Talent All-Stars

Michelle Kligman didn't set out to run the “people strategy” for a nearly 16,000-person health system. She set out to be a clinical psychologist. Somewhere between a postdoc at Columbia and a stint profiling executives during mergers, HR found her instead. Michelle is the Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resource Officer at Jackson Health System, the nonprofit academic medical system that...

Every employee at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, from the clinicians to the people cleaning patient rooms, is expected to give the same answer when asked what they do: "I find cures and save children." Dana is the Senior Vice President of Human Resources at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, where she's spent nearly three decades helping the organization recruit and retain talent again...

Mario Pennycooke never planned to end up in recruiting. He built a career in graphic design, sold cars at a Toyota dealership, then trained as an automotive technician before any of that pointed toward talent acquisition. Mario is the Director of Talent Strategy at Hendrick Automotive Group, the largest privately owned dealership group in the country, with over 100 locations coast to coast. In thi...

Jason Munoz didn't choose a career in recruiting. He was “voluntold” into it after years running operations in the field, and it ended up shaping the next 26 years of his career. Jason is the Director of Talent Acquisition at Entergy, a Fortune 500 energy company that generates, transmits, and distributes electricity to more than three million customers. In this episode, he talks about how his ope...

James Hardie is the company behind Hardie, TimberTech, and AZEK Exteriors, a global leader in exterior home and building solutions. Running talent acquisition for a company that size, especially one growing through acquisition, takes someone who has learned to lead through other people instead of fixing everything herself. Doris Smart is the Head of Global Talent Acquisition at James Hardie. Her p...

Hasbro is the toy, gaming, and entertainment company behind Monopoly, Nerf, Transformers, and Magic: The Gathering, and running people strategy for a brand that big takes someone who has done a little bit of everything. Holly Barbacovi is the EVP & Chief People Officer at Hasbro. Her path started in the Peace Corps in China, wound through Microsoft's early recruiting days, and eventually landed he...

F5 helps the world's largest organizations keep their apps and websites fast, reliable, and secure. Doing that takes a global workforce, a TA function built for a company in transformation, and someone who knows how to build recruiting infrastructure from the ground up. Valerie Weingarten is the VP of Global Talent Acquisition at F5. She spent 16 years at Salesforce scaling recruiting through some...

The USPS delivers to 167 million addresses almost every day. That takes 640,000 employees, 30,000 post offices, 250 processing facilities, and one of the largest HR operations in the country. Jenny Utterback, VP of Organization Development at the United States Postal Service, is the person responsible for the people side of all of it. She came in through recruiting nearly 20 years ago and never le...

Most companies with nearly 5,000 employees have a recruiting army. Green Thumb Industries has 12 people, a network of cannabis dispensaries spanning the country, and Joey Niemczyk, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition, figuring out how to make it work. Joey started her career watching her immigrant parents build something from nothing, and that shaped everything about how she thinks about people...

Every product you order online passes through a warehouse. Someone decided how that warehouse runs. Dematic builds the systems that make it happen, and when you're operating at that scale, the difference between the right hire and the wrong one isn't just an HR problem — it's a business problem. Jenny Ferrell knows this better than most. She started her career recruiting engineers for a small, pri...

Hiring thousands of employees for a new casino resort launch is a high-stakes race against time. You are operating in an unfamiliar city without established market dominance, all while under the constant scrutiny of industry regulators. Jenn Reagan has done it multiple times. As VP of Talent Learning and Development at Bally's Corporation, she's figured out how to walk into a brand new community,...

Most large companies don't build their recruiting function intentionally. It grows organically, gets patched when something breaks, and ends up inconsistent across teams and regions. Lori Vickery inherited exactly that situation when she joined Bimbo Bakeries USA in 2016, and spent the next decade fixing it. Today, as Director of Talent Attraction, she leads a full end-to-end recruiting function c...

Most companies hire reactively. Someone leaves, a role opens, and the team scrambles to find a replacement. Carey Pellock, Chief People Officer at Anaplan, thinks that approach is already outdated. Carey has spent years pushing her organization to think differently about workforce planning. Instead of asking "who can fill this seat," she's asking "what skills do we need two years from now, and how...

