Megan Colonna Zickwolf

A Deliberate Path Into Recruiting

The formative step came early. An internship at Target introduced her to the reality that campus recruiting is a discipline with its own practitioners, its own craft, and its own dedicated seat inside a major enterprise. Meeting a campus recruiter in the wild, so to speak, turned an affinity into a career path. She has been in the profession ever since.

Today her focus sits in the early career space at H&R Block, arguably the most demanding corner of talent acquisition right now. Early career hiring means meeting a generation entering the workforce with different expectations, different tools, and a different relationship to work itself. It requires a recruiter who is genuinely curious about the person on the other side of the table, which is precisely the muscle Colonna Zickwolf has been building since her university days.

The Mentors Who Shaped Her Leadership

Ask her who shaped her and she does not reach outside her own building. Both of the mentors she names sit at H&R Block alongside her.

The first is Leona Flores, the company's Director of Belonging and Corporate Impact. Flores, she says, brings an immense amount of knowledge and professionalism to the work of leading people from a wide range of backgrounds, a skill set that has proved directly applicable as Colonna Zickwolf's own remit evolved toward the early career population and the generational shift that comes with it. Flores has been a consistent advocate, the kind of mentor who shapes a career by insisting on its possibilities.

The second is Tiffany Monroe, H&R Block's Chief People and Culture Officer. If Flores taught her how to lead across difference, Monroe has modeled what senior leadership can look like at its best. Monroe, in Colonna Zickwolf's telling, set the tone for the culture of the organization itself. She studies Monroe closely: her mannerisms, the way she leads, the way she empowers others. It is not imitation so much as apprenticeship, and it explains why Colonna Zickwolf's own leadership philosophy centers on creating room for other people to do their best work.

Building AI in Phases, With a Human at the Center

Colonna Zickwolf is clear eyed about the fact that every company is metabolizing AI at its own pace, and she is candid about the sequence H&R Block has followed. Phase one was subtraction: deploying AI and agentic AI, building agents and bots, and pointing them at the administrative work that quietly consumes a recruiting team's week. The logic was simple. Clear the plates and you free the minds for the bigger things.

Phase two moved from efficiency to integrity. The question became how to implement these tools in a way that ensures equitable and fair recruiting processes, a governance instinct that many organizations are only now discovering they needed. Phase three, which she is genuinely excited about, brings that intelligence directly into the applicant tracking system.

What she will not do is mistake the tooling for the job. "With recruiting, there's just that need for that personal connection," she says. Her philosophy is not that AI will take over everything, but that the enduring competitive advantage in hiring will always be a person in the loop, a human being who can connect with a candidate. In a market awash in automation enthusiasm, that is a leader drawing a deliberate line.

More Than Outcomes

Her advice to other talent leaders comes in two parts, and both are unfashionably human. The first is her operating definition of leadership: creating the conditions for her team and her partners to succeed, paired with a strong emphasis on clear and candid feedback. Support and directness, in her view, are not in tension. They are the same commitment expressed two ways.

The second reframes the profession itself. Recruiting and programmatic functions, she argues, amount to more than delivering or driving outcomes. "We have an opportunity as recruiters to shape how people show up as professionals," she says. That means emotionally investing in development rather than simply hiring strong contributors and moving on to the next requisition. It is a longer view of the work, one that measures success not only at the offer stage but in what a person becomes afterward.

She practices that same generosity outside her own team. At the ORX Recruiter Conference she made a point of connecting with rising practitioners in the field, and she is quick to put other people's names forward. For a leader who found her calling in the part of the job where you get to know someone, it tracks perfectly.