Apple’s recent reshuffling of its management team has introduced some new faces to the C-suite at the tech giant. And one of the biggest, and some might argue overdue, additions is Carol Surface, who was named to the new role of chief people officer in February.

It’s a move that didn’t make a lot of waves at the time, but could have a big impact on the company. Apple’s biggest asset, after all, is the people who conceptualize, develop, and sell its products. Prior to Surface joining the company, human resources operations fell under the watch of Deirdre O’Brien, who was also in charge of the company’s retail operations.

So, who is Surface and what moves is she likely to make? Although Surface hasn’t granted any interviews since taking the job at Apple, here’s a bit of background on the company’s new senior executive and what challenges she faces.

HER ARRIVED CAME AFTER APPLE WAS ENGULFED IN AN HR CRISIS

A few months prior to Surface moving over from health-tech company Medtronic, Apple was the focus of some unflattering press reports about how it handled HR issues. The Financial Times wrote in August that over a dozen current and former employees had accused Apple’s HR department of mishandling misconduct allegations. Half of those claimed the company had retaliated against them for complaining to Apple’s People team, earning them the reputation of “bad team members.”

One employee, a former legal director, posted her tale, describing what she said was domestic abuse from another attorney at the company. Apple HR ultimately reprimanded her, she said, for “allowing a personal relationship to interfere with my work, not adequately securing my devices and accounts, and being unprofessional during the investigation.”

(Apple, in a statement to the Financial Times, said, “There are some accounts raised that do not reflect our intentions or our policies and we should have handled them differently.”)

It was a black eye that hurt Apple’s reputation and threatened to impact recruiting. With Surface now running HR for the company’s 164,000 employees, the company hopes to repair that.

SHE DIDN’T PLAN ON BECOMING AN HR SPECIALIST

Running a HR department was not originally an occupational ambition for Surface. She started her career in a variety of specialist roles at Pepsi, drawing on her industrial-organizational psychology background. “I would have been perfectly happy staying focused on talent management, connecting data and insights with my knowledge of psychology,” she told executive search firm SpencerStuart two years ago.

Pepsi’s leaders, though, encouraged her to explore human resources, which led to HR business-partner roles in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

“What attracted me to HR was the ability to apply my knowledge and experience in industrial organizational psychology to make an impact on a much bigger and broader scale,” she said. “A company’s performance is the accumulation of tens of thousands of individual talent, organizational, and cultural decisions. Having a direct impact on an organization’s success through its people appeals to me.”

SHE WAS UNIQUELY PREPARED TO MANAGE DURING THE PANDEMIC

Her time with Pepsi had her working out of the country for seven years, and Surface said that helped her prepare for dealing with the unexpected, including the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2003, she was just weeks into a posting in Hong Kong when the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic broke out.

“It was certainly formative,” said Surface. “That experience taught me to be calm in the face of a crisis, and to keep employee safety front and center, despite the uncertainty of what the future may hold.”

SHE’S NOT A BACK-TO-OFFICE ABSOLUTIST

Apple has been on the front line of pushing employees back to the office, often taking a hard-line approach. Surface, though, was, at least at one point in her career, on a different page.

“Given the high productivity and ingenuity of employees during a pandemic, expect hybrid work to be a nonnegotiable,” she told SpencerStuart in 2021. “Organizations must embrace and recognize the bar is going to be raised and see it as an opportunity. Companies that don’t embrace this—in a way which reflects both their business needs as well as what their employees are looking for—will be left behind or will lose out on the best talent.” It’s unclear if her thinking has changed since then.

SHE HAS CHAMPIONED WOMEN IN PREVIOUS ROLES

One of Surface’s pet projects while at Medtronic was helping women at the company overcome obstacles they might face along their career path. That included launching a mentorship program.

Women, she noted at a presentation at the University of St. Thomas-Minnesota in 2016, might not apply for a job if they see they don’t have every qualification listed, whereas men will apply with just 50% of the qualifications ticked off the list. And that contributes to the imbalance many organizations have.

“How do we, as a leadership team, help remove those barriers and help accelerate their success and help women reach their fullest potential in the business world?,” she asked. “What I have observed in talking with women is there’s this connection with the need to be perfect and confident. . . . What we’ve tried to do is help women understand that you don’t have to have every single criterion of a job description covered. Let’s talk about what you aspire to do in the context of your career and help remove some of those barriers.”

ONCE SHE TAKES A JOB, SHE TENDS TO STICK AROUND

In an era where executives bounce from company to company after a couple of years, Carol Surface is an exception. She stayed with Pepsi for more than 10 years before departing for a nearly 4-year stint at Best Buy, where she was chief human resources officer. In 2013, she joined Medtronic, where she had another tenure of nearly 10 years before being poached by Apple.

Update: This article was updated to clarify the timing of Carol Surface’s arrival at Apple.