Hiring Happy Hour

About Hiring Happy Hour

Welcome to Hiring Happy Hour, where we celebrate the human side of hiring. Join host, Nicole Hammond, and as she pulls back the curtain on the people shaping the future of work- the innovators, dreamers, and change makers behind today’s hiring technology experience.

Publisher

SmartRecruiters

Category

business · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

13 Jan 2026

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

39 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Turning the Future of Hiring Into Reality, Part 2 - Rebecca Carr - Hiring Happy Hour - Episode # 038 (Re-Air)

   25,000 hires. 170+ countries. 400+ recruiters enabled. SAP’s hiring team is officially live on SmartRecruiters (https://lnkd.in/p/g7BHMbVZ), so we're hitting replay on Rebecca Carr's story of how this whole thing began. Trust us, it's even better knowing how it ends. In part two of this re-aired conversation, Rebecca Carr, CEO of SmartRecruiters and now President of HCM Products at SAP, joins Hiring Happy Hour for a candid look at one of the most defining chapters in company history: rebuilding momentum internally, pivoting SmartRecruiters into an AI-first organization, and navigating the company’s acquisition by SAP, all at the same time. What follows goes far beyond strategy decks and vision statements. At a moment when many companies slow down under the weight of acquisition and organizational change, Rebecca shares how SmartRecruiters accelerated, launching Winston into a market that was not fully ready and driving adoption to nearly 60% of all jobs running through the platform, a remarkable number at a time when most AI products struggle to achieve sustained enterprise usage. But this conversation is about more than AI. It is about what innovation actually looks like inside a global enterprise: moving quickly without losing trust, creating clarity during uncertainty, and building a culture willing to execute before every answer is fully known. From rebuilding organizational confidence to navigating acquisition, Rebecca shares an honest look at what transformation demands from modern leaders: conviction, adaptability, and the courage to keep moving while the future is still taking shape. Takeaways: Ship the vision before the market catches up. Waiting for industry consensus before moving on AI is how organizations fall behind. SmartRecruiters launched and drove adoption of Winston, the platform’s AI interface, while competitors were still debating the concept — and built a separation that's now measurable. Adoption is the real proof point, not the product itself. A strong launch means nothing if people don't use it. Getting there requires change management, internal champions, and a rollout strategy that's as deliberate as the product itself. Enterprise transformation and innovation can coexist if you're intentional. Navigating a major acquisition while simultaneously evolving your product vision is only possible when leaders are radically transparent about where the business is and what it needs to do next. Rebecca held both in motion by keeping the team informed, focused, and moving. Create conditions for bold thinking, then actually act on what comes out. The best strategic ideas rarely emerge from structured planning sessions. When Rebecca asked her team at a company offsite to bring back the craziest ideas on the planet, she got a product roadmap. Some of those ideas are still in flight today. Speed is a strategic asset, not a byproduct. In a crowded market, the organization that moves with both conviction and urgency creates its own differentiation. From launching Winston to closing an acquisition with one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world, pace itself became part of SmartRecruiters’ value proposition. Confidence shown to the market is its own signal. Rebecca's "dance floor" analogy captures something every TA leader navigating a competitive landscape needs to hear: confidence shown to the market, even imperfect confidence, projects readiness and attracts the right partners before the window closes. Change management is an innovation problem, not just a people problem. Getting an enterprise to adopt new technology at scale means solving for trust, clarity, and momentum, not just capability. Treat rollout as a strategic challenge equal to the product build itself. Quote of the Show: “If you have a goal, and you have passion behind it, you have to believe in it as a leader.” - Rebecca Carr Links: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rebeccajcarr (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccajcarr/) Website: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/ (https://www.smartrecruiters.com/) Ways to Tune In: Substack: HiringHappyHour.com (http://hiringhappyhour.com) Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf (https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf) Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369 (https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369) Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793 (https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793) iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/ (https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/) Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769 (https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769) YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour (https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour) Transistor: https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/ (https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/)

2. 

   29 Sept 2026

   Turning the Future of Hiring Into Reality, Pt 1 - Rebecca Carr - Hiring Happy Hour - # 037 (Re-Air)

