Andrew Reid
SignalFire
Andrew Reid 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 Andrew's story.
Andrew Reid has spent his career helping technology companies identify, attract, and build around the people required for their next stage of growth. His work has evolved from agency recruiting and executive search to building talent functions within investment firms. Today, he develops the infrastructure, programs, and recruiting strategies that support companies across SignalFire's portfolio.
This progression has also shaped how he thinks about technology in recruiting. Rather than treating AI as a replacement for the fundamentals of talent work, Andrew sees it as a tool for improving how talent leaders recruit, advise, make decisions, and build more effective talent operations.
From Recruiting to Portfolio Talent
Andrew began his career in talent right out of university, when the recruiting technology landscape looked considerably different. LinkedIn Recruiter was the primary tool available, and recruiting relied heavily on disciplined market research and relationship-building.
He subsequently moved into executive search at SPMB and later Artisanal Talent, focused on leadership and specialized functional searches. His clients ranged from venture-backed startups and growth-stage scaleups to Fortune 500 companies. He helped carve out function and domain practices while developing custom, data-driven candidate-tracking systems, an early indication of his interest in improving not only recruiting outcomes but also the systems behind the work.
The move into venture capital broadened that mandate considerably.
In 2021, Andrew joined Lead Edge Capital as its first dedicated talent leader, establishing a talent function that became the foundation for a broader Value Creation unit. The role extended beyond individual searches into executive recruiting, compensation benchmarking, retention strategy, talent networks, internal hiring, and broader firm-wide talent programs.
He joined SignalFire in 2023, where that work has continued to evolve. Andrew leads talent support initiatives across a venture portfolio spanning companies from pre-seed through pre-IPO, while also building systems and programs intended to make the Talent team's support more proactive and scalable. His work includes executive and individual contributor recruiting, founder advisory, talent network development, search-firm strategy, portfolio recruiting infrastructure, and programs that extend beyond individual hiring processes.
Build Systems That Deliver the Greatest Impact
For Andrew, the challenge of portfolio talent is fundamentally one of scale.
An internal recruiter can orient around the hiring needs of a single company. A venture talent team may be supporting hundreds of companies at different stages, with different priorities and varying levels of need. The objective cannot simply be to run more searches. It is to determine where the team can have the greatest impact, build systems that identify those opportunities earlier, and create resources that allow expertise to extend beyond the searches the team directly owns.
At SignalFire, that has meant investing in both high-touch recruiting support and the infrastructure surrounding it. Andrew has developed talent networks designed to proactively engage executives and operators, built systems to monitor and support recruiting activity across the portfolio, and developed models that leverage SignalFire's underlying data capabilities and AI platform Beacon to autonomously connect relevant talent with portfolio opportunities.
That combination of direct recruiting and scalable infrastructure is increasingly central to how Andrew thinks about the function.
Using AI as Leverage, Not a Strategy
AI has become an important part of the recruiting infrastructure, but Andrew is cautious about making the technology itself the objective.
The industry has moved quickly from a relatively limited technology landscape to one in which new AI products, workflows, and capabilities are constantly being launched. The challenge for talent leaders is no longer gaining access to technology; it is understanding where that technology meaningfully improves the work.
Andrew's approach has been to experiment directly, and if a solution does not yet exist, he won't hesitate to develop it himself.
LLMs can accelerate research, help structure and synthesize information, support content development, assist with candidate qualification, and increasingly serve as a foundation for more sophisticated recruiting workflows. More importantly, advances in the underlying technology have enabled talent teams to build capabilities themselves rather than relying exclusively on packaged recruiting software.
For Andrew, that creates an important distinction between using AI and building with AI.
The latter does not require recruiters to become engineers. It does require enough curiosity to understand how the technology works, where it can create leverage, and where human judgment remains essential.
His advice to talent leaders is relatively simple: experiment.
The technology is changing too quickly for anyone to have a permanent playbook. Building familiarity with LLMs, testing workflows, and understanding both their capabilities and limitations provides a stronger foundation than waiting for the market to settle around a definitive set of tools.
The Talent Function Keeps Getting Broader
Andrew sees experimentation as part of a larger evolution of talent leadership.
Recruiting remains fundamentally about identifying and persuading the right people to join an organization. But the systems surrounding that work are becoming considerably more sophisticated. Talent leaders increasingly have access to richer data, better automation, stronger market intelligence, and tools that allow relatively small teams to operate at a scale that previously required significantly more resources.
In Andrew's view, the opportunity is to combine the judgment and relationship-building that have always defined strong recruiting with technology that makes those capabilities more scalable. Talent still matters as much as technology; what is changing is the range of ways in which talent teams can deliver impact.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Andrew. We are honored to welcome Andrew Reid to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Andrew. 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.
