Chad Pace
Hadrian
“Our goal is to give our team superpowers. Enable AI usage to free up time for the human approach to recruiting.”
Chad Pace 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 Chad's story.
Early in his career at Facebook, Chad hired an engineer so rare that only about five people in the world carried the same background. That single search changed the shape of everything that followed. It marked him as someone who could operate at the far end of the talent market, where the candidate pool is measured in individuals rather than thousands, and it put him on a team that would go on to rewrite how one of the largest technology companies on earth approached its most senior technical hiring.
Today, roughly twelve years later, Chad owns specialized hiring, leadership hiring, and executive hiring at Hadrian. Every search from the senior staff level and above, across the entire business, runs through him. It is a scope that suits the pattern he set at the beginning: the harder and scarcer the profile, the more he wants it.
From One Rare Engineer to an Entire Function
Like most people in the profession, Pace fell into recruiting. What he did with the entry point is the interesting part. His first boss tapped him to help build out the E7 recruiting team at Facebook, a group dedicated to hiring senior staff plus software engineers across the business. He was selected for it on the strength of that one improbable hire.
In 2014, he was part of the team that built out the E7 plus specialized hiring process across Facebook. That work has outlasted nearly everyone who touched it. The team still exists today and now sits under Facebook's executive team, which is a rare legacy in a function where processes are usually torn down and rebuilt every few years. Chad describes the arc since then as a trickle-down: prove you can find the unfindable once, and the hardest problems keep arriving at your desk.
Superpowers, Not Substitutes
The team is building an AI-enabled talent function at Hadrian, and doing it with an unusual combination of ambition and restraint. The team is evaluating Juicebox and MetaView, holds a contract with LinkedIn for its AI hiring assistant, and works with Ashby as their ATS. Every team member has access to Claude, and the team has its own instance, so the talent organization can fully use Claude Code and build against it without affecting the rest of the business.
The strategic intent behind all of it is deliberately narrow. Automate the tedium: dragging and dropping candidate profiles, uploading resumes, drafting hiring plans and job descriptions. Preserve the human work. The goal, as he frames it, is to give each recruiter an AI assistant so the team can scale without over-hiring, and for the people on it to spend their hours on the human approach to recruiting rather than on data entry.
About a week before this profile was reported, Hadrian hired its first people engineer, a genuine software engineer embedded in the talent function. The mandate is to marry the backend systems, make them communicate cleanly, and build internal tools as needed rather than waiting on an Ashby rep or a LinkedIn rep to solve every integration problem. It is a structural bet, not a pilot.
On the wider market, Chad is blunt about the failure mode he sees coming. Sourcing tools will not replace a human today. They may work on some funnels but not all. Leaders who lay off their sourcing teams and flip everything to AI overnight, he warns, are in for a rude awakening.
Foundation Before Automation
His advice to other talent leaders is sequenced, and the sequence matters more than the tools. Define the use case first. Then make sure the systems beneath every area you want to automate are buttoned up, the data is clean, and information flows as smoothly as possible. Only then start deciding which parts of the process to automate fully.
"You can't throw an agent at a problem and expect it to fix everything," he says. You need to understand how your systems run before automating and maximizing output; you need to walk before you can run. Coming from someone whose first mentor drilled operational excellence into him, the advice has a clear lineage.
The Human Who Validates the Machine
Pace is optimistic about what this means for the people in his profession, provided they choose depth. The best recruiters and the best sourcers will always have jobs, he argues, because someone has to validate what the AI produces. His prescription is to become a subject-matter expert and own every nook and cranny of the process: sourcing, outreach, response rates, interviews and more. The more of it you can genuinely master, the less eliminable your role becomes.
There is a brand argument in there too. An AI agent cannot be trusted to judge whether its own outreach is authentic, whether it is communicating correctly, whether it is representing the company well to the human on the other side of the message. A person has to make that call. That, in Pace's view, is the difference between a best-in-class system and merely an AI system, and it is why he keeps building toward augmented recruiters rather than replaced ones.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Chad. We are honored to welcome Chad Pace to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Chad. 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.
