Rebecca Zeleney

The Sales Floor Was the Training Ground

Plenty of recruiters describe themselves as accidental. Fewer can trace a direct line from the skill they were hired for to the skill that defined their career. Zeleney can. Cold calling teaches a specific kind of resilience: the ability to keep dialing, keep framing the value, and keep moving after a no. Applied to hiring, it becomes sourcing, outreach and closing, which are the muscles most talent teams struggle hardest to build.

When her employer needed to grow and had no recruiting function to grow with, she took on the work herself and found she genuinely enjoyed it. The pivot was not a retreat from sales. It was a redirection of it, toward a product she found more interesting than anything she had sold before: someone's next career move.

The Year the Tools Started Working

Zeleney's read on AI in recruiting is refreshingly free of both evangelism and dread. Her assessment of the last year is that the technology has worked out a lot of the kinks. The industry has moved past the demo phase into a stage where there are tools and agents that, in her words, really, really work.

On the candidate side, she sees the market splitting into two populations. The first group is using AI intelligently: running more efficient job searches, preparing more thoroughly, and showing up better in interviews as a result. Zeleney's verdict on that is unqualified. She thinks it is absolutely fantastic.

The second group is smaller and considerably more troubling. Talent teams are now seeing deepfakes and bad actors attempting to infiltrate hiring processes. Zeleney is careful with proportion here, noting that this is nowhere near the majority of candidates but a very small minority. She is equally careful about consequence. That minority, she points out, can be extremely impactful, which means recruiting organizations have to be more aware and more cognizant than ever about how they keep bad actors out. It is a security problem that has landed, largely unannounced, on the talent function's desk.

A Warning About Shiny Tools

The other half of Zeleney's argument is aimed squarely at her peers, and it concerns what she calls shiny tools. Any senior talent leader knows the inbound rhythm: a vendor arrives with a brand new product, claims to be the only one doing this, and explains everything it will do for you. Then, she says, you start asking questions, you start looking under the hood, you start doing demos, and sometimes you find it is not working as advertised. Not all of them, she is quick to add. But some.

Her prescription is two disciplined habits. First, evaluate every tool through the lens of whether it solves a real problem the business actually has, rather than buying a cool feature that solves nothing. Second, question the technology deeply enough to genuinely understand it before it touches a hiring decision. Vigilance, in her framing, is not skepticism for its own sake. It is the price of using AI responsibly.

That responsibility has an ethical edge she names directly. The question she believes leaders must keep asking is how to use AI in a way that does not drive bias, and that in fact reduces bias in hiring and produces better hires. Efficiency is the easy win. Fairer outcomes are the harder one, and Zeleney is clear about which matters more.

It is a fitting position for someone who started out because a company needed hiring done and no system existed to do it. She has spent a career building those systems, and she still evaluates every new one by the same question: does this actually help us find the right person?