Carolina Errecart‘s surname is deceptive, because far from being French or Basque, she is as paisa as any, although she has stood out among the Gauls because she is in charge of recruiting strategic personnel in southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Google, one of the global technology giants.
It is enough to see his black hair and features to corroborate that his origin is American; His accent, despite the fact that in addition to his native Spanish he speaks English and French perfectly, and with Italian and Portuguese proficiency, also shows that he grew up in the land of beans and the delights of corn.
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In fact, even though he has been living outside the country for at least 15 years and has adopted the French custom of having croissants for breakfast, these are always accompanied by Colombian coffee and every visitor who is announced is asked to bring arepas in all their modalities: chocolo, yucca or cheese. Her husband also often says, half jokingly and half seriously, that the entrance pass to their house for anyone who arrives from these lands is a kilo of coffee and a good dose of Manimoto.
Carolina’s last name change came at the time of her marriage. Her fiancé, Patxi Errecart, even proposed that he could adopt hers, given that the custom in France is for the couple to have the same last name, but they decided for convenience that it should be his, taking into account that their residence would continue to be the Old Continent and to avoid possible discrimination due to South American origin.
Every winter Carolina evades the freezing cold of Europe and packs her bags to come and recharge her batteries with the affection of family and friends in Medellín. The other objective is for her little children, ages 18 months and four and a half years, to be injected with the cultural values that have allowed their mother to gain a place in the world.
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She does not hesitate to talk about her parents, Joaquín Emilio Arias and Aura Elena Sánchez, both farmers from Eastern Antioquia and Titiribí (Southwest), respectively; both members of families with 13 children, and poor.
“They were big families. They tell me a lot about that time, that they foraged for food, that they didn’t have shoes, that they were often hungry; they had very difficult childhoods and they had to work from a very young age,” he says.
Then their families migrated and found themselves in the Manrique Central neighborhood, where they met when they were 12 and 13 years old; then they fell in love.
The mother (now 79 years old) studied to be a dental assistant. Young Joaquín, for his part (now 80 years old), had to share from very early on the responsibility of supporting the family with his older brother, a heavy but unavoidable burden in a sexist era and also if the rest of the large descendants were women. His initial job was as a mechanic, driving a tank car that transported fuel and from then on he began to work in the trade of used cars and spare parts, until he forged his own import company in this field.
That’s how they ended up living in Belén La Palma and managed to educate three professional daughters: the oldest was a dentist, the middle one was a lawyer, and Carolina, who studied international business at Eafit University.
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That is to say that Carolina did better than them because when she was born the family had already ascended the social scale, but she did her part to take advantage of the inherited privileges. She was always among the most diligent students, she made an effort to study at the Colombo-French Alliance, at the same time as the university, and in the middle of her career she opted in 2007 for a one-year exchange at the University of Strasbourg, which would chart out what came to her from then on.
“Since I started university, in the first three years, I dedicated myself to studying French and having good grades because to be able to do these exchanges one has to have an average of four out of five; mine was like 4.2 and we applied as 80 for just three places,” he points out.
According to her, it was wonderful because in the business school of that training center located in the northeast of the nation of the great Napoleon Bonaparte, in addition to perfecting her third language (she already felt solid in English) she had contact with people from all over the world and focused on international relations. We must not forget that this city is considered the “capital of Europe” for being the headquarters of the European Parliament and other instances of the Union of 27 countries of the Old Continent.
Thanks to that, he also obtained a double degree and met Patxi, a Basque who was already planning to go to study in Mexico but diverted his course to Medellín for the sake of love, and ended up studying an MBA at the Eafit School of Business Administration.
The binational integration led to marriage a year and a half later, and a new adventure, in 2010, when they decided to go seek new horizons in London and with the additional purpose of him also perfecting himself in a third language.
As if to imply that not everything has been rosy, Carolina says that in the first months, as professional as she was, she worked as a salesperson in a sports clothing store and part-time in an accessories warehouse.
“When he finished his English classes I told him: ‘No, if it’s to be cold, in this cold culture and knowing that neither of us are at home, with this high cost of living and not so good salaries (…).’ We went for a while to the south of France, where he is from and then we moved to Paris,” he remembers.
The entry point to the world of work in France was a family-run international business consulting company, with just 15 people, which however had offices in London and Singapore and was looking for someone to help them navigate the legislation and working conditions of that nation and other countries with which they did business.
He worked there for three years and was definitely guided by the topic of human talent because he saw that passion was combined with a market need. He completed a master’s degree at the University of Versailles and later joined the United Nations delegation stationed in New York; Her role was to review that human resources policies aligned with good inclusion standards.
“It was a very good experience because I liked the diplomatic world and I was involved, for example, in the General Assembly, where all the presidents go,” he notes. From that time, Carolina fondly remembers standing face to face with people of the stature of Barack Obama and Cristina Kitchner, as well as with several leaders and prime ministers of Europe.
