Michelle Weber

A Career Built in the Field

Weber's path into talent leadership ran through the operating side of retail rather than through a recruiting desk. She started as a general manager, moved into her first HR functional role, and was later promoted to director in an HR business partner capacity. By the time she joined Old Navy she was head of field HR, running people strategy for a workforce spread across hundreds of locations.

That grounding shows up in how she talks about the function. Weber is unusually candid about what talent acquisition can become if no one intervenes. "TA has this kind of inherent nature of being transactional and very operational and tactical," she says. Her ambition, consistently, has been to pull the work up a level: away from the day-to-day grind of task load management inside a system and toward the judgment, advisory and relationship work that only a person can do.

She has also led through genuine crisis. Inside Gap Inc., Weber and a close colleague built and ran a crisis response team during COVID, standing up a call center and, in her words, revolutionizing how the company delivered HR. It is the kind of assignment that tends to permanently change a leader's tolerance for ambiguity.

The People Who Changed the Trajectory

Ask Weber who made her, and she names names. The first is Savannah McAvoy, her district manager during her years as a general manager. McAvoy led with what Weber calls radical and direct candor, always rooted in development rather than criticism, and she paired that candor with real risk. She moved Weber out of a store role and into her first HR functional job, then later promoted her to director as an HR business partner, betting on demonstrated results and demonstrated potential rather than prior experience. "Her mentorship and belief changed the trajectory of my career in a really meaningful way," Weber says.

The second is Amanda Griffin, a peer she still has the pleasure of working alongside. When Weber ran field HR at Old Navy, Griffin led field learning and development, which made them customer and partner to one another. What Weber took from the relationship was less about hierarchy than proximity: Griffin challenged her thinking, sharpened her strategy, helped her bring a big vision to life at scale, and was in the trenches with her when it counted, including through the COVID response. Weber describes her as a ride or die collaborator, and draws a broader lesson from it. Our greatest development does not always come from a manager or someone more senior, she argues. Sometimes it comes from the peers already around us, if we take the time to pick up our head and look to the left and the right.

The third was the executive coach Weber engaged when she first stepped into the expanded end-to-end talent role. That work taught her how to lead at scale, how to manage complex stakeholder relationships, and how to lead through influence rather than authority. It also reframed how she saw herself, pushing her to develop her strengths instead of over-indexing on the things she believed she was not good at. Those early sessions still travel with her a decade later.

AI as a Lift, Not a Threat

Weber is bullish on artificial intelligence in talent acquisition, and for a specific reason: it attacks precisely the part of the job she has spent her career trying to shrink. "AI really has the power to transform our functions," she says, and what excites her is not efficiency for its own sake but what efficiency buys back. Automating the transactional layer frees recruiters to spend time where it matters most, which in her view is candidate care and candidate sell.

That is the strategic case she makes internally. Lifting the workload is what allows a team to stop being an order-taking service and start behaving like talent advisors, nurturing pipelines with genuine attention instead of processing them between system updates. The technology, in other words, is a means of restoring the human parts of recruiting rather than replacing them.

Why Not, Instead of What If

Her advice to other talent leaders is direct. Don't be afraid of it. Experiment with it. Identify the high frequency tasks that can be automated, and use the reclaimed hours to augment your time and your impact. Weber frames the shift as an emotional one as much as a technical one: move out of a place of fear and what if, and into why not, what can it do, and how can it help me be even more effective at what I'm doing today.

The instruction that follows is the one she lives by. Lean into the change and the disruption early, be part of how the function gets reshaped, and do not sit and wait on the sidelines. Coming from someone whose entire career pivoted on saying yes to a thirty-day assignment, the advice carries some weight.

Paying the Spotlight Forward

Asked to name peers who deserve recognition, Weber offered two without hesitation. Steve Pringle, head of global field talent acquisition at Apple, she calls one of the most agile and committed TA leaders she has ever worked with: deeply tenured, relentlessly business-centered, and a model for how to keep adapting and stay on the forefront of the function. Sarah Nathanson, the long-tenured head of talent acquisition at Aritzia, earns her admiration for something harder than growth alone. "They're just like unwavering in their talent standards," Weber says, praising the quality and consistency of hiring the company has sustained while continuing to scale.

It is a telling pair of choices from a leader whose own career was built by people who took chances on her, challenged her thinking, and refused to let her settle. Weber has clearly been paying attention to what that costs, and what it returns.