Veronica Vallez

I think a lot of intellectual curiosity in the early stage of my career, you know, just wanting to learn. I think that created a good foundation for my technology knowledge that I could sit at a table with the CEOs, co-founders, CTOs, and know what I'm talking about. And then later on, just really helping other people when I can and building out my network. I would say that my intellectual curiosity as a young person, and then over time, just my building of my own network has really been what allowed me to build the career that I have now.

I would say just really valuing and nurturing your network. You know, it's not when you need something from your network that you reach out - you have to really nurture a network over time, so that when you do need something, they're there. I think that has been kind of the story of my career, has been throughout my network, and that's how I've gotten to the places that I have at the times that I've gotten there. So I would say just really valuing and nurturing your network and helping out other people when you can.

I would say being able to take risks pretty early on, you know, like going to a startup that's maybe Series A or Seed Stage. In the early part of your career, it's a great way to learn the full life cycle of recruiting and HR. You don't really get those opportunities if you take the big-name internships with large tech companies. So I would say just being able to take risks to go to early-stage startups - that gives you the most exposure to all parts of the process.

I think in the field specifically, there's so much talk about AI and how are we using AI in the recruiting workflow, and kind of a general question of how do we balance that with the humanity of really meeting people at a point where they're making a really important choice in their life, which is changing jobs. So how do we balance using AI tools, but also still bringing a level of humanity to recruiting? I think that's going to be the toughest challenge that we face in the next couple of years as recruiters and recruiting leaders. In terms of challenges I've faced throughout my career, I think that you never know what you're going to get when you join a startup. Coming into really ambiguous environments where there's no process, leadership is changing - a lot of those things have been kind of the toughest learnings that I've had to have over my career, just coming into a place that's chaotic with a lot of ambiguity and not being phased by that.

I would say it's similar to what I had mentioned about nurturing the network, but really having a lot of empathy for where people are. I'm talking to candidates all day, and some are active candidates that have been looking for a job for a long time. Just really being able to put yourself in other people's shoes to understand where they're at, and that people have other things going on outside of the day-to-day work. So I think just working with the understanding that people are human and having a lot of empathy.