a half and learned, in that stretch, the difference between managing a team and owning an operating model: the design, the metrics, the stakeholder relationships, the machinery underneath the hiring.

That bet is what makes her current role possible. When she arrived at MITRE, there was no early careers function to inherit. She is building a campus recruiting and early careers program where none existed, drawing directly on what Accenture taught her. "That experience of getting the opportunity to try something I hadn't done and to really stretch myself and grow led me to this role where I feel confident that I can build something," she says. It is a quietly remarkable statement of professional arc: the student who watched recruiters at a career fair now decides what MITRE's presence on those campuses will look like.

A Different Kind of Recruiting, Not a Smaller One

Modernizing university recruiting at MITRE has put Neuschaefer in evaluation mode on AI. She and her team have met with vendors offering everything from wider candidate reach with automated screening to sourcing automation, and she asks pointed questions of all of them. Her opening question to anyone selling AI into talent acquisition is whether the product exists to replace her recruiters. The answer matters to her.

Her position is neither breathless nor defensive. "If we don't adapt to some form of AI in our processes, we're going to be left behind," she says, noting that AI is now the direction of travel for essentially every function in business, especially on the technology side. But she does not read that as a countdown clock for her profession. She reads it as a change in the shape of the job. Recruiting leaders and recruiters alike, in her view, need to be asking how to make the tools work while still delivering their candidate experience and their personality, and then partnering closely with hiring teams so those teams understand how AI is being used in the process.

She is candid that the field is nervous. Recruiting as a profession is hesitant right now, she says, because the question of whether a tool could replace a person is genuinely on the table. Her answer is grounded in the same instinct that drew her to the career fair booth all those years ago: people like to talk to people. The future she describes is one where recruiters spend less time on mechanics and more time on judgment, relationships, and advising the business.

Paying the Mentorship Forward

Ask Neuschaefer who deserves recognition and she names people above and below her on the org chart with equal enthusiasm. She points to her current leader, who walked into a difficult situation and is rebuilding a recruiting program brick by brick with what Neuschaefer calls grace, efficiency and strategy. She also names a former direct report at Slalom, who now leads a large talent program and team of her own. "I knew she was going to be that one day," Neuschaefer says. "I'm so proud of her."

That is the throughline in a career shaped by early mentorship, permission to be herself, and a calculated risk: leaders who saw something in her before it was obvious, and a leader who now does the same for others. The advice she offers her peers is a version of what she was given. Be realistic about where the profession is going, adapt before you are forced to, and do not surrender the part of the work that made you good at it in the first place.