This is episode four of Decoding the C-Suite, a five part miniseries from Recruiting Future about how leadership really thinks about AI, recorded with the leadership team at SmartRecruiters seven months into their acquisition by SAP.
AI is moving faster than any buyer can absorb, and that creates a genuine design problem: build for the boldest customers and you lose everyone else, build for the cautious and you fall behind. Shefali Netke, VP of Product Design at SmartRecruiters, lives in that tension every day. She explains how to design for a spectrum of readiness rather than an average user, why she refuses to keep designing for the old world, how her team builds AI fluency, and what it takes to merge two design cultures into one team.
Key Takeaways
- AI product design means designing for a spectrum of readiness, not an average user; some customers want to leap ahead while most aren't ready.
- Keep designing for the old world and you fall behind; jump too far ahead and you lose everyone in between.
- Tech lives in a bubble that assumes everyone is an AI power user; in reality most people find AI intimidating, risky, or something they don't have time to learn.
- The hardest part of AI fluency is the first step; give people structured time and permission to start, and the momentum takes care of itself.
- AI releases now land daily rather than monthly, and at that pace waiting is itself a decision to fall behind.
- No AI learning is ever wasted; tools and workflows go out of date, but the thinking, prompting and context skills stay with you.
- As powerful as AI is, it doesn't have to be in everything; good leaders learn to distinguish signal from noise and protect the moments that need human interaction.
Transcript
Matt Alder: [0:18] Hi there, and welcome to Decoding the C-Suite, a five-part mini-series from Recruiting Future about how leadership really thinks about AI. Throughout the series, I'm in conversation with five senior leaders at SmartRecruiters, seven months on from their acquisition by SAP, exploring how each function around the leadership table sees AI and what talent leaders can learn from it.
Matt Alder: [0:42] Today, we turn to the product. The technology is moving faster than any buyer can absorb, which creates a genuine design problem. Because building for the boldest customers means losing everyone else, while building for the cautious means falling behind. Shefali Netke is VP of Product Design at SmartRecruiters, and she lives through this tension every single day. We talk about designing for a spectrum of readiness rather than an average user, why she refuses to keep designing for the old world, and how her team stays ahead of a field that changes daily. There's also a very human story in here about what it takes to merge two teams from two very different companies. This is Decoding the C-Suite, Episode 4, The Product.
Matt Alder: [1:32] Tell us a little bit about your role, but also the scope of that in terms of the integration between SmartRecruiters and SAP.
Shefali Netke: [1:42] Yeah, absolutely. I'm our VP of Product Design at SmartRecruiters, and my team handles everything user experience related within the product. A big chunk of that recently has been integrating into the SAP world, which has been a really great journey, and we've learned a lot in the process. A big part of that has also been combining some of our teams to make that happen.
Matt Alder: [2:04] Let's talk about that, because you've integrated some of the SAP team into your SmartRecruiters team, haven't you? What does that mean? What does that look like? How has that happened?
Shefali Netke: [2:14] Yeah, absolutely. So from a broader R&D perspective, we brought over 100 engineers, many PMs and designers as well, into our group, which I think has been fantastic. Because when we're looking at integrating two systems that are both quite complex, having that expertise come and sit in our teams has really been invaluable. We integrated those teams right away, particularly the ones working on integration, migration, data sync, reporting. They've come together and blended, and that way we have the expertise right in the team. Both sides are able to understand the complexity, understand the context and blend those together better. And then even from a cultural perspective, ways of working, because there are nuances that go just beyond the technology and product as well.
Matt Alder: [3:06] I think that's really interesting, because there's a real human perspective to this, isn't there? What have been the challenges with bringing humans together from two very different sides of this?
Shefali Netke: [3:16] Yeah, it's interesting. I would say, in a really great way, big picture, everything is very aligned. Both groups are very curiosity-driven, very innovation-driven, high willingness to learn, very open. So from that perspective, culturally, we blended really well. It was more the smaller things that get you. The tools, the little ways of working, the rituals, remote versus in person. There are all these different combinations. The day-to-day complexities are the ones that we had to work out a little bit, whereas the bigger picture alignment was actually much easier, because we have this common vision that we're driving towards.
Matt Alder: [3:58] What was the most challenging part? What was the most difficult thing that you had to overcome?
