Rebecca Carolan

The First Recruiter in the Building

The company that hired her had been founded by two people obsessed with experience management, and it was expanding fast. Carolan came in as something closer to an office manager, leaning on the administrative and relationship skills she had built in finance, and did a bit of everything: payroll pieces, experience management, and the general work of standing up a brand new office. Because the business was growing so quickly, a great deal of that work turned out to be recruitment.

She scheduled the meetings. She greeted candidates when they arrived, put them at ease, wished them luck on their way in. Then curiosity took over. She started looking up their LinkedIn profiles and their backgrounds beforehand, quietly forming a view on who was likely to succeed, then testing that instinct against the outcome. She began shadowing hiring conversations and found the whole thing fascinating. When an opportunity opened up, she moved across and became the company's first recruiter.

It was not a path anyone had mapped for her. No one in her family had worked in the industry, and none of her previous colleagues had either. "Once I got a little insight into it, it opened up a whole new world to me," she says. That combination of curiosity and pattern recognition, applied at the exact moment a company is deciding who it wants to be, has been the engine of her career ever since.

Dermot Costello and the Absence of Facade

Ask Carolan who shaped her and one name comes first. Dermot Costello was managing director at Qualtrics when she joined it as an early stage company, and she supported him closely, including a good deal of executive assistant work as part of that do-everything role. He had, in her words, an aura and a presence. He was intimidating at first. He was also unusually intelligent and rigorously business-focused while remaining intuitive, empathetic and genuinely perceptive about people. Because they lived in the same direction, she sometimes shared a ride home with him, which meant hours of exposure to the way he thought.

Costello was diagnosed with cancer during her time there, and he later passed away. What has stayed with her is how he showed up. Even through the most turbulent period of his own life, he kept caring about the people around him. When he knew there was nothing more that could be done, he came into the office, sat down with the team and talked them through his life lessons. The session was captured on video, and Carolan still shares it, because she believes there are learnings in it for everyone. She hears his name now from people who never worked with him, which she says warms her heart entirely.

The lesson she draws from him is about authenticity, and she is direct about why it matters in talent. The industry runs on buzzwords and on knowing the right thing to say, and people can end up wearing a bit of a facade. Costello never did. "People listened when he spoke," she says, and it carried weight precisely because there was real meaning behind it. That standard now sits underneath how she leads and how she talks to candidates.

Redefining What a Modern Leader Looks Like

Carolan had ruled leadership out. She liked running her own desk, knowing her candidate management cold, understanding exactly how to influence her stakeholders. Her mental image of a leader was somebody tough, hard, direct and powerful, an idea she now cheerfully describes as a real old-school attitude.

A manager of hers disagreed and said so plainly: "You actually would be a really good leader." When Carolan pushed back, the manager pointed at the evidence, the initiatives she had built, the colleagues she had influenced, the people she had nurtured and brought on board. "That's what a modern leader looks like," she told her. Carolan started to consider it, and that conversation is what led directly to the role she holds today. It is also why she now spends so much of her energy telling other people what they are capable of before they can see it themselves. Great people, exposure to great people, and the willingness to listen to what they had to say is, in her own summary, the reason she is where she is.

AI Everywhere, Except the Moments That Matter Most

Carolan is candid that she and her team at Procore are still near the beginning of their AI journey, and she finds that exciting rather than daunting. She considers the technology's impact on talent acquisition unparalleled, the biggest shift she has seen in the profession. Among her team and her stakeholders she sees the full spectrum, from people who are reluctant and nervous to people diving straight in with real passion, and she has concluded that a leader's job here is largely one of framing. The question she puts to her team is not what AI will replace. It is how they optimize the way they operate, how they use it to be better at their jobs, and how they make the work more efficient without hollowing it out.

That last part is a line she holds firmly. Her team uses AI heavily on internal process, stakeholder updates and reporting. It does not use AI to screen CVs. Every application that comes in is still read by a person, because Carolan is not yet convinced that bias has been ruled out of the tooling. She is equally clear-eyed that human bias exists too, which is why her team discusses it openly, coaches itself on it and reflects on it deliberately in order to reduce it wherever possible. And there are specific touchpoints in the candidate journey that she insists stay human, where somebody has a name and a face, and the candidate feels seen and heard. AI, in her framing, exists to buy back the time that makes those moments possible.

From Order Takers to Partners

The internal change Carolan is most enthusiastic about has little to do with candidates. Talent acquisition teams have long fought the perception that they are order takers rather than partners and subject matter experts, and she believes the gap has often come down to data fluency. Everyone in the profession talks about leading with data. Fewer people can tell the story behind the numbers, and fewer still can use that story to move a hiring manager's opinion or land the outcome the business actually needs. What she has watched AI do for her own team is close that distance, giving recruiters who once hesitated the confidence to interrogate the data themselves and walk into a stakeholder conversation with an argument rather than a spreadsheet.

It is a fitting preoccupation for someone whose own career turned on being handed insight she previously had no access to. Carolan is unsentimental about how she got here, crediting proximity to genuine, generous people more than any grand plan. She has spent the years since making sure the people on her teams get the same.