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.

Three Leaders, Three Lessons

Ask Zeleney who shaped her and she names three people, each attached to a distinct lesson.

The first is Deb Duma, Vice President of Human Resources at Baylis Medical, who also led talent acquisition. Duma was, in Zeleney's description, incredibly driven and at the same time compassionate and empathetic, a combination rarer than it should be in HR leadership. What Zeleney admired most was what she calls Duma's true matchmaking ability: an intuition for what actually drove a person and where that person would excel. "She would just be spot on in so many of her introductions and connections with people." It is a standard Zeleney still measures her own instincts against.

The second is Dalia Nami, also of Baylis Medical and now working in HR business partnering. Nami was Zeleney's first leader in the corporate world of recruitment, the one who showed her the ropes as she moved from improvising a hiring function to operating inside a structured one. Every recruiter has a version of that person. Not every recruiter is lucky enough to get a fantastic one.

The third is a colleague rather than a boss, which is what makes the choice telling. Lauren Wildfang was a peer who later reported to Zeleney, and Zeleney is unambiguous about the direction the learning flowed. Wildfang brings tenacity and a can-do attitude to recruitment, along with an ability to drive forward regardless of the obstacles placed in her path and to find a way to get to a yes. "I've learned so much from her even though she's reported to me in the past." It is a quietly generous thing for a senior leader to say out loud, and it says as much about Zeleney's leadership as it does about Wildfang's talent.

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?