Paulina Camacho: From Recruiting to the Decision-Making Table

There's a moment in any Talent Acquisition professional's career when they stop hunting CVs and start reading the business like an Operations Director would. For Paulina Camacho, that moment didn't arrive all at once. It came one open role at a time, until leaders stopped seeing her as "the HR person who hires" and started inviting her to the meetings where money is discussed.

Camacho is a psychologist with nearly nine years of experience in Talent Acquisition and People operations, spread across retail, technology, and fintech. She worked at Central Outlet, Clikalia, and Pluxee before making the leap to HRBP at AORA, where she simultaneously led teams in Mexico and Ecuador. Today she's a People Business Partner at Nexu, supporting the Technology, Data, and Product teams. She also holds a graduate degree in Human Resources from UNAM.

This article is part of HR Top Voices, Desky's interview series where HR professionals from across Latin America share, unfiltered, how they carved out their place within their organizations.

From Recruiter to Internal Consultant

Paulina pinpoints the turning point in her time at Pluxee, where her role was 100% recruitment. That's where she realized that even an operational function like filling vacancies had a strategic layer nobody had taught her to articulate.

"Sometimes, leaders go completely technical when they want to hire someone, but that's where my expertise as a recruitment specialist comes in," she explains. "We often overlook soft skills or potential by focusing too heavily on technical qualifications, but my experience showed me that, as experts, we can be consultants for these leaders."

That shift in perspective also meant unlearning old habits. She'd come from an operational recruitment background—"fill 50 sales positions in a month"—using the same profile and the same checklist for everyone. Moving into managing the full talent lifecycle demanded the opposite: listen more, automate less.

Leading Teams Across Cities (and Countries)

At AORA, Paulina managed teams in Mexico and Ecuador simultaneously, each with its own culture, regulations, and way of operating. Today Nexu operates only in Mexico, but the logic she learned there still applies: to connect with a team, you first have to understand where and how they work.

"This is my first time working directly with tech teams and I had to immerse myself in their language and environment: technical terminology, how these niche communities function, where these candidates move, what employees need beyond their paycheck," she explains.

That same idea—that each distributed team operates in its own environment with its own needs—is what complicates things for many People teams managing benefits for employees who don't share an office. A benefit like workspace becomes more than a simple line item in the budget once the team is spread across multiple cities: each with its own coworking space, its own contract, its own invoice.

It's the same challenge faced by Milagros Diez, Senior HR at Candor Investment Group, with a 100% remote team scattered across several countries: negotiating coworkings city by city doesn't scale. She solved it by centralizing everything with a single provider, with a dashboard showing who uses what space, when, and how much the team spends. Learn how Desky works for companies

Fintech Speed, Solid HR Processes

Nexu is fintech, an industry where moving fast isn't optional. But Paulina is clear that "fast" and "solid" aren't opposites if HR understands the business.

"The main key that's worked for me, working in startups and now in fintech, is knowing the business, understanding customer needs, and immersing myself in what goes beyond People," she says. "You can build and operate at your best when you understand the environment: how we secure funding rounds, what kind of company we are, what culture we want to build."

That clarity, she argues, is what allows her team to move fast with confidence instead of moving blind.

Psychology as Competitive Advantage

Before HR, Camacho studied Psychology. And she believes it's what sets her apart from a "by-the-book" HR professional.

"Psychology, in practice, gives you this sensitivity to know the other person. Whether we're in the clinical or organizational sphere, you learn to develop this 'clinical eye' that works really well," she explains. That sensitivity, applied to stakeholders and business leaders, translates into one concrete skill: active listening and detecting needs the other person hasn't yet put into words.

Nine Years of Wisdom from the Other Side of the Desk

She's recruited for banking, technology, and executive positions. With all that accumulated data, her advice for job seekers today isn't about the perfect CV:

"Don't give up. And second: help luck along." She explains that a big part of the process depends on a recruiter seeing the right CV at the right moment among thousands of applications, so multiplying your channels (LinkedIn, company career pages, direct contact with the hiring manager) isn't pestering—it's increasing your odds.