Once his contract concluded, he had the option to continue but the decision was to return to France to experience a new beginning. That was when a former client informed her that there was a vacancy at the American multinational drug company Merck, which was growing in its innovation area and wanted to make its way in European countries with products aimed primarily at women’s health and well-being.
The contract, again, was for one year, but again the good performance and the empathy generated worked in his favor because the head of human talent himself recommended that he take his resume to Microsoft to find his second great vocational discovery in his working life.
“They contacted me and made me a great offer. They told me, ‘Come work with us’. And I told them ‘I don’t know absolutely anything about technology’ and they replied that it didn’t matter, that what interested them was what I had done in human resources issues.”
Over the course of the almost three years that Carolina worked at this first technology company, she also had to work one last season for Linkedin, which was acquired by Microsoft. There she was when they called her from Google, her current employer, thanks to the great expertise she has achieved in matters of human resources management and corporate transformation.
Apparently and from the way he tells it, it was not only because of the money that he made the change, but because the position he was promised allowed him to practice international relations.
“They told me: ‘It’s going to be a very global position and depending on how things go, we’ll see’.”
That was seven years ago and it has not only been maintained but has escalated. “After my manager He told me that he loved soft skills (soft skills) that I could contribute and the languages that I master, and in order to capitalize on them he gave me a position in southern Europe as market recruiter lead (market recruitment leader)”, in which I had to work very closely with the vice presidents of France, the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and Italy, this being an intense time in recruitment to form the teams, especially in digital advertising and taking advantage of the cloud. This means that it is not like recruiting a squad of workers for a factory of mass products, but they required very special profiles.
“Then it is very technical because the person has to have worked in advertising sales, but not just any advertising, but digital advertising; they must have a lot of experience in the digital world, know Google’s products and digital solutions and they must always be bilingual, because no matter how much you work in Italy you have to speak Italian and English; in Spain it is the same,” he notes.
In these cases there are four interviews for which it is difficult to prepare and more or less that was the same process that she herself had to go through when entering, although it had been by direct invitation and not by open call, since they knew her unique abilities.
“In one of those interviews one has to talk a lot about leadership, that is, how to influence others, how to have executive leadership and the communication part, because at Google they work a lot on the management (management)”. The third interview focuses on the cognitive part, which focuses on seeing how the person’s thinking is structured, their ability to express it and questions about how to solve problems. The fourth has to do with the assimilation of corporate values.
Carolina explains that her current job as recruiter lead (recruitment leader) consists of accompanying the vice presidents of cloud and advertising of the multinational based in Paris, from where the operation is managed for southern Europe, the Middle East (Israel and the United Arab Emirates) as well as Africa.
“That is to say, if tomorrow I have to recruit a director for Spain, someone from the team will search the market to see which directors exist in that country; if they correspond to what we need, they contact them, make a first contact with them and then give me a list of the selected people. I make a second filter and decide who sees the vice president,” he explains.
To do this, she has four or five professionals (depending on the need) who make the first filter and then she finishes the process. But there are others who take care of the minutiae of contracts and, if necessary, the paraphernalia that means locating a person in a country other than their country of origin.
“Apart from that recruitment, we design the organization because Google reorganizes itself all the time; so let’s say that before suddenly there were eight countries, today we condense them into six and I have to be part of that, reorganize the people under the leadership of the director of that reorganization. I really like that, because they are positions with a lot of leadership, working with executives at an international level; a lot of diplomacy, a lot of tactics are needed,” he emphasizes.
She explains that at first she traveled too much, but four and a half years ago, when she had her first child – Esteban – she rationalized her trips as much as possible. The second –Bixente– came 18 months ago.
With 39 years of experience and achievements that make her a role model, Carolina accepts, however, that she has had to deal with the disadvantages of being a Latin American woman in adverse contexts, since she resides in a country where her native language is not spoken, but she also works in a gringo company based in the City of Light that needs to communicate in a third language – English.
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“So, my challenge all my life has been to be able to demonstrate why a Latina, a woman who was born in Belén La Palma, who came to Paris, to Google, is capable of what they are proposing to her and not say “it can’t be done,” because I have to feel proud of what they are proposing to me and at the same time withstand the pressure; that is called a bit like imposter syndrome.
Although she doesn’t know the movie Let the sawyer passby Víctor Gaviria, would somehow embody Simón, the protagonist who when they need a sawyer does not hesitate to raise his hand even if he later has to do tricks to comply. According to her, not only has she always prepared herself to face big challenges, but she has the DNA of the Paisas, of being “students for everything and determined to move forward.” He adds that one of Google’s values, action orientation, is like the translation to the business world of the colloquial expression of the Antioqueños of ‘Pa’ tras nor pa’ gain momentum’. That is why he assures that the paisa berraquera has helped him a lot to be where he shines today.
*Special thanks to ACI Medellín for facilitating contact with Carolina Errecart.
