As the global workforce navigates the most disruptive technology shift in a generation, one of the world’s largest employers has quietly recalibrated what it looks for in new talent. According to Becky Schmitt, Chief People Officer at PepsiCo, the company’s hiring strategy has narrowed to three defining qualities: hustle, agility, and curiosity.
It is a simple framework, but in a labour market reshaped by artificial intelligence, automation, and a generational rethink of how careers are built, simple has become powerful.
From Technical Skills to Human Traits
The shift reflects a broader truth taking hold across global enterprises: technical skills have a shorter shelf life than ever before. AI tools can be learned in weeks. Workflows are being rebuilt in real time. What separates strong performers from the rest, increasingly, is how they think and how they adapt, not just what they know.
PepsiCo, which employs over 318,000 people across more than 200 countries, has built its hiring playbook around this reality. The company is looking for people who lean into ambiguity, take ownership of outcomes, and remain genuinely interested in learning new things, even as those things change every quarter.
“We are looking for people with hustle. People who are agile. People who are curious. In the AI era, those are the qualities that compound.”— Becky Schmitt, Chief People Officer, PepsiCo
Why This Matters Beyond PepsiCo
The framework is being read closely across the HR community for a reason. PepsiCo’s hiring decisions ripple across industries, its operations span beverages, snacks, supply chain, manufacturing, marketing, and technology. The skills it values today often become the skills the wider market values tomorrow.
For CHROs, founders, and hiring managers navigating their own AI transitions, Schmitt’s framework offers a clear, transferable lens. It signals that the next decade of high-performing talent will not be defined by polished CVs and traditional credentials, but by a mindset built for change.
A Quiet Recalibration of What “Top Talent” Means
Schmitt’s comments arrive at a moment when major employers, from Accenture, which is training 550,000 of its people in AI, to LinkedIn, which is openly questioning whether the traditional org chart still has a future, are all asking the same underlying question: what does it mean to be employable in the AI era?
PepsiCo’s answer is unusually grounded. Hustle. Agility. Curiosity. Three words. Three observable traits. Three filters every candidate now passes through.
In an era full of buzzwords and frameworks, that simplicity may itself be the most useful idea of all.
Sources: Fortune, PepsiCo, LinkedIn