Shefali Netke: [4:02] I think the changing of some defaults, probably. Whichever team you are coming from, you're used to a certain way of working. Everyone had to do a bit of onboarding again, even though no one had left a company. Those SAP folks were coming over into the SmartRecruiters world, but we were also very much coming into the SAP world at the same time, as this layered approach. Because of that, we're all onboarding, and that part was challenging in a way that we all had to come with that mindset of being new to a lot of spaces, accounting for what that looks like, and a ton of overcommunication. When you have your default networks, you can get used to those cadences. But when that changes, you have to overcommunicate so much, because things initially were getting lost in the different channels and ways of operating.
Matt Alder: [5:04] It's interesting because humans are just humans, and people like to hold on to things and ways of working. As you say, overcommunication is probably a big part of fixing that. How else do you deal with it when people are mourning a previous way of working? What's the best way to bring everyone into the same place?
Shefali Netke: [5:23] One thing that really helped us was we did our company kickoff in February this year and brought everyone together. For us in R&D, especially bringing all of those SAP joiners into our group, we as an organisation celebrated together. This is a win for everyone. We're coming together, and what does that look like? Being able to celebrate that moment, take it in, realign for the year together, and then just have human moments. Being able to get on the dance floor or have dinner together. Even for me, it was as simple as one of our team dinners. Every single team dinner, we would get all the chairs together and make sure all 20 designers could sit together. There's just something around being able to all sit around the same table and have a conversation. Being able to make that in-person connection just a few months into merging the teams made a massive difference in how we could bring everyone together.
Matt Alder: [6:22] It's interesting that in this world of AI and technology, we don't talk enough about the humans that sit behind this and build this. So it's really interesting from that perspective. Talk to us about the vision a little bit. What is the vision driving all of this? What's the North Star that you're all aiming at?
Shefali Netke: [6:42] So when we brought the teams together, we did a very intentional vision typing exercise. There were already a lot of anchors around the vision as a business and where we wanted to go as a product, but most people are visual learners. They need to see what it can look like. So we did a few sprints around bringing to life what true integration looks like with these products and what that could be. We built out a really wonderful experience that we could showcase at the company kickoff. We showed that to the group, and they were able to see, end to end, in maybe a five or six minute movie, what it could actually look like. Showing them the art of the possible, our North Star. Even if it takes some time to get there, giving people a solid visual of, this is the future, this is the potential of what we could be together, rather than just talking in general phrases or presentations.
Shefali Netke: [7:43] I think that was a really big anchor point for folks. And to digest that together in this theatre space with your teammates beside you, and right after that, being able to turn to someone and be like, how do we make that happen? How do we connect? Maybe we could do it this way. It sparked a lot of ideas, and that visual North Star in particular has been really impactful.
Matt Alder: [8:06] Previously, you've obviously been working on the SmartRecruiters products, but you have the whole SAP context coming into that. Their products, their technology, their approaches. How has that changed the way you're thinking about the design of everything to get to the vision? What has it brought to the party?
Shefali Netke: [8:23] There are a few different elements at play. Initially, I got a lot of amazing outreach from the SAP design team and community, which was fantastic. They started sharing some of their world, their design system, how they think about UX in a broader perspective. They also have a great central design team that manages across their whole suite. So it was really interesting to see how they scale it, just within one line of business, but then beyond as well, and starting to understand what it looks like in their ecosystem.
Shefali Netke: [8:56] Then when it came to our product, some of it is tactical. How do you fuse these experiences together and keep the ease of use, keep the cohesion, make sure it's smooth across the board? And then from the other side, I would say it was more about how we anchor folks and tell them the right story for how design can evolve, because there are a lot of different directions it can go. Being able to iterate on that and being open to it, not getting set in a specific way of doing things, and starting to recalibrate. The biggest shift for us from a SmartRecruiters perspective was now thinking about how we play into the larger suite experience, versus a certain part of the process. We've always been quite expansive, but it's very different sitting in the broader SAP ecosystem. There's this ongoing theme of unified suite, unified experience, and that has probably been the biggest shift in thinking for us.
Matt Alder: [10:01] One thing that I'm really interested in is speed, because SmartRecruiters, startup, scale up, is used to moving very, very quickly. SAP, a much bigger business with a bigger product set, by its very nature moves a lot slower. What happens when those two things come together? How does that work?
Shefali Netke: [10:21] I actually think we get the best of both worlds with this approach, and we're able to go much further together. With SmartRecruiters, our biggest strength has been innovation and, like you mentioned, speed. We push the boundary. We want to go further. We think as big as we can. With SAP, one of their biggest strengths is that foundation and scale. So what we have been able to do and unlock is take that innovation and scale it. What may change sometimes is that we need to adjust the innovation path in order for it to scale and to have more of that impact, and that's great. Because then instead of just being able to walk through one or two doors of opportunity, we actually get 50 as a payout, because SAP can open that world for us. That's been the really amazing balance there, where we can keep that piece of innovation, make sure not to lose the pace, but adjust the approach so it can actually scale to unlock much bigger opportunities overall.
