Carla Moreira

I am very dedicated to whatever I do. I put myself 100% into everything and I think it's important to be present and really appreciate what you do. I had a lot of support from my family to speak other languages and get a good education. I think you have to really dedicate yourself, be focused, and have this inner strength to hold on, to have persistence and resilience, and never give up because life is hard and we have many challenges to overcome. You have to have faith and dedicate a lot of yourself. You have to really appreciate the journey and be a person that will be remembered. In consultancy, you have to think about your personal skills, being able to have good relationships, to be a good person, to be honest and transparent. These are the traits that are non-negotiable. You can educate yourself and have the best technical education, but the personal traits are more important at the end because it's about relationship, it's about connection, it's about networking. When you are honest and transparent, you don't have to be afraid that people will like you or not. You have to do your best.

First of all, search for self-awareness through self-knowledge. Understand yourself, understand your needs, not what someone would tell you. Listen to your inner voice, this inside, and really trust your intuition about what you have to do. It's more important than the external forces that always push you to one career or another, or what's in the hype. People are always in like a hurricane, so you have to go to the center of this hurricane, because the center is really peaceful. You have to understand what are your best skills, understand what you love to do, and really go and embrace sometimes what life brings to you. I'm an engineer, I graduated as a chemical engineer, it's very technical, and then I switched to being a headhunter, so it's the total opposite. I embraced that. I was open to listen and to understand, do I like that? Does this resonate with me? Does this really give me passion? And then I changed my career path entirely. You have to be open to that too. Sometimes you study something and then you change your mind. I think to be open and really embrace some things that life brings to you is important. You cannot plan everything. You have to be open and understand if that resonates with you, if that brings you passion, and then move in that direction if you want.

My field is very challenging because I started 20 years ago, more than 10 years ago, as a consultant, and it was like a blue ocean. It was one of the first consultancies that I worked for. But companies now, some of them are internalizing the recruitment and the HR, so what we do can be internalized. We have to understand that the competition is hard nowadays. Twenty years ago it was like a blue ocean, but now you have to differentiate yourself. It's challenging because you have to know more about a sector, for example, or know a lot about energy and automotive. You add value about what you really know and to be a high level in this field. You have to go deeper, not to be superficial. I am not a headhunter generalist. You have to be a specialist. The boutique firms are going in this path nowadays. You have to specialize, you have to understand your niche. It's more challenging, it's not so easy, because most of consultants that work at big companies have their own boutique, like me. When you were part of a big brand, now you have to build your own brand, so it's not easy. We had to change some things about the company to be more broad in perspective, to make more solutions, to have more solutions for the HR. Now we are not only executive search, because this is very narrow, so we had to be a solutions provider, advisory. You have to be human-centered because nowadays we have AI. AI will replace some of the operational side, about searching, about the first screening, so AI will do that. Consultants have to understand that the human part, the added value that you bring about the connection, the person that you interviewed, when you can develop people, like in an assessment, in an individual development plan, AI cannot do that. You have to be more human-centered because that will differentiate a service that's for human, not that AI can replace very easily.