Brian Fink
The ReWork Group
“Try new things. It's going to make you a better sourcer. It's going to make you a better recruiter.”
Brian Fink 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 Brian's story.
Brian Fink built his first talent pipeline in 1997, and it had nothing to do with software. As rush chairman of his college fraternity, a role he held for three consecutive years, he spent his weeks walking up to strangers, learning their stories, and helping them make a decision that would shape the next four years of their lives. Nearly three decades later, as Managing Partner of The ReWork Group, he is running a more sophisticated version of the same play.
He calls it a convertible skill, and the phrase says a lot about how he thinks. "Today as a recruiter, we're helping people make decisions about their future," he says, "whether it's the next tour of duty that's 18 to 36 months, or if it's a lifelong decision or career decision." Twenty plus years into a recruiting career that has run through agency work, Apple and Twitter, Fink has never lost the sense that the job is fundamentally about standing next to someone at a fork in the road.
The People Who Built the Recruiter
Ask Fink who shaped him and he does not reach for abstractions. He reaches for names, and he spells them out.
The first is Michael Whaley, who started alongside him on his very first day in recruiting. Whaley had done the work before and showed Fink the ropes of agency life: how to communicate effectively with both the candidate and the client, and how to actually drive a relationship rather than simply manage a requisition. It is a lesson about craft that Fink still treats as foundational.
The second is Steve Rath, who taught him to build a Google custom search engine, a skill Fink is widely known for today. Rath took him under his wing and brought him to Apple. Fink describes him plainly and warmly: a good friend and a good mentor, the kind of person whose influence shows up in a career for decades afterward.
The overarching figure, though, is his father, Stephen Fink. "My dad really taught me what it was like to care about people and to sincerely thank them in a direct and effective way," he says, adding that the same standard should apply to every partner a recruiter works with today. And his mother earns her own credit, for a piece of advice that became a professional operating system: try new foods, try new cultures, explore. It will make you a more well rounded individual.
Two Kinds of Recruiters
On artificial intelligence, Fink sees two things happening at once, and he insists both are true. One group of recruiters is genuinely excited about the change, actively testing how AI can make them better, and thinking forward. The other group has decided this is nothing new and that no skill set needs updating.
He does not soften the implication. One group is leading the future, he says, and one group is going to be left behind. That is the divide he watches, and he puts himself firmly in the first camp: constantly trying new things, experimenting in tools like n8n, building rather than just consuming.
But his real argument is less about technology than temperament. The differentiator, he believes, is curiosity. "If you're a curious recruiter, if AI comes, great. You're going to know how to take advantage of it," he says. And if AI fails to deliver on all its promises, the curious recruiter still wins, because they will know how to take advantage of whatever does arrive. "It's not like you're betting on one horse," he adds. "It's like you're betting on multiple races and you're making curious decisions and asking the right questions."
Keep Doing the Hard Work
Fink's confidence about the current moment comes from having watched the function survive worse. Over his career he has worked through recessions and layoffs. He has convinced passive candidates to take calls they had no interest in taking. He has defended headcount to CFOs with spreadsheets, and he is careful to note whose spreadsheets they were: "Spreadsheets that we built, not that the CFO built."
That history is the source of his advice to peers navigating another wave of disruption. Recruiters, he argues, have been doing hard things their entire careers. They have found people who did not know what they were looking for and matched them to roles they did not know existed. His conclusion is a call to keep going rather than to brace for impact: "We've got to keep doing the hard work."
Asked to distill everything into a single line for other talent leaders, he does not hesitate or philosophize. Try new things. As simple as that.
Lifting the Room With Him
One more thing worth noting about Fink: when the conversation turns to talent leaders he admires, he becomes a recruiter again, rattling off names, titles and companies with the precision of someone who genuinely tracks people's careers. He points to Allen Henshaw, his former manager at Twitter and now senior talent manager for the CTO organization at Booz Allen Hamilton, previously associate director of recruiting at Wayfair. He points to Daniel Nooromid, VP of Talent and Workforce Planning at KLDiscovery. He points to Donald Knight, group vice president of talent acquisition at Warner Bros. Discovery. Then he stops himself, notes that he has named only men so far and says, "That's not how I roll," before adding Megan Whittington, a former Twitter peer who is now VP of People and Culture at eMarketer.
It is a small moment, but a telling one. The instinct to widen the circle, to make sure the right people get seen, is the same instinct that made a 1997 rush chairman good at his job. Fink simply never stopped practicing it.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Brian. We are honored to welcome Brian Fink to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Brian. 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.