Hiring therapists for in-home child care is challenging because it's not a suitable role for everyone. Many candidates are surprised by the difficulty and realize they are wrong for the job only after being hired. Steffanie Chaviano, VP of Talent Acquisition at Autism Learning Partners, has spent eight years solving that exact problem at scale across 60 regions and 16 states. In this episode of Ta...

SAP has over 100,000 employees, operates in nearly every country on earth, and generates revenue in the tens of billions. So when their Global Head of Talent Discovery says the old way of hiring isn't working anymore, it's worth paying attention. In this episode of Talent All Stars, Eric Goldstein explains why SAP ditched "talent acquisition" as a concept, how they're building a skills-based hirin...

This episode originally aired September 30, 2025—and it's too good not to revisit. Jennifer Christie has built one of the most fascinating careers in people leadership: running presidential personnel at the White House, holding senior posts at American Express and Twitter, and now serving as Chief People Officer at Docusign. Safe to say she's seen leadership from every angle. In this encore episod...

Verisk is a global data analytics company that helps businesses understand and manage risk. Now they’re tasked with completely rethinking how to build a talent pipeline in an industry where the skills didn't exist five years ago. In this episode of Talent All Stars, Verisk's CHRO Sunita Holzer breaks down how the company built a data science recruiting engine from scratch during the pandemic, why...

Joy Rothschild leads people strategy for 20,000 employees across 50+ Omni Hotels & Resorts properties, each with its own character and story. But her edge isn't just hiring for a hospitality empire—it's spotting the quiet ones in the corners, the people others overlook, and betting on them before they're ready. In this episode of Talent All Stars, Joy shares her unexpected path into HR, the career...

Pamela J. Brown leads talent strategy for 530 Crunch Fitness locations, hiring 500+ personal trainers a year in an intensely competitive market. But her real superpower? Building leaders who build leaders, opening doors for the next generation, and proving that great people strategy drives revenue, not just cost savings. In this episode of Talent All Stars, Pamela shares practical wisdom from 25 y...

A great culture doesn’t just happen by accident. Marvin Boakye, Chief Human Resources Officer at Cummins, believes it must be engineered with the same discipline, rigor, and accountability as any complex system. For him, culture is not an abstract idea. It is something leaders design through daily behavior, decisions, and tradeoffs. In this episode of Talent All Stars, Marvin explains how Cummins...

In this special Year-End Wrap-Up of Talent All Stars, host Dave Travers reflects on the conversations that shaped the talent landscape in 2025. Through insights from leaders across healthcare, real estate, retail, technology, aviation, gaming, and more, this episode breaks down the five themes that defined how the best teams hired, developed, and retained talent this year. Dave revisits the voices...

Octapharma Plasma operates donor centers nationwide, supplying critical plasma used in treatments that impact patients daily. Leading the talent strategy behind this essential work is Monte Garrett, Director of Talent Acquisition. His leadership philosophy is founded on a framework he mastered as a teenager: the strategic discipline of chess. Monte's mentor taught him to approach every business ch...

First Student is North America’s largest provider of school transportation, moving millions of students every day across the United States and Canada (more than every major airline combined). Leading the people side of this operation is Renee Boydo, Vice President of HR Experience, who guides the teams responsible for hiring, training, and supporting the drivers and staff who keep children safe. I...

Premise Health is the largest direct healthcare provider in the United States, operating more than 800 wellness and care centers across 46 states. At the center of its growth is Liz Reimer , Chief Human Resources Officer, who leads the company’s people strategy and talent function. In this episode of Talent All-Stars , Liz shares how her team re-engineered recruitment by dividing talent acquisitio...

JLL helps organizations buy, build, lease, and operate the spaces where business happens, from hospitals and data centers to offices and logistics hubs. Behind this global real estate and investment-management powerhouse is a talent operation that keeps more than 100,000 people moving in over 80 countries. In this episode, Jane Curran, Global Head of HR Operations at JLL, shares how she built a ca...