Meghan Magette

The Question She Asks Every New Recruiter

Magette opens conversations with every recruiter who joins her orbit with the same question: how did you get here? She asks because the answer is almost never linear. "It doesn't seem like anyone necessarily sets out to be a recruiter when they grow up," she says. What fascinates her is not the accident of entry but what happens after it, the way people stumble into the profession and then fall in love with it.

Her own version began in human resources. She joined Hilton as an engagement coordinator, working on team member engagement, and when it came time to consider a next move she found herself drawn to campus recruitment. That was the turn. "There is nothing like giving someone a job," she says. "And even more exciting, there was nothing like giving someone their first job." Early talent recruiting put her at the exact point where a career either starts or stalls, and she has never really left that vantage point. She talks about the candidate journey not as a funnel but as a trajectory, something a single offer can bend permanently in someone's favor.

That conviction is what separates her from practitioners who treat requisitions as inventory. For Magette, an offer extended at Hilton is not a transaction closed. It is a life redirected, and the responsibility that comes with that is the part of the job she has built a career around.

Two Leaders, Two Lessons

Ask Magette who shaped her and she names two people quickly. The first is Diana Vaughn, her very first manager at Hilton, who recently retired after a career Magette calls incredibly inspiring. Vaughn's reputation preceded her inside the building. "You would meet new people and they'd ask, what team are you on? And I'd say, I work for Diana. And they're like, oh, you're so lucky," Magette recalls. Vaughn was known for developing people and investing in the ones she led, and the lesson that stuck was about flexibility: stay open on your career path, and jump into the moments and opportunities that look scary or that you have never considered, because you never know what road they lead to.

The second is Christine McGinnis, her current leader, and the lesson there is structural. McGinnis has a gift for partnership and problem solving that Magette has studied closely. "There's truly not a problem that you cannot solve," she says. The skill she is trying to absorb is the ability to take an intimidating challenge, the kind that makes a room go quiet, and break it down into something simple and approachable enough that people will follow you into it. Bringing people along on the journey, in Magette's telling, is not a soft add-on to execution. It is the execution.

Between them, Vaughn and McGinnis taught her the two halves of the job she now holds: the courage to take on unfamiliar work, and the discipline to make that work legible to everyone else.

Automate the Ordinary, Humanize the Extraordinary

AI is the topic of nearly every conference and hallway conversation in talent right now, and Magette has been deliberate about where she plants her flag. Hospitality, she points out, is a people serving people business. The idea that AI will fully automate or take over the recruitment process does not hold up against what her teams actually need to assess: whether a candidate genuinely understands service, and whether they can deliver it. That evaluation is human work.

Her framing came from an executive at Edward Jones speaking at a conference, and it has since become something close to a personal motto: automate the ordinary so you can humanize the extraordinary. Magette sees real upside in what automation can absorb, the administrative load that has always been an unglamorous constant of recruiting. But the payoff she cares about is what recruiters do with the time they get back.

"What I love for our recruiters, hopefully that gives them more time to provide that great candidate experience, to provide that best hiring manager experience," she says. The point is not efficiency for its own sake. It is to lift the administrative burden so recruiters can concentrate on the conversations and interactions that actually determine whether a great hire happens. In an industry busy debating whether AI replaces recruiters, Magette has quietly reframed the question as what it frees them to do.

Play the Long Game

Her advice to other talent leaders comes in two connected parts, and the first is a direct inheritance from Diana Vaughn. "Don't collect job titles, collect experiences," she tells early talent, and she means it as a corrective to a very common anxiety. People fixate on milestones and timelines, on making manager within three years and being promoted again after that. Magette does not dismiss ambition. She simply argues that the better question is what experiences and skills each opportunity has taught you, and that answering it honestly builds a resume and a development plan more durable than any promotion schedule.

The second piece is patience. It is easy, she notes, to take the short term decision that elevates you right now. Her habit is to insert a pause and ask a harder question: how does this elevate me in the long term, and what does it mean for my team, my growth, and my organization? "A pause point is always, always a good idea to really determine what your next step should be," she says.

Sixteen and a half years in, the philosophy has proven itself. Magette's career at Hilton is not a ladder she climbed so much as a set of experiences she gathered, from engagement work to campus recruitment to senior leadership in talent acquisition, each one widening what she could see. She now spends her days making sure the recruiters on her teams have the room to do the same, and that the candidates on the other side of the phone get the version of the process she fell in love with in the first place.