The Chad & Cheese Podcast Break Everything with Rebecca Carr
4 snips
Mar 17, 2026 Rebecca Carr, CEO who led SmartRecruiters through an AI-driven pivot and SAP acquisition. She argues for ripping up ATS thinking and rebuilding hiring as agent-driven conversational experiences. Topics include AI replacing interfaces with conversations, trust and transparency in screening, decoupling fraud checks from evaluation, and how AI frees recruiters for higher-value work.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
AI Pivot Turned Commodity Product Into Category Leader
- Smart Recruiters pivoted by leaning hard into AI to escape commodity status and become a category leader.
- Rebecca credits long engineering tenure and a unified product vision for executing a rapid, high-risk transformation that paid off.
Decide Boldly And Protect Your Strategic Bet
- Decide boldly and say no to incremental customer demands that derail your strategic pivot.
- Rebecca advises aligning product, go-to-market, and budget up front so teams can sell and build confidently toward one outcome.
SAP Embedded Engineers Jump Started Smart Recruiters R&D
- After acquisition, SAP quickly shifted employees into Smart Recruiters R&D, doubling team size and accelerating the roadmap.
- Rebecca calls the integration a deliberate test that preserved Smart Recruiters' independence while boosting delivery speed.