Matt Alder: [11:24] Looking externally to the market where the employers are, it's a very strange position at the moment, because the technology is moving faster than any of us can keep up with. It's just incredible to see how quickly things are changing. At the same time, we're talking about large enterprise organisations who can't really change very quickly, however hard they try. How do you factor that into what you're designing, in terms of not just what the clients need, but how to push them forward?
Shefali Netke: [11:58] When we're talking about any technology leap, there's always a spectrum of folks. Folks who are maybe more risk-averse, not quite ready yet. There are people who are ready to jump and are super innovative and more risky. And then a lot of folks fall in between, where they're curious, willing to try, but don't want to bet all their chips quite yet.
Shefali Netke: [12:21] When we think about it from an experience perspective, we want to make sure we don't keep designing for the old world. We don't want to fix just small things that keep you rooted in old experiences or old ways of working. But we also recognise we can't just totally jump over, because we will miss all these folks in between. However, if we don't start aiming further ahead, we will also fall behind. So it's a balance in this zone between the folks who are pretty ready and the folks who are ready for that leap.
Shefali Netke: [12:54] We've been operating in that space where we try it in different areas of the product in different ways. It's something that we've seen with our customers as well, where maybe they're more willing to try it first in a specific region or with a specific team, prove it out and then go from there. In the same way with our product, we have some areas where we've intentionally leapfrogged ahead and have been pushing really far. And then some of our more core workflows and foundations, we're starting with more of the middle approach, where we can take people on that journey, because they have a lot of anchors to what it's supposed to look like.
Shefali Netke: [13:31] There's a good mix there of how you infuse AI into a product. You don't have to go the full jump. There is something to that experience for people who are comfortable with it, but there are a lot of ways to actually just weave AI into the experiences and start teaching folks that behaviour, because there's a huge piece here around AI fluency. Sometimes in tech, we are in a bit of a bubble, where maybe we assume everyone knows how to use this, or we tend to be power users. And the reality is a lot of people aren't ready for that. Or maybe they are ready, but it's intimidating, or it feels risky, or maybe they feel like they don't have time to learn it yet. So how do you make sure you're staying ahead while still giving good entry points for folks who do want to learn and start upskilling as well?
Matt Alder: [14:20] Diving into that tech bubble, we talked about it being challenging for employers, but as a tech company, it must be incredibly challenging to keep pace with everything that's going on, and then try and interpret that into something that employers can understand. How do you keep innovating? How do you make sure you're up to date with everything that's going on within your team?
Shefali Netke: [14:40] It's a lot of information, I will say. I find it very exciting. I like digging in, I like learning. But it can still be a bit of an overload, and there is also a lot of noise that you need to filter through. There are new releases daily, almost, now. It used to be monthly, then weekly, and now every day something has come out. Things get outdated super fast. Something happens, you learn a workflow, and then next week there's a better way of doing it. With the pace things are moving now, you can't really afford to wait either, because you will just fall behind from a learning and skills perspective.
Shefali Netke: [15:23] That has been a big part of how we've changed our approach this year, which is how do we make sure we are augmenting our own workflows and the ways that we're building, to make them more powered by AI. That's something we've been really intentional about. We're not trying to do everything at once, either, because you don't want to just completely upheave everything. But we're questioning our ways of working and seeing, is there a better way to do this? What are the different pieces?
Shefali Netke: [15:50] What's worked best for us is we've had a few champions come up naturally. Folks that have really leaned into it and are willing to keep up with the daily updates and really be in that stream of inputs. And then what we did recently is we ran a really intentional AI learning workshop for our entire product org. The two things I was hearing the most were people saying that they don't have enough time to dedicate to learning, or it's too big of an initial step to get into it. So we said, okay, you know what? Two days. We did it remotely, three hours every day. Just come in, you're excused from all your other meetings, and we'll just dedicate it to learning time. We brought in an external speaker, we did some workshops, we did a mini hackathon approach. At the end of that, we came up with some pretty cool ideas. The point wasn't necessarily the ideas, although we actually did implement some of them in our practices, which is great. It was just to get folks started.
