Dawn Carter
New Dawn Strategy Group
“For me it wasn't a natural lane. It was more of just trying things out and finding what made me feel happy and gave me gratitude, and that ended up being talent acquisition.”
Dawn Carter has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 leaders in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are nominated by peers or found by committees that look for excellent work wherever it happens, then chosen for the depth of their craft and their impact on hiring. This is Dawn's story.
When Dawn Carter joined Amazon in 2005, the company's corporate population was roughly 12,500 people. Today it is closer to 350,000. She remembers the early years as a time when talent teams asked forgiveness rather than permission, when a small, nimble group could simply try something and see what happened. That instinct, build it, test it, fix it, has followed her through Walt Disney Imagineering, NetApp, Uber and eBay, and now anchors the consulting practice she runs at New Dawn Strategy Group.
Carter is a builder of early career and emerging talent programs, the kind of work that requires equal parts systems design and human judgment. It is also work she arrived at by experiment rather than by plan, which may explain why she is so unsentimental about how careers actually get made.
From Restaurant Floors to Imagineering
Carter spent the first four years of her working life in the hotel and restaurant industry before deciding she was done with it. What came next was not a promotion so much as a reset: an entry level role at the bottom of an HR function, inside a Disney development company, reporting to a boss who saw something worth investing in. He arranged for the company to pay for her to return to school, and she earned a certificate in human resources at UCLA.
From there she worked her way sideways as much as upward, moving through operations, HR generalist territory and talent acquisition operations. Roughly a year into that journey she landed in talent acquisition proper, and shortly after that in early career hiring and the diversity hiring work the industry then called D&I. She ran that portfolio across the Disney development company and eventually across Walt Disney Imagineering.
"For me it wasn't a natural lane," she says of the path. "It was more of just trying things out and finding what made me feel happy and gave me gratitude, and that ended up being talent acquisition." It is a useful thing for someone who hires students and new graduates to believe: that a career is discovered as often as it is designed.
On AI: Speed Without Surrendering the Candidate
Carter is direct about the scale of what is happening. AI, she says, is drastically changing the talent acquisition world, and she sees organizations everywhere reworking their tech stacks to understand where and how it can influence the funnel. She is careful not to prescribe a single answer. Every organization, in her view, is at a place that makes sense for them, and the serious ones are weighing three things at once: efficiency, risk, and candidate engagement.
That last one is where she draws her line. Agents will speed the process, and she expects to see them across the board. But the process itself has to keep evolving around the candidate experience, not away from it. "You can't have an AI agent or AI drive everything related to hiring," she says. The opportunity is real; the delegation has limits.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Dawn. We are honored to welcome Dawn Carter to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Dawn. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.
