Rebeca Gonzalez

The Profession That Kept Calling Her Back

Rebeca began in international relations and switched to organizational psychology, a decision she made with unusual clarity about the cost of the education and the return on the investment. Her interest sat in research and development: behavioral management for organizations, an area in which she published work that traveled around the globe. Then the 2008 crisis hit, and by the time she received her degree in 2010, the prospects for that kind of specialized work had narrowed.

Recruiting kept finding her anyway. Her internship was in recruiting. She moved into consulting, and colleagues pulled her back: Rebeca, come help us with recruiting. She did it well enough that when an offer came, it was a recruiting offer, not a consulting one. After moving to the United States she took a full-time recruiter role supporting Honda through Adecco, and a friend reframed everything in a single sentence: think about how blessed you are, because today you have the blessing to get people jobs.

"I never saw it with that angle," Rebeca says. She stopped steering away from the work that kept choosing her and committed to it fully. Since 2014 she has held to one standard: every person she places should be in the right company at the right moment, a fit that makes sense not only for the next role but for the shape of that person's life.

Global Projects, Regional Reach

Rebeca chose automotive and stayed, through what she describes as the ups and downs of the industry. Her project record reflects that commitment: brownfield facilities, investments, new R&D centers, shared service centers, global builds that require a talent strategy long before the first badge is printed. It is where two interests meet, because helping people find work and helping companies turn a profit are, in her view, the same discipline practiced from two angles. That fluency makes her credible in rooms where HR is often assumed to be a cost center.

She is also clear about what her title represents inside a German company. "With all the possibilities of choosing a talent acquisition lead, they chose me," she says. She treats it as a mandate rather than a milestone, pushing for diversity as a matter of equity for everyone who wants to work where she works. At Schaeffler she launched a Women in STEM project, building branding initiatives through university and high school connections to encourage young women toward engineering degrees, into the workforce, and ultimately into the company. The regional remit lets her carry that work across countries, and she says so with obvious pleasure.

The Mentors Who Kept Raising the Bar

Mr. Blancas, then Global Vice President of Manufacturing at Schaeffler Group for the autonomous driving division, was tough on her. She was young, and she had never stood up a brownfield facility. He wanted to know where her certainty came from. Her answer: she had spent her career working toward achievement, had never failed a project she gave herself fully to, and he should give her the chance to prove it. Every time she neared a milestone, he raised the bar. She credits that pressure with the confidence she brings to a director role now, along with the business depth to understand the impact she is making.

Monica, the first HRBP director she worked with, took her on as what Rebeca calls a life project. Their sessions felt like a doctoral defense: Why do you want to do this? How will you do it? Have you checked the budget? Having her ideas confronted by a senior director, fresh out of school, compressed years of learning into a short span. Rebeca now runs her interns the same way, so they take as much from her as they can while generating real return on investment for the company.

AI as a Partnership, Not a Phase

Rebeca's framing of the current moment is deliberately dramatic. AI, she says, is becoming as significant as the discovery of fire, because it is transforming everything organizations do. The caution follows immediately: it is not a solution that fits all, and results at one company guarantee nothing at another. Leaders have to prepare the environment before bringing the technology in.

She reaches for an agricultural analogy. Saying "AI" is like saying "apples," and there are at least five types of apples in Michigan, a very big apple state. There is no cookie cutter. In talent acquisition she treats adoption as a hiring decision: the team is effectively hiring AI for the company, which means knowing what each tool can genuinely do, where it belongs in the process, and what the business is optimizing for. Cost savings demand a cost savings mindset; compliance or autonomy-driven goals demand another. She has watched companies fail at implementation and watched others succeed, and the difference is rarely the tool.

"Intelligence is a matter for humans," she says, with the artificial part serving as the extra power that makes human judgment go further day to day. For a global company, that means connecting the dots so the technology serves the organization internally and its customers as well. A long-term partnership, in her words, not a phase.

Advice for 2026

Rebeca expects talent leaders to wake up in an environment unlike anything they have operated in before: different applicant expectations, different customer expectations, a different business landscape. Her advice is evolution, and she means it literally, thinking of Darwin in the Galapagos watching species reshaped by their surroundings. The surroundings are shifting, and no one gets to be blindsided by it.

That does not mean chasing every trend. It means an open mindset, watching what is emerging, then analyzing how it could genuinely be incorporated. Because the work touches applicants, customers, the business, and the processes all at once, adaptation has to move faster than it did last year. Her assessment is blunt: this was the last stretch in which a leader could say "maybe not now." The pressure ahead is high enough that those who do not evolve risk becoming obsolete.