Anita Chandrasekhar
Anita Chandrasekhar
Global head of Talent Strategy & Operations, Zapier
Anita Chandrasekhar didn’t set out to build a career in talent acquisition — she found it by chance, and stayed by conviction.
Her entry into recruiting began at Teach for America, where she was initially part of a regional operations team. When that team was disbanded, her manager transitioned into recruitment — and when an opening appeared, he hired Anita back onto his new team.
“I hadn’t done anything in recruiting before,” she says. “I remember thinking, how am I going to figure this out?”
What followed became one of the most formative roles of her career.
Finding Purpose in the Funnel
At Teach for America, recruitment wasn’t just another function — it was the organization’s lifeblood. Anita worked in a People and Performance role supporting a recruitment team of more than 200 people, responsible for bringing in the teachers that powered the entire mission.
Her challenge was clear: rethink how recruiters themselves were hired, developed, and evaluated.
Anita redesigned the hiring process from the ground up — standardizing assessment, defining and measuring quality of hire, and building performance and promotion structures that hadn’t previously existed. Her team also owned recruiter hiring directly, operating almost as an internal recruiting engine due to the sheer scale of the organization.
“That’s when it clicked for me,” she says. “Bringing the right people into the right roles is the highest leverage work you can do — for individuals and for organizations.”
She had found her place.
Scaling Talent in a Global Context
From there, Anita moved to Zapier, where she continues similar work in an entirely different environment: a global, remote-first SaaS company operating across borders, time zones, and cultures.
Today, she leads a lean talent acquisition team — under 20 recruiters supporting an organization of roughly 800 people worldwide.
“What you quickly learn is that talent acquisition looks completely different depending on geography,” she explains. “Hiring in Australia is not the same as hiring in India or Ireland — and none of them look like the U.S.”
Navigating those differences — while maintaining consistency, fairness, and speed — has been one of the most rewarding challenges of her career.
Leaders Who Shaped Her
Gratitude is a recurring theme in Anita’s story.
Her first and most influential mentor is Darren Lim Yankovic, her former manager at Teach for America and now Senior Vice President leading recruitment there.
“He led by example,” she says. “Curiosity, vulnerability, humility — he never pretended to know everything. And he pushed me constantly to be better.”
Her current manager, Tracy St. Deke, Head of Global Talent at Zapier, represents a different — but equally impactful — leadership style.
“She pushes ownership and strategic thinking,” Anita explains. “If you’re operational, she stretches you strategically. If you’re big-picture, she grounds you in the details.”
The third influence is deeply personal: her older brother, Ramesh.
“He’s my moral compass,” she says. “He asks the questions I don’t want to answer — and that’s exactly why I go to him.”
From forcing clarity in decision-making to prioritizing purpose over compensation, his guidance has shaped how Anita leads — and who she chooses to hire.
Navigating AI With Intention
As AI reshapes the recruiting landscape, Anita advocates for a balanced approach.
“You can’t survive without AI anymore,” she says. “But recruiting will always be human-led.”
At Zapier — itself an AI orchestration platform — AI fluency is now a baseline hiring requirement across roles. At the same time, Anita is careful about how AI is implemented within talent workflows.
From AI screeners to sourcing tools, her philosophy is clear: test small, audit often, and build bias checks into every step.
“AI is trainable,” she explains. “And if you don’t question it, you’ll just automate the same problems faster.”
She also notes the other side of the equation: candidates now have AI too — introducing new challenges around authenticity, fraud, and assessment integrity.
“These are new skills talent teams have to develop,” she says. “This isn’t optional anymore.”
Advice for Talent Leaders Heading Into 2026
If Anita had to leave talent leaders with one principle, it would be this:
Lead with caution and curiosity.
“There are hundreds of tools,” she says. “But unless you understand the actual problem you’re trying to solve, AI won’t save you.”
Her advice: diagnose pain points across the entire funnel, trust human judgment, and never stop questioning systems — especially when bias and fairness are at stake.
“Test. Retest. Question. Then move forward,” she says. “Otherwise, you might fix one problem while creating another.”
