Lori Busch

From Hotel Management School to Talent Operations

Busch went to school for hotel management and started in operations, first as a restaurant manager and then as a VIP guest relations manager at a hotel. In hospitality, especially at smaller businesses without formal HR departments, managers do their own recruiting. Her second hotel role was at an opening property, which meant building a team from nothing. She was sourcing, screening and running the whole process herself, and the lesson landed early and permanently: getting the right people onto a team is not an administrative task, it is the job.

That realization moved her into agency recruiting, placing temporary talent in the creative and design space during the early 2000s, when the market was genuinely difficult. She worked primarily on the candidate side, and the satisfaction came from precision rather than volume, finding the one role that matched exactly what a candidate in the market was looking for and then making that match work for the company too. The corporate chapter followed, first at TripAdvisor and then at Toast, and her center of gravity gradually shifted from filling roles to designing the machinery behind them: operations, systems, analytics and the broader people operations function.

The People Who Handed Her a Blueprint

Two managers shaped the arc, and in a full circle worth noting, one of them leads her again today. Jeff, now her boss at Toast, was running the recruiting team at TripAdvisor and standing up its sourcing function for the first time when he gave Busch her first in-house sourcing role. What she took from him was the value of vision at scale, the ability to picture what a sourcing function could become at a company of that size before it existed on paper.

Brandon came into TripAdvisor as its first operations leader, and he brought Busch into the ops world in earnest. He showed her what an operations function actually looks like and how you construct one from the ground up, a skill she then carried directly into building the ops function at Toast from scratch. Different context, same principle: someone had to be first, and the way each of them approached a blank page became her template.

Inspiration also arrives from outside her reporting lines. Through the Greenhouse customer advisory board she works closely with Nkem and Robbie, both senior product leaders there, and she finds their vision for how product can evolve the recruiting space genuinely instructive. She says something similar about the founders behind WriteHire, two people she describes as exceptionally smart. And then there is her own team, where several people who started in recruiting roles crossed over into operations and went on to strong roles at Toast or elsewhere. Those pivots are, in a sense, her own story running again in other people.

AI That Earns Its Place in the Stack

Busch is enthusiastic about AI for a specific reason: it makes people more productive and it gives them better information about work they are already doing. At Toast, her team uses WriteHire to record candidate conversations, and the effect has shown up in both directions. Scorecard quality has gone up. So has scorecard quantity. The organization now has far more robust visibility into what candidates are actually saying and what the recurring themes are, which feeds straight back into a better candidate experience.

She has also built for herself. Running a team of 60 means a calendar dense with meetings, so she created chief of staff agents that pull insights out of her recorded meetings and keep her anchored to what needs to happen that day and what belongs on the checklist. It is the support function she has never had as a direct report, assembled from tools already at her fingertips. Beyond that, she leans on AI for content creation and for shaping the same message differently depending on the audience receiving it, and for connecting workflows across the various parts of her remit so they hand off to each other more cleanly. She calls this an exciting space and time to be operating in, and she means it as a builder rather than a spectator.

Advice for 2026

The counsel Busch returns to most often, and repeats to her own teams, is deceptively simple: know what you are solving. Anchor in the problem, not the tool. Her concern about the current wave is not that AI is overhyped but that the sheer volume of interesting capability tempts leaders to work backward, adopting a solution and then hunting for a problem it might fit.

Her recommended sequence is the reverse. Identify your biggest pain points and hardest challenges first, then evaluate whether a tool, a program or a process change actually addresses them, and be honest when the answer is no. It is a discipline she applies to her own buying decisions too. When something new crosses her desk, the questions are where it fits in the existing tech ecosystem and what investment it justifies, not how impressive the capability looks in isolation. Understand the problem before you try to solve it, and every decision downstream gets easier.