Amanda Lopez
Adobe
“My recommendation would just be to be change resilient and not change resistant.”
Amanda Lopez has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing the 100 most exceptional leaders and practitioners in talent acquisition. Honorees are selected by the Talent 100 committee from thousands of nominations and candidates across the industry, chosen for the impact of their work, the depth of their craft, and their influence on the future of recruiting. This is Amanda's story.
Most talent leaders form their views on artificial intelligence from headlines and vendor demos. Amanda López wrote a capstone on it. Recently graduated with a law degree from Cornell, she chose as her subject the collision of AI and empathy within employment law, and came away with a conclusion that should give the entire industry pause: the law will be roughly 15 years behind how quickly the technology is moving. That gap, she argues, is not an abstraction. It lands squarely in the lap of talent acquisition, where the tools are already screening, ranking, and shaping who gets a shot.
"These are all implications that we're going to have within TA," she says, "and so we just want to make sure that we're utilizing it in the appropriate ways, and using it to encourage fair assessment." It is a characteristically López formulation: unhurried, precise, and grounded in the practical consequences for the person on the other side of the process.
A Facebook Post and a Better Question
López did not set out to build a career in technology recruiting. She was working in program management in the nonprofit sector and looking for something new, and reached out to a friend about a posting she had seen on Facebook for another project management role. The friend, whom she had known from working in academic environments in college, pushed back with a question that redirected everything: are you sure?
There was another opportunity, the friend said, a recruiter role. López's response was honest. "What does a recruiter even do?" The answer she got was less a job description than a mirror. You are talking to people, learning about their skill sets, and you love learning. The role was in consumer electronics, and the prospect of walking into tech and engineering was genuinely intimidating for someone who, as she puts it, did not grow up in the tech space and was the first in her family to graduate.
What followed happened, in her word, through osmosis. The more people she spoke to, the more the vocabulary settled in, until intimidation gave way to what she describes as a genuine love of being within the tech space.
Three Managers, Three Different Educations
Ask López who shaped her and she will narrow a long list to three names, each attached to a distinct lesson. The first is Onyekachukwu Osai, her first manager when she moved into agency recruiting. He taught her business fundamentals and the habit of staying curious about what is actually happening in the market. More than that, he refused to let her stop at face value. He taught her how to read a room, how to connect with people in a way that leaves them feeling confident and comfortable, and how to be a genuinely good active listener, a skill she notes that a great many people in this profession still struggle with.
The second she names simply as Puneeth, a leader who entered her career at the moment she made the leap from agency to corporate. He gave her access and experience she never expected to have, and, just as importantly, the intangibles: how things actually work inside a large company, the unwritten rules that nobody publishes in an onboarding deck. For a first generation graduate navigating corporate technology from the outside in, that knowledge was the difference. She credits it directly with her success in the corporate environment.
The third is Mark Stevens, a manager she has worked for more than once and reports to today. His contribution has been emotional intelligence and the discipline of seeing a situation from perspectives she had never considered. Together, the three form a curriculum: the market, the machine, and the human being.
Clean the House Before You Scale It
López is enthusiastic about AI in recruiting, but her enthusiasm comes with a load-bearing condition. AI, she says, is a force multiplier, and an excellent one, but only if the foundation and the core are already great. Otherwise it simply amplifies what is broken.
That is why she treats the current moment as an invitation to audit rather than to accelerate. "How do we make sure that we have the house clean first," she asks, "before being able to look at scaling it?" It is an unglamorous position in a market where every company is racing to announce something, and it is the reason her advice carries weight with peers.
She sees the second order effects most clearly in early career talent, where the market is moving decisively toward skill sets and away from traditional job titles. The old ladder was legible: program specialist to program manager to program director. AI is dissolving that logic. What matters now, she argues, is discernment, curiosity, and whether a candidate brings a growth mindset rather than a fixed one. She expects the industry to keep leaning into skills over formal job codes and titles, and she finds the prospect genuinely exciting.
Change Resilient, Not Change Resistant
Asked for the single piece of advice she would hand other talent leaders, López does not reach for a framework. She reaches for a posture. Expect the unexpected. She repeats a line she has heard from others and clearly believes: AI is not going to replace people, but people who use AI are going to replace people who do not.
The deeper counsel is about how leaders carry themselves through disruption. Every major shift in technology has been experienced very differently by different people, she notes, and the leaders who fare best are the ones who metabolize it rather than brace against it. "Be change resilient and not change resistant," she says. "How do we take the conditions that have been created and make them appropriate for us in what we want to see and achieve? Not the other way around."
It is the philosophy of someone who once asked what a recruiter even does, taught herself an industry by talking to enough people, and then went and earned a law degree to understand where the next set of problems would come from. López does not wait for the conditions to suit her. She learns them, and then she puts them to work.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Amanda. We are honored to welcome Amanda Lopez to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Amanda. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.