Shefali Netke: [16:53] Giving people an outlet or some sort of structure to just get started with their AI learning makes it easier for them to then maintain that momentum. Then it becomes more about providing them with the structure to keep it going, the right resources and things like that. The tough part for people is that initial step, because it's very overwhelming right now. Everyone keeps telling you, you need to learn AI, do more with this. But how do you actually start? Once you do, it unlocks so much potential.
Matt Alder: [17:24] It's interesting, because employers have exactly the same problem with all the noise. How do you filter out that noise? What is it that you look for to say, do you know what, this is actually something we should focus on, and this is just something that's going to disappear by next week? How do you do that?
Shefali Netke: [17:41] I would say a lot of trial and error, probably. Whenever there's a new tool, just try it out and see. I have probably three or four folks who are always very eager to try things and will dig in, and we give each other signals. How's this looking? Should we push it to the team or not? That is a way to start doing it. Once you're really in that stream of testing, you start to get a good sense of what will last and what won't.
Shefali Netke: [18:12] And then I will say, with any of the learning and the tools, none of it ever feels like a waste. Because even if that particular tool or flow doesn't last, your way of thinking, getting better at prompting, or thinking about context, all of that definitely stays with you. It's just different ways of applying it. So I would say trial and error for the most part, but then also recognising where, okay, this really works, we should double down and really do this. And then keeping that cadence going and saying, okay, this is the next point where we should make this one structured and continue to do that. What you want to avoid is constantly telling people, okay, now this one, now this one, now this one, because then it becomes noise to your teams, where it's like, are all of them really that great? What does that look like?
Matt Alder: [19:02] You said earlier that this is a journey heading towards a vision. Let's look out into the future, 12 or 18 months. What do you think the biggest opportunity is in bringing the two together?
Shefali Netke: [19:13] I think that SmartRecruiters brings a really strong innovation arm in our way of thinking, our way of operating, the way that we are always reaching pretty far out. We dream big, we think big, and we try to execute in that way as well. That's probably our biggest strength that we bring to the table. And then from the SAP perspective, they have that at a larger scale, and they're thinking about it in terms of the entire business ecosystem. From a data perspective, from a structure perspective, and the framework and scaffolding to make that happen.
Shefali Netke: [19:57] If we bring those two together, it unlocks a lot, and we're starting to see that with the way our visions are combining and the direction it's going. The overall combination is leveraging the data and the foundation that comes with this massive business, but unlocking it in more innovative ways, and essentially building this layer on top where we can drive businesses in very different directions.
Shefali Netke: [20:30] I'm also seeing a willingness from both companies to think differently. I think that's happening across the industry, where we're challenging what recruiting looks like, what HR tech looks like, and starting to let go of some of the older workflows or ways of working, and starting to jump ahead to do things. Whether it's agentic work or the whole spectrum of what that could look like, everyone is realising now that this is the way of the future. If we can bring those two visions together, there's really amazing potential there.
Matt Alder: [21:09] Final question for you. What does leadership look like in an AI-driven world?
Shefali Netke: [21:13] I would say probably leading with curiosity. Not taking what you know for granted, or your ways of operating or working. Having a very open mindset about how things can change and what they could look like, and also encouraging curiosity with your teams. If they suggest a new workflow, don't feel attached to the old one, even if you were the one that implemented it. Encourage folks to challenge and try new things. I would much rather have folks experiment a lot, and then maybe need to pull them back in terms of implementing or getting it structured, rather than them feeling like they can't go out and explore and being hesitant from the start. So overall, being very open and curious.
Shefali Netke: [22:03] And then the other part is that as you're doing that, you get better at distinguishing the signal from the noise. Because as powerful as AI is, it doesn't have to be in everything. Remembering what the key elements are where we really do want human interaction and involvement. That's also a key piece of staying grounded while you're leading in an AI world. So I would say balancing those two. Being curious and open to what it can do, but still keeping that anchor of human experience and human emotion and empathy.
Matt Alder: [22:39] Shefali, thank you very much for talking to me.
Shefali Netke: [22:41] Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Matt.
Matt Alder: [22:44] That was Shefali Netke on building products in a market that can't keep up with its own technology. Next time, it's the final episode of the series, and we'll finish by looking outwards at the market. Everything is now AI-powered, every vendor makes the same claims, and buyers are finding it harder than ever to tell them apart. Steve Hardy leads marketing at SmartRecruiters, and he's refreshingly honest about which parts of marketing are broken and what actually builds trust now. Subscribe or follow wherever you listen to your podcasts, and I'll see you for episode five.
