Rebecca Carr

Chief Executive Officer SmartRecruiters, an SAP company

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Rebecca Carr is Chief Executive Officer of SmartRecruiters, the talent acquisition platform that SAP acquired in September 2025 and which now operates as an SAP company while continuing to be sold as a standalone recruiting system. Her association with the company runs across more than a decade and two separate tenures: she joined in 2014 and spent seven years there across product, customer success, and go-to-market roles, left for the background-check company Checkr, returned in July 2023 as Chief Product Officer, took the chief executive’s job on an interim basis after Michael DeSimone’s departure, and was confirmed permanently in August 2024. Within a year of that she had negotiated and closed the sale to SAP, and she has since led the integration of SmartRecruiters into the SuccessFactors human capital management suite, where it is replacing SAP’s own recruiting module. It is an unusually direct arc from product manager to owner of the product’s strategic fate.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Chief Executive Officer of SmartRecruiters on 27 August 2024, having served in the role on an interim basis after Michael DeSimone’s departure.
• Led SmartRecruiters through its acquisition by SAP, announced in August 2025 and completed on 11 September 2025, with the company continuing as a standalone recruiting solution within SAP.
• Oversaw the 2026 integration with SAP SuccessFactors, delivering unified login and navigation, synchronised people, job, and organisational data, and the Winston AI companion embedded in hiring workflows.
• Rejoined SmartRecruiters as Chief Product Officer in July 2023.
• Spent an earlier seven-year tenure at SmartRecruiters from September 2014 to 2021, across product management, customer success, professional services, product marketing, and solutions consulting, rising to Senior Vice President of Growth.
• General Manager of Checkr Pay and Chief of Staff to the chief executive at Checkr from 2021 to 2023, running the payments product business unit including research and development, go-to-market, and operations.
• Earlier product leadership roles at Jobvite, BranchOut, and Playdom, which Disney acquired in 2010.

Professional Journey

Carr’s early career was in product leadership at consumer and recruiting technology companies, beginning at the social gaming company Playdom, acquired by Disney in 2010, and continuing at BranchOut, the professional networking startup, and then at Jobvite, where she led global product teams. Jobvite put her squarely into applicant tracking and recruiting software, the category she has worked in ever since.

She joined SmartRecruiters in September 2014 and stayed seven years. Rather than a narrow product track, her remit moved across the functions that sit between engineering and the customer: product management, solutions consulting, professional services, product marketing, and customer success, ending as Senior Vice President of Growth. That breadth is the reason she was later credible as a chief executive rather than only as a product chief, because she had run most of the commercial surface of the business.

In 2021 she left for Checkr, the background screening platform, where she was General Manager for Checkr Pay and Chief of Staff to the chief executive. The general manager role gave her a business unit of her own, with research and development, go-to-market, and operations under one accountability, and the chief of staff role put her next to the chief executive of a company scaling fast. The two together amount to a deliberate apprenticeship for the top job.

She returned to SmartRecruiters in July 2023 as Chief Product Officer, reporting to chief executive Michael DeSimone, charged with the product direction of a platform facing the same question as every recruiting vendor at that moment: how much of hiring could be automated by large language models without destroying the candidate experience. DeSimone departed, Carr took over as interim chief executive, and on 27 August 2024 the company appointed her permanently, with a mandate explicitly framed around deep learning, AI, and automation.

Less than a year later SAP announced its intention to acquire the company, completing the deal on 11 September 2025. SAP’s reasoning was straightforward: SuccessFactors, its human capital management suite, had a recruiting module that was not competitive, and rather than rebuild it the company bought the strongest independent talent acquisition platform and set a timeline to replace its own. Carr’s framing of the deal was about pace and reassurance, that joining SAP would accelerate innovation while giving customers the confidence they wanted and the flexibility they demanded, and SmartRecruiters has continued to be sold as a standalone product interoperable with SuccessFactors and with rival HCM systems.

Since the close she has led both the company and the integration. By March 2026 SAP was describing a connected architecture in which the two systems share login and navigation, organisational data such as job families and cost centres flows automatically from SuccessFactors into SmartRecruiters, and the Winston AI companion sits inside hiring workflows, with Winston and SAP’s Joule set to operate as connected agents. Reporting also indicates she has taken on a broader product remit inside SAP covering HCM product management and strategy, though SAP’s own publications continue to identify her as chief executive of SmartRecruiters.

Education

University of California, Berkeley

Harvard Business School

No degree or field of study is published for either institution in any source consulted.