Skills Over Experience: How Udemy Rebuilt Its Hiring Framework: Ale Pegnim (LIVE @ Transform 2026)

About this episode

Alessandra Pegnim discusses Udemy's innovative hiring practices and the integration of AI in recruitment.

WATCH: https://youtu.be/ZJCK-R5w4yg Recorded live at Transform 2026, this episode features Alessandra Pegnim — known as Ale — Head of Talent Acquisition and Employer Brand at Udemy, the public online learning platform with nearly 1,400 employees globally. Oli spent 16 years on the agency side before making the move in-house, giving her a perspective on recruiting that flips the typical career narrative and brings a closer-and-urgency mindset to every search she runs. The conversation covers the full recruiting stack at Udemy: how they manage a 50% inbound hire rate (unusually high for a company of their size), why they eliminated referral bonuses and watched referral quality improve, how they build skills-based hiring rubrics in partnership with hiring managers, and what it looks like to realign a search when the role evolves mid-process. Oli also talks through their outbound sourcing tools, the balance between inbound and outbound, and how internal mobility factors into their talent strategy. The AI section of this episode is one of the most practically useful in the series. Oli shares a team exercise she ran to reduce AI anxiety — asking recruiters to list what they did at the…

People in this episode

Host: Adam Posner

Guest: Alessandra Pegnim

Topics covered

• hiring framework
• skills-based hiring
• recruitment strategies
• AI in recruiting
• internal mobility

Keywords

• Udemy
• hiring framework
• skills-based hiring
• AI in recruiting
• recruitment strategies
• inbound hiring
• internal mobility

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Udemy, Transform 2026

More episodes of The POZCAST: Decoding Success with Adam Posner

• BEST OF: Walking Barefoot Across the US for Mens Mental Health Awareness: Anton Nootenboom · June 5, 2026 · 58 min
• Unlocking Human Potential: Torrance Hampton’s Journey of Self Discovery · May 29, 2026 · 48 min
• The Messy Middle of HR Tech Nobody's Solving — Until Now. Onboarded Co-Founder Mike Johnson (LIVE @ Transform 2026) · May 22, 2026 · 9 min
• One Size Fits Many: How Wellhub Turned Personalized Wellbeing Into a Retention Strategy: CPO Lívia de Bastos Martini (LIVE @ Transform 2026) · May 21, 2026 · 13 min
• AI Offense and AI Defense: How Greenhouse Is Redesigning Its Entire Interview Process: VP of People Transformation, Ariana Moon (LIVE @ Transform 2026) · May 20, 2026 · 16 min
• We Went from Doing More to Doing Better: HR Tech Analyst Kyle Lagunas's State of the Union on AI (LIVE @ Transform 2026) · May 19, 2026 · 17 min