How to Actually Earn a Seat at the Table

Paulina Camacho didn't get to the decision-making table through seniority. She got there speaking the language spoken at that table: numbers.

"I was able to show them that People plays an important role because we started talking about money: the cost of bad hires, the cost of turnover," she recalls about her transition to more technical positions within technology and cybersecurity. "That's when space opened up for me and I got a real seat at the table where strategy was being planned."

If she had to sum up that learning for the Paulina who started at Central Outlet, it would be one sentence: "Learn everything you can about the business. This knowledge will get you a real seat at the decision-making table, not just a token one, and it will also make you the primary advocate for your employees' needs."

The KPI That Doesn't Tell the Whole Story

Turnover, absenteeism, engagement: Camacho has built entire dashboards of People KPIs. But the problem, she says, is rarely that the numbers lie. It's that the People team looks at them from too high up.

"On turnover we say: 'Well, it's normal in every organization—people leave and we hire more,' but we don't account for how massive the cost of early turnover really is," she warns. "When we look at it in raw terms, we can understand that turnover isn't just something that happens in every sector—it has a cost, and a big one."

Her other warning is about analysis paralysis: a massive dashboard of KPIs is worthless if it doesn't translate into small, concrete actions. "Sometimes we think we need to raise salaries or add fifty premium benefits, and we don't. Sometimes a small move creates big change."

Why Career Development Plans Stay on Paper

At Nexu, Paulina helped build career and development programs. And she's identified the most common mistake in designing them: promising more than the organization can actually sustain.

"I've seen many career and development programs that look great on paper and promise the world, but in practice are impossible," she says. "No one gives feedback, there are no follow-up plans or training. If the People team and direct managers don't commit to working with employees to make this possible, it all stays on paper and becomes a very, very long-term promise."

The Table Is Earned Through Business Acumen, Not Just HR

What runs through every answer Camacho gives is the same idea from different angles: a strategic seat in HR isn't asked for, it's built by understanding the business with the same depth as a Product or Finance leader. That applies to justifying the cost of turnover and to designing a benefit the team will actually use.

And there's a direct parallel to something many People teams deal with every month: offering benefits that sound great in recruitment pitches, but that become an operational burden—contracts, invoices, country-by-country approvals. The same criterion Camacho applies to a career plan—map it out before promising—applies to managing workspace for distributed teams.

Camacho doesn't say this thinking about workspace, but the pattern is the same: the average company manages between 4 and 7 different coworking providers—one contract per city, one invoice per space, one approval process per booking. Desky simplifies it: one contract with access to thousands of spaces across Latin America and Europe, one monthly invoice, and zero fixed costs—you only pay for what your team uses.

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Frequently Asked Questions About HR Business Partners and Distributed Teams

What sets a People Business Partner apart from a traditional recruiter?

The PBP doesn't just fill vacancies: they participate in business decisions, translate strategy into talent needs, and support the full employee lifecycle from recruitment through career development.

How do you manage benefits for distributed teams across multiple cities or countries?

The most efficient approach is centralizing management with a single provider instead of negotiating city by city. This applies to any benefit—gym memberships, wellness programs, workspace—and allows you to maintain full visibility of spending without multiplying contracts.

Which HR KPIs are worth looking at more closely in a fintech or startup?

Early-stage turnover and absenteeism are often underestimated because they're treated as "industry norms." Measuring their actual cost, not just their percentage, is what allows you to prioritize concrete actions instead of diagnoses that don't translate into change.

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About HR Top Voices: this interview was conducted by Desky's editorial team, a flexible workspace platform for remote and hybrid teams across Latin America and Europe, as part of its series of conversations with leading HR professionals in the region.

Last updated: August 2026