Hannah Hostetter, Talent Development Associate, helps shape how employees receive feedback and develop their careers at Wayfair. Her work spans executing biannual performance cycles and analyzing review feedback to identify themes that inform learning and development priorities across the business.
A growing focus of Hannah’s work has been leveraging GenAI to analyze performance review feedback at scale. By using these tools to surface themes and quantify patterns across cycles, she is helping turn qualitative feedback into actionable insights. These insights directly inform planning, prioritization and employee development support.
Read on to learn more about Hannah and the projects she’s most excited about right now.
How has generative AI (GenAI) reshaped your approach to turning employee feedback into action?
Using GenAI changed the way we approached feedback by helping us quantify themes and create comparable patterns across cycles. Before this capability, we relied more heavily on quantitative data, samples from the larger review cohort and broader business priorities for how we shaped our strategy.
These are still important inputs, but now we can also analyze reviews directly to understand how frequently themes appear, how they vary across work groups and how they shift over time. This gives us a more consistent way to evaluate employee and manager needs and think proactively about where our resources can be most useful.
Ultimately GenAI helps connect review feedback more directly to planning, prioritization and development support.
What excites you most about the role AI can play in helping teams better support employee performance, growth and development?
What excites me most is the opportunity to keep exploring how emerging technologies can help us build a more holistic development experience.
AI can do more than analyze information: it connects employees and managers to relevant resources, makes support easier to access and creates more capacity for thoughtful coaching and development.
I'm excited by the idea of using AI to bring together feedback, learning, manager enablement and growth planning in more intuitive ways.
What project or accomplishment are you most proud of during your time at Wayfair?
I’m most proud of how my team has embraced emerging technologies to make Talent work more scalable and effective, and of the role I’ve played in helping build that momentum.
I started by diving into our AI tools, then turned what I learned into practical resources, demos and trainings for others — and that training became a launchpad for everyone to start building. Within a month, each person had a working workflow that applied automation to their own area of work (I’m so lucky to have such a wonderful, intelligent team!).
It’s been rewarding to help people feel more confident experimenting with automation and to show how these tools can save time, simplify manual work and create more scalable support.
What’s something about your team’s work that you wished more people knew about?
Our team’s work extends way beyond the formal review cycles. Reviews are an important milestone and the most visible part of our work, but a lot of our focus is on what happens before and after them too: how employees understand expectations, how managers give meaningful feedback and how both groups can use performance conversations to support growth.
We’re always thinking about how to make those moments feel more connected to day-to-day development, not just a process employees engage with twice a year.
What’s a small hobby you’ve picked up recently, and what’s inspired it?
I’ve been treating my apartment like an ongoing creative project. Lately, I’ve found so much joy in decorating my apartment to feel more like “me” — lots of pink, lots of wall art, soft plush rugs and fairy lights. Being a Wayfair employee is really great for these kinds of projects!
I just started gardening outdoors to make the backyard homier (I have a hydroponic setup I use year-round) and Wayfair has so many options for planters, pots and even live plants. If I can fend the backyard chickens off long enough, I’ll also be able to make fresh jam from my strawberry plants.
What’s your favorite Wayfair product that you’ve purchased?
I love my Ebern Designs
Upholstered Corduroy Sofa. This sofa has withstood dozens of naps and hundreds of movie nights and it’s still comfy and the same vibrant pink it was when I bought it. The assembly took maybe 10 minutes.
Honorable mention goes to this George Oliver Strawberry Fields Print, are you sensing a strawberry theme from me yet? You should be!