Mary Price

Mary Price

Founder, Penfield Talent - Penfield Talent

For Mary Price, recruiting began inside Apple’s retail organization.

At the time, Steve Jobs and Ron Johnson, then SVP of Apple Retail, recognized that Apple’s retail stores were filled with strong talent. They wondered what might happen if some of that talent had the opportunity to gain corporate experience.

That idea became the Apple Retail to Corporate Exchange Program.

The program opened 25 roles, and one of them was for a recruiter.

Mary had never officially worked in recruiting, but as a people manager in the Apple store, she had already been hiring, onboarding, and training team members.

When she saw the recruiter role, something clicked.

“That recruiter role really sounded like me,” Mary recalls.

She loved Apple and felt a responsibility to help protect the company by bringing in the right people.

“People are the reason companies are successful,” she says. “Build a strong team, and you will build a strong company.”

Mary was selected for the program, and that became the beginning of her recruiting career.

Learning from Leaders Who Saw Potential

Looking back, Mary credits several leaders with shaping how she thinks about recruiting and leadership.

The first was Sean Chelly, who was her recruiter at Apple and later became her boss.

For Mary, Sean changed her life by helping her see what was possible.

“He had such an artful way of really seeing people and seeing their potential,” she says.

Sean helped create space for Mary to realize her own potential through a job. Later, when she worked for him as a recruiter, she learned from the way he partnered with the business, led his team, and thought about talent.

The second leader was Brendan Brown, who was VP of Recruiting at LinkedIn.

Mary describes working at LinkedIn as feeling like “getting a master’s degree in recruiting.”

Under the organization Brendan helped build, she learned how to use data, run effective intake meetings, hold leaders accountable, partner with the business, and understand talent brand.

The third leader was Erin Scruggs, now VP of Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn.

Mary describes Erin as direct, smart, creative, strong with stakeholders, and deeply committed to her team.

“She is unapologetically direct,” Mary says.

Together, those leaders shaped Mary’s understanding of what great recruiting leadership looks like.

Automation, Efficiency, and Experimentation

As AI and new technologies reshape recruiting, Mary sees three major themes: automation, efficiency, and experimentation.

For automation, she points to the need for companies to identify where manual steps can be removed from the process.

One example from her own team was onboarding. By working with HRIS partners, they helped create a smoother handoff from Greenhouse to Workday so that onboarding could begin automatically before a new hire’s start date.

“It’s like a relay race,” Mary says. “As the baton is getting handed off to the next team, it doesn’t drop.”

Efficiency has also become increasingly important, especially as teams are asked to do more with fewer resources.

At OneTrust, Mary’s team experimented with an internal bot that could search SharePoint pages, talent pages, documents, and internal resources to answer common questions.

That helped reduce the burden on recruiting operations and allowed the team to focus on more strategic work.

Her team also ran a recruiter hackathon using AI to generate creative solutions. One idea became a hiring manager training and onboarding program focused on setting standards for hiring.

Solving Problems with AI

Mary believes AI should not be adopted just because it is the latest trend.

Instead, she encourages talent leaders to focus on real problems.

“I would really push teams to experiment with solving problems,” she says.

For Mary, that means giving teams space to learn, experiment, and use AI thoughtfully.

Rather than simply asking people to use ChatGPT prompts, she believes leaders should challenge teams to think bigger: Can they create an agent? Can they build a bot? Can they automate a workflow?

The people closest to the work often understand the problems best.

“Have them be part of the solution,” she says.

Advice for Talent Leaders Heading into 2026

As talent teams move further into 2026, Mary encourages leaders not to chase every new trend.

AI adoption is moving quickly, but speed alone should not be the goal.

Leaders should encourage learning, experimentation, and problem-solving while staying grounded in the real needs of the business and the people doing the work.

Most importantly, Mary believes talent leaders must protect human judgment.

“Don’t ever let the temptation of efficiency replace human judgment,” she says.

For Mary, recruiting is still about people working with people.

AI can help automate tasks, improve efficiency, and support better workflows, but it should not replace the human judgment required to fill roles thoughtfully.

By combining curiosity, experimentation, operational discipline, and a deep respect for human decision-making, Mary Price represents the kind of talent leader helping recruiting move forward without losing sight of what makes the work meaningful.