In this episode, I talk with Blair Bennett, Senior Vice President of Talent Acquisition at PepsiCo, about transforming TA inside one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies. PepsiCo is a $90 billion-plus organization operating in more than 200 countries and territories, with over 300,000 associates. Approximately 230,000 employees are frontline workers who help make, move, and sell its products. Blair’s global TA organization supports roughly 75,000 requisitions each year, including approximately 40,000 frontline requisitions. She shares how PepsiCo moved from a complex, decentralized structure toward a centralized operating model organized around three areas: strategy, enablement, and execution. The goal wasn’t consistency for its own sake—it was to create a foundation that could respond faster, generate better insights, and support the future needs of the business. We explore PepsiCo’s work to reimagine frontline hiring after bringing its U.S. food and beverage businesses together under one North America organization. Rather than starting with technology, Blair’s team conducted more than 100 interviews with business leaders, HR partners, and other stakeholders, mapped the existing processes, and identified the most important pain points. That work informed a new model combining internal capabilities, an RPO partner, centralized recruitment marketing, and technology designed around PepsiCo’s specific needs. Blair also discusses the evolving scope of TA. PepsiCo is developing capabilities in talent foresight, career transitions, talent intelligence, and scenario planning—helping the business think beyond filling today’s requisitions to understand the skills, tasks, and workforce models it may need several years from now. Questions We Explore How do you transform TA across a company operating with high complexity?What must be standardized before technology and automation can scale successfully?How should frontline hiring differ for entry-level, skilled, and highly technical roles?Where can automation improve hiring—and where do recruiters and hiring managers still add unique value?How can TA help the business anticipate future talent needs instead of waiting for requisitions?