   This week on Hiring Happy Hour, we're re-airing this conversation for a very good reason: Rebecca Carr’s story just picked up an exciting new chapter. Alongside her role as CEO of SmartRecruiters, she's now also the President of HCM Products at SAP. Rebecca Carr didn’t plan to end up at SmartRecruiters. What started as an accidental application through a demo recruiting account became the beginning of a decade-long journey helping shape one of the most influential companies in hiring technology. In part one of this special two-part series, Rebecca, CEO of SmartRecruiters and now President of HCM Products at SAP (https://lnkd.in/p/gaau238m), joins Hiring Happy Hour to reflect on the early career moments, bold bets, and customer partnerships that helped define both her leadership journey and the evolution of SmartRecruiters itself. From a 94-day global deployment for Bosch to rethinking recruiting around trust, candidate experience, and long-term partnership, this conversation traces the career arc that enabled Rebecca to become the leader she is today, helping shape enterprise hiring through one of its most transformative moments yet. Along the way, Rebecca shares lessons on grit, belief, and what enterprise change actually requires — including why keeping the feedback loop between product and customer tight has always been central to her thinking, and why it matters even more as AI begins to reshape how companies hire. For HR and TA leaders navigating that same shift, this is a conversation about what it looks like to build the future of hiring, not just talk about it. Takeaways: Great implementations don't just go live — they create methodology. When you build around global standardization, candidate-first design, and real change management, you're not just deploying software. You're creating a repeatable playbook that the whole organization can use long after the project team moves on. Candidate experience has to be a non-negotiable line item in every design decision, baked into how your hiring technology should be built and deployed. The companies that get hiring right don’t just treat it as something to optimize for when it's convenient. Every process choice should be tested against one question: what does this mean for the candidate? The best vendor-customer partnerships are bidirectional. Real progress happens when both sides are willing to do things differently than they planned. That means customers trusting the vendor's product vision enough to standardize, and vendors trusting the customer's operational reality enough to build with them, not just for them. The tightest feedback loops produce the best products. Depth of collaboration during implementation is hard to sustain post-go-live, but closing that gap through technology is one of the most important problems companies (including SmartRecruiters) should be focused on solving now. Be unromantic about your processes. Great talent with grit and belief still needs well-defined processes to execute against — but the moment you fall in love with how something is done, you lose the agility that makes you competitive. The relationships built doing hard work together outlast the work itself. When both sides are fully invested in making something succeed, the personal connections that form become a lasting foundation that enables further success. Quote of the Show: “A lot of what I've been thinking about with my own product organization today is how do you keep that level of really high-touch alive in an agentic era? I'd love to keep that customer experience consistent through the life of a contract, not just the first critical months.” - Rebecca Carr Links: Rebecca’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rebeccajcarr (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccajcarr/) Rebecca’s LinkedIn Post: https://lnkd.in/p/gaau238m (https://lnkd.in/p/gaau238m) Website: https://www.smartrecruiters.com (https://www.smartrecruiters.com/) Ways to Tune In: Substack: HiringHappyHour.com (http://hiringhappyhour.com) Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf (https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf) Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369 (https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369) Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793 (https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793) iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/ (https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/) Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769 (https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769) YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour (https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour) Transistor: https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/ (https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/)

3. 

   22 Sept 2026

   A Deep Dive Into Transforming Hiring Tech - Dave Novak - Hiring Happy Hour - Episode # 036

   What happens when "migration" actually means starting over? In this episode of Hiring Happy Hour, Nicole sits down with David Novak, Senior Director of Strategic Customer Engagements at SmartRecruiters, to unpack what it takes for enterprise customers to move off SAP SuccessFactors Recruit and onto SmartRecruiters. Dave leads the team built to support these moves, and his message is clear: this isn't a lift and shift, it's a transformation. They dig into why SmartRecruiters is built to be configurable rather than customizable, how that trade-off actually unlocks scale, and why governance now matters as much for monthly product releases as it does for AI. If your organization is weighing a platform change, this is a grounded look at what separates a rocky transformation from a successful one. Takeaways: Treat a platform migration as a transformation, not a copy-paste job. If you rebuild your old system exactly as it was, you lose the reason you switched in the first place. Before redesigning any workflow, revisit why you wanted to change: a compelling candidate experience, less admin work for recruiters, and hiring managers who actually engage. A configurable system beats a highly customized one once you're thinking about scale. Custom builds are hard to unwind, and they slow down every future release you'd otherwise adopt in minutes. Pilot new capabilities in a safe test environment, one region or business unit at a time, before rolling them out org-wide. Small, intentional tests build confidence without disrupting the whole hiring organization. Assign one clear owner for monitoring and rolling out product releases. Governance breaks down fast when everyone assumes someone else is watching for what's new. Hold AI to the same governance standard as any other release. Know where the data comes from, keep a human in the loop on hiring decisions, and watch for bias baked into historical data. Look for a technology partner who flags relevant updates before you have to ask. That shift, from reactive support to proactive guidance, is often what unblocks a complex transformation. Quote of the Show: "Bring them [hiring managers] back to why they wanted to make the change in the first place... empowered recruiters, engaged hiring managers, and a compelling candidate experience."   - Dave Novak Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davewnovak/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/davewnovak/) Website: https://www.smartrecruiters.com/ (https://www.smartrecruiters.com/) Ways to Tune In: Substack: HiringHappyHour.com (http://hiringhappyhour.com) Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf (https://open.spotify.com/show/1Pnhu7Njmi09N6Yzye59Nf) Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369 (https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/hiring-happy-hour/id1868802369) Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793 (https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/d60912b0-8925-4bba-aff1-f5230a0cc793) iHeart Radio: https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/ (https://iheart.com/podcast/317223012/) Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769 (https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/hiring-happy-hour-6340769) YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour (https://www.youtube.com/@HiringHappyHour) Transistor: https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/ (https://podcast.hiringhappyhour.com/)

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Contact Hiring Happy Hour

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.