Michelle Labbe

Chief People Officer Toptal

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Michelle Labbe is Chief People Officer of Toptal, the network that places vetted freelance software engineers, designers and finance specialists with client companies. Her role is unusual because the company she runs people operations for has no headquarters at all: Toptal has been fully distributed since its founding, with roughly a thousand remote associates supporting a freelancer network across 158 countries. That meant that when the pandemic forced most companies into remote work, Toptal was one of the few organisations whose HR function had already solved the problem at scale — and Labbe spent much of 2020 fielding calls from client executives asking how it was done. She has led the function since 2018, after two decades of talent leadership across agencies, media and professional services.

Career Highlights

• Chief People Officer of Toptal since 2018, accountable for both the People and Recruiting organisations.
• Built the people function for a company with no corporate headquarters, supporting approximately 1,000 remote associates who in turn support up to 5,000 freelancers across 158 countries.
• Grew her own team roughly fourfold over her tenure as Toptal scaled.
• Became a principal external voice for Toptal on distributed work during the pandemic, when the company published The Suddenly Remote Playbook free online and client executives approached her directly for advice on going remote.
• Hosts The Talent Economy podcast, and speaks regularly at talent and HR events including the Women in Tech Global Conference and Human Capital Institute programmes.
• Previously Chief People Officer of ICR, the strategic communications and advisory firm, and Senior Vice President of Talent and Culture at Rent the Runway.
• Earlier talent leadership at Patch.com, Razorfish and Deloitte — a career spanning agency, media and professional-services models of HR before moving into technology.

Professional Journey

Labbe spent the first half of her career in the parts of the economy where talent is the product: Deloitte, where professional-services staffing is the business model; Razorfish, the digital agency; and Patch.com, AOL’s hyperlocal news venture, where she was Vice President of People during a period of rapid expansion and contraction. Each of those environments required recruiting and retaining people at speed against uncertain demand, which is the same underlying problem she works on now.

She moved into more senior roles in the 2010s, joining Rent the Runway as Senior Vice President of Talent and Culture as the fashion rental company scaled, and then serving as Chief People Officer at ICR, the strategic communications and advisory firm. By the time Toptal recruited her in 2018 she had around twenty years in the field, spread across startups and agencies rather than a single corporate ladder.

Toptal presented a genuinely different problem. The company had been built without offices from the start, which removed almost every conventional lever of HR practice — no onboarding week, no corridor culture, no location-based compensation bands, and a workforce distributed across enough time zones that a single all-hands is impossible. Labbe’s answer was to build infrastructure for connection deliberately rather than assume it, and her own working pattern reflected the reality: a 2021 profile described her running twelve to fifteen calls a day spanning time zones from Russia to Seattle, from a home in Connecticut.

That accumulated experience became suddenly valuable in 2020. Toptal published The Suddenly Remote Playbook free online, and Labbe became the person client executives called when their own staff refused to return to offices. She has remained a visible external voice on distributed work since, through speaking engagements and The Talent Economy podcast, which she hosts. Toptal’s own leadership page continues to list her as Chief People Officer.

Education

University of Arizona

Bachelor of Arts, Political Science.