Amanda Vialpando
GumGum
“I love seeing people excited and motivated to continue to progress forward in their life.”
Amanda Vialpando has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 leaders in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are nominated by peers or found by committees that look for excellent work wherever it happens, then chosen for the depth of their craft and their impact on hiring. This is Amanda's story.
On the sideline of a club volleyball tournament, one father turned to another with a question about the team's coach: she was graduating soon, so did she need a job? The coach was Amanda Vialpando, then finishing a Division I career at UC Riverside on a full-ride volleyball scholarship, and the job in question was at a staffing agency called Aerotek. She had no idea what recruiting was.
What she did know was that she liked talking to people, and that she had spent months telling anyone who asked about her post-graduation plans the same thing: she had a feeling in her bones that she would meet someone who would connect her to a job. Roughly eight months later, that is precisely what happened. She interviewed for the entry-level opening, got it, and walked into a career she had never once considered.
Coaching Was The Training Ground
Before recruiting, there was developing. During the offseason of her junior and senior years, Amanda coached club volleyball as a way to give back, and the work stuck with her in a way the box scores never did. She loved building up high school talent, loved the parent relationships, loved the motivating. Those were the exact qualities the father on the opposing team had heard about secondhand, and they are the qualities that translated with almost no friction into talent acquisition.
Agency life did the rest. Like a large share of recruiters, Amanda started in the agency model, and she credits it with installing the foundation she still runs on: grit, disciplined behaviors, drive. From Aerotek she moved into the digital media software space for a few years, which is where she learned the market she would eventually specialize in and where she met the colleague she would later recruit herself.
Eight And A Half Years, Built From Scratch
GumGum approached Amanda to become its first in-house business recruiter, a mandate that came with global scope from the outset. Eight and a half years later she is still there, having earned three or four promotions along the way, and now oversees recruiting across North America, Europe, and the JAPAC region as Manager, Talent Acquisition.
One of her proudest results is a person rather than a metric. Needing a coordinator, Amanda reached out to Jess, a former colleague from her previous company, with a simple pitch about a really cool place to work. Jess stayed roughly six years, collected multiple promotions under Amanda's development, and remains one of her favorite people to have worked alongside. It is the coaching instinct again, transplanted into a corporate talent function: identify the potential, then build the runway.
The Mentor She Cannot Name Is A Whole Team
Asked to name the people who shaped her, Amanda resists narrowing it to one. The answer, she says, is the collective she has been surrounded by at GumGum: HR business partners, the operations group, VPs, her chief people officer, and the coordinators she has hired most recently. Different brains, different capacities, different points of view, all close enough that leaning on them for advice or problem solving feels natural rather than transactional. That safe space, in her telling, is the single biggest reason she has stayed as long as she has.
Her chief people officer recently asked what motivates her day to day. Amanda's answer was immediate: her colleagues. The hiring leaders she partners with have goals, and her job is to hand them the best possible talent as fast as she can so they can hit them. When something stalls, she takes it personally, even when the cause sits well outside her control. Her instinct is not to explain the delay but to roll up her sleeves, put an arm around the person, and ask what needs to happen next.
Efficiency Yes, Replacement No
Amanda sees real value in AI and is candid about her skepticism at the same time. The upside is obvious to her: strip out the day-to-day administrative work that keeps recruiters away from candidates, and the freed hours go straight back into phone calls, video conversations, and actual human connection. That is the version of the technology she is happy to adopt.
The risk she watches for is the other version. She uses her own experience as a customer to make the point, describing the frustration of calling her bank and reaching a robot instead of a person. Recruiting, she argues, runs on empathy and on understanding what actually drives someone, and she does not want AI to become a full replacement for the human on the other end. Her read on the current moment is that the appetite for connection has only grown since 2020, when physical interaction was stripped away from most people's working lives. So every new tool gets the same test: does this create more room for human contact, or does it quietly remove it? She is genuinely glad HR technology is getting this much attention and investment. She simply wants the industry to hold the balance while the hype runs hot.
Be A Sponge
Amanda's advice to people entering the field is deliberately unglamorous: absorb everything, from everyone, constantly. It is the same principle that has kept her curious inside one company for eight and a half years, learning from operations leaders and coordinators alike rather than assuming seniority means having the answers.
Underneath all of it is a fairly simple motivation. She loves helping people, and she loves being the anchor between where a candidate is and where they are going next. Seeing fulfillment, happiness, and momentum in someone else's career is the return she is actually working for, and it explains why a former volleyball coach turned out to be so well suited to a job nobody told her existed.
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 Vialpando 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.
