Rando Valdes

The Accountant Who Liked People

The move made more sense than the resume suggested. In her consulting role, Valdes had been the one drumming up new business and adding members to the team, and her managing director noticed. "Unlike the stereotypical notion about accountants, I am a people-first person," Valdes says. She liked engaging with people. She liked helping them solve problems. Talent acquisition offered both, plus a chance to expand a skill set that had, until then, run in a single direction.

What she carried across is the thing many talent leaders spend years trying to acquire. "Having my accounting background and that financial and business acumen has proved very beneficial," she says, "and lends itself to being able to work with data, explain data, use data as a story." That last phrase is the operative one. Valdes does not treat reporting as an obligation owed to the executive team. She treats it as narrative construction. In her view, data is every bit as important to the future of recruiting as AI is, because metrics without explanation are just decoration. "We need that data to tell our stories, to support the reasons behind all of our metrics that we're looking to capture." Her recommendation to anyone in the field is unambiguous: lean into the data, get more knowledgeable about how to work with it and how to defend it.

Her ambitions have never stopped at the offer letter, either. Alongside talent acquisition, Valdes describes herself as passionate about the overall people experience and people operations, the full arc of what it feels like to join an organization and stay in it.

The People Who Bet On Her

Ask Valdes about mentors and she starts with a person who was not a recruiter at all. The managing director at her consulting firm, the one who saw a talent leader inside an accounting consultant, remains at the top of her list. "I owe an immense amount of gratitude to her for bringing me into this space, which was very unknown for me at the time," she says. "She believed in me, had faith in me, and just my ability to pick this up and learn it from scratch." The two worked together at that firm for ten years, a decade that turned a leap of faith into a career.

From there, Valdes credits the chief people officers, SVPs and VPs of HR she has reported to across her career, leaders who taught her the craft through partnership rather than instruction. And she is emphatic that a third source of learning has been overlooked in most conversations about mentorship: the people who work for her. "I've always gotten motivation and inspiration from my own team," she says. She names Jacqueline Fenster, Terry Baker and Amy Elder, the last of whom served as her senior talent acquisition manager when Valdes was head of talent acquisition at Vida Health, as exemplars of the kind of leadership she admires. Her description of all three is identical and deliberate: exceptional at what they do, great team builders, always leading with empathy, always creating great experiences.

Building an AI-Native Talent Function

Plenty of talent leaders talk about AI. Valdes has built with it. Over the past year she created an agent that runs across every platform she uses at Oura and delivers, at eight o'clock each morning, a complete overview of her day and the priorities inside it. No manual to-do list. No opening four tabs to reconstruct what happened overnight in Slack and email. "I already know what my day is going to look like even before I even open up my calendar," she says. She calls it invaluable, and it is a telling first use case: before deploying AI on candidates, she deployed it on her own operating discipline.

From there it moved outward across the function. Her team uses AI to improve workflows and sourcing, to build onboarding for new team members, to capture interview notes and to develop scorecards. "We have really embedded AI in our day to day here for our talent acquisition responsibilities," she says. The logic is not headcount reduction. It is the removal of the administrative burden that has always sat on recruiters' shoulders. "When we have efficiency in our roles, we will be more productive and open ourselves up to take on other more strategic opportunities." Efficiency, in Valdes's framing, is not the destination. It is the budget that buys strategic work.

Leading With Kindness

Her advice to other talent leaders begins with a posture rather than a tactic: be open to always learning. "We have to continuously evolve, especially with technology in this AI world that we're now living in," she says. Embrace it, learn it, and think creatively about how it can improve the day to day. Then lean on your team, your support staff and your mentors. "We're all in this together" is a line she has repeated for years and clearly means.

The last piece is the one she returns to most often, and it has nothing to do with technology. Go into each day with a positive outlook, she says, and look to make experiences better for everyone you come in contact with. "You never know what someone might be going through on a given day." It is a philosophy tailor-made for a profession that spends its hours on the most consequential and most anxious moments of other people's lives. "I think you can just reap so much more from working with others when you go into it with a positive attitude and just leading with kindness."

It is a fitting close for a career that began with a leader who chose to believe in someone unproven. Valdes has spent the years since paying that forward, at speed. As she puts it, she never looked back.