Meghan Walker

From Candidate Care to Talent Leadership

Walker began her talent acquisition journey at Giant Eagle, first as an intern and then as a candidate care coordinator before moving into recruiting proper. From there she moved through a series of deliberately different environments, and that variety became her competitive advantage. At Wayfair, a large retail organization, she spent three years learning an industry she had never recruited for. She has worked in high-volume settings and in specialized, strategic hiring. She has worked at scale and at startups.

The result is a leader who refuses to pick a lane. "I sort of try to bring the best of all of those worlds," she says: the structure and efficiency of a large enterprise, paired with the thoughtfulness and flexibility that smaller environments demand. It is a rare combination, and it is why she is trusted with building functions that do not yet exist.

At Duolingo, Walker started as an individual contributor and was not certain she wanted to manage people at all. She now leads a team and calls that shift one of the best things that happened to her. Among her signature contributions: standing up the company's first sourcing organization. Duolingo had never had sourcers. Walker helped build the foundation for what that function could be.

What Should Be Automated, and What Shouldn't

Walker's view of AI is neither breathless nor defensive. Recruiting was already a fast-paced industry, she notes, and AI has made it at least ten times faster while pushing the function to become far more operational and far more data-driven. She welcomes the automation of repetitive work. What she wants leaders to interrogate is the distinction most of the industry is skipping.

"What can we automate and what should we automate? I think there's a difference there," she says. Building trust with a candidate. Walking a hiring manager through a difficult decision. These moments, she argues, are the ones that actually change outcomes, and they remain irreducibly human. Her framework is simple and demanding at once: use AI to create efficiency, then reinvest that reclaimed time into the parts of recruiting that require judgment, empathy, and relationship building. AI should reduce the administrative burden, not the human connection.

She is candid that she has not yet seen that connection erode, but she treats it as a risk worth naming early. "Just because we can doesn't necessarily mean we should," she says. And she puts the responsibility squarely on leaders to create the space and the guardrails so recruiters know where the boundaries are, and where they are free to push them.

A Business Function, Not a Support Function

Walker's second piece of advice cuts closer to the profession's self-image. Recruiting is a high-pressure environment that can feel thankless, and it is too often treated as a support function when it should be understood as a business function. In that climate, she says, it becomes very easy to focus only on the metrics.

The best leaders, in her view, balance results with how those results are achieved. She leads with a coaching orientation and spends significant time helping her team build the durable skills: how to build judgment, how to assess talent, how to influence stakeholders, how to navigate ambiguity. "You could teach anyone how to recruit," she says. These are the capabilities that separate a competent recruiter from a great one over a career.

She also thinks empathy is underrated in recruiting leadership, and she rejects the premise that it comes at a cost. The best recruiters and recruiting leaders, she argues, are the ones who can build trust, tell a compelling story, and make thoughtful decisions, not simply move fast. Speed matters. It just is not the whole job.

Her own leaders proved the point by seeing potential in her before she saw it herself. Walker now spends her days doing the same for the people on her team, which may be the most fitting return on an accidental beginning.