HR Leaders: How PepsiCo Approaches 60,000 Hires a Year

Chris Rainey [00:00:00]:
Today I’m joined by Blair Bennett, SVP of Global Talent Acquisition at PepsiCo. Blair, welcome to HR Leaders.

Blair Bennett [00:00:10]:
Thanks, Chris. Great to be here.

Chris Rainey [00:00:14]:
PepsiCo is one of the most recognizable brands on earth — but let’s start with the talent challenge. 60,000 hires a year. What does that actually look like from the inside?

Blair Bennett [00:00:26]:
It’s a global operation. We have more than 300,000 employees across dozens of countries. The 60,000 annual hires cover everything from frontline manufacturing and distribution workers to corporate and commercial roles. No two markets are the same — the hiring needs in a manufacturing facility in Mexico are different from a sales team in London or a distribution center in Ohio. So the first challenge is always: how do you build a system that’s globally consistent but locally relevant?

Chris Rainey [00:01:20]:
How do you approach that?

Blair Bennett [00:01:25]:
We spent a lot of time asking the right question, which is: what’s actually broken? Not “what technology should we buy?” but “where are the real friction points for candidates and for our hiring managers?” And when we did that honestly, we found that a lot of our existing processes were designed for a different era. They were built for compliance, not for speed or experience. So before we brought in new technology, we redesigned the workflows. Because if you automate a broken process, you just get a faster broken process.

Chris Rainey [00:02:30]:
That’s a really important distinction. What did the redesign look like?

Blair Bennett [00:02:37]:
We mapped the entire candidate journey for our highest-volume roles. Where does someone first hear about PepsiCo as an employer? What’s the first action they take? Where do they drop off? What happens between application and first day? A lot of the drop-off we were seeing wasn’t because people weren’t interested — it was because we were slow. We’d get a great applicant, and then three days would go by before anyone reached out. In frontline hiring especially, that’s a lifetime.

Chris Rainey [00:03:40]:
So speed was the main lever?

Blair Bennett [00:03:45]:
Speed was one of them. Simplicity was the other. We were asking questions in our application that nobody actually used to make a hiring decision. Why are they there? Because they’ve always been there. Removing that friction — shortening the application, making it mobile-first, getting to a response faster — moved our completion rates significantly. Then when we layered AI on top of those cleaner workflows, the impact was amplified.

Chris Rainey [00:04:45]:
What’s the role of AI in the new model?

Blair Bennett [00:04:50]:
AI handles the high-frequency, low-judgment tasks — initial screening, scheduling, answering candidate questions about the role or the location. It’s available 24/7, responds immediately, and doesn’t make candidates feel like they’re waiting. That frees our recruiters to focus on things that actually require human judgment: assessing culture fit, building relationships with hiring managers, supporting the onboarding transition. The recruiter’s job gets more strategic, not less relevant.

Chris Rainey [00:06:00]:
Any pushback internally on the shift?

Blair Bennett [00:06:05]:
There’s always some. Change is hard, especially at scale. The key for us was being transparent about why we were doing it and what success would look like. We involved recruiters in the design of the new workflows — they had real input on what the AI should and shouldn’t handle. When people feel like the change is happening with them rather than to them, adoption is much stronger.

Chris Rainey [00:07:10]:
Blair, this has been an incredibly insightful conversation. Thank you for walking us through what transformation really looks like at that scale.

Blair Bennett [00:07:20]:
My pleasure. It’s a continuous journey — but we’re in a much better place than we were three years ago.