Cheryl Chasen
The Lotus Group
“I found a job where I have the fulfillment of helping people, which is the social work in me, and I still make really good money doing it.”
Cheryl Chasen 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 Cheryl's story.
Cheryl Chasen once sat with two job offers in front of her: one at a company that helped people in recovery find work, the other recruiting SAS programmers for the pharmaceutical industry. She took the recruiting job in January 2002, and more than two decades later she has never quite let go of the other one.
Today Cheryl is Executive Director of Recruiting at The Lotus Group, a role she started roughly a month ago after almost 17 years at Green Key Resources, where she built the pharmaceutical division from the ground up. She has spent her recruiting career on commission only, a structure she chose deliberately and never traded away. The through line across every stop is a conviction that recruiting, done properly, is a helping profession that happens to pay well.
A Social Work Degree and a Loan to Repay
Cheryl holds a master's in social work. She graduated, did the arithmetic, and realized she could not live in New York City on a social work salary while paying back a loan. So she went into sales during the internet boom, decided quickly that she did not like it, and moved through a series of startups hoping to ride the wave. She did not benefit from the boom at all.
When she reached the point of asking herself what came next, she went looking in earnest. By her own count she sat for roughly 50 separate hiring conversations and collected offers from across the spectrum, including one selling a hypnotist service to help people stop smoking. The market, she recalls, was pretty incredible back then. She narrowed the field to two finalists: the recovery placement role that would have been the direct extension of her degree, and the offer from Smith Hanley recruiting SAS programmers into pharma. Her reasoning at the moment of decision was plain. She wanted to make money.
What she did not expect was that the two paths would converge. Sitting across from her future employer at Smith Hanley, she started noticing the overlap: you have to build trust, you have to be a genuinely good listener, you have to repeat back what people tell you so they know they were heard. She provides resources when candidates relocate. The tools she picked up in social work school, and in life, translated almost directly. That combination of purpose and pay is why she stayed. No one goes to school to be a recruiter, as she puts it, and she is candid that the work has not been uniformly wonderful. She did not love it for the past three years. Loving a job every single year of a long career, in her view, would be an anomaly.
Building a Business Within a Business
Cheryl remains grateful to her first boss, who hired her with no recruiting experience whatsoever. They all sat in one room together, and Cheryl learned the craft there. That manager understood her, backed her, and gave her the foundation everything since has been built on.
She stayed at Smith Hanley for six or seven years and never once approached another agency during that stretch. Green Key, which had no pharmaceutical division at the time, kept reaching out anyway. When her firm was acquired by private equity, the changes piled up and the ceiling became visible. The three partners at Green Key then made her an unusual proposition. Their message, as she remembers it, was that they did not really understand what she did, but whatever she was doing over there, could she do it here.
That was trust extended in advance, and she repaid it by building the pharmaceutical division. She learned a great deal from the three of them about constructing a business and cultivating relationships. Each partner was very different from the others, which in her reading is exactly why they worked so well together. For her part, she describes the assignment in her own terms: she was building a business within a business.
Hiring for Ethics, Not Just Billings
Ask Cheryl to account for her success and she redirects to her team. She could name individuals, she says, but there were so many people across the years, including several who stayed the entire run, that singling anyone out would be unfair. She learned something from every one of them.
Her hiring bar was deliberately narrow. However good a recruiter looked on paper, they had to clear a values test first: like-minded, ethical, and in the job for more than the commission, because they genuinely wanted to help people. Everyone on the team met that standard, and she credits it for the culture that followed.
Managing that group made her a better leader and a better manager. Every person is different, she notes, so you have to adjust to each personality and to the way each one works. That constant recalibration drew directly on the same skill set that made her effective with candidates in the first place.
Efficiency Without Losing the Human Part
Cheryl uses AI every day and is still actively learning it, pushing to find new ways to leverage it so she can strip out administrative work. Her guiding aim is not novelty but efficiency: get the overhead off her desk so the hours go somewhere useful.
She is not worried that the technology will eliminate agency recruiters. Agency people carry the soft skills, and she does not believe AI can replace those. Her own strength is developing relationships and talking to people, and the tooling simply buys her more room to do exactly that.
She also speaks openly about a personal dimension. Cheryl has ADHD, and tasks such as drafting an email have always taken her longer than they take other people. Using AI to augment her own skill set has helped meaningfully, making the routine parts of the day faster and leaving her attention free for the conversations that decide outcomes.
The Case for Taking the Risk
Cheryl thought she would retire at Green Key. Leaving after nearly 17 years, walking away from the division she built, the clients she had cultivated, and the comfort of knowing exactly how everything worked, was, in her word, terrifying. Almost everyone is afraid of change, she observes, and the longer the tenure the sharper the fear.
She had been dispensing the counterargument to candidates for years. If you are unhappy and it has gone on longer than six months, it is time to look for a new job, because life is too short. She admits she did not follow her own guidance: she stayed unhappy well past that mark before finally making the move. Her husband, like plenty of other people, keeps repeating the line that big risk brings big reward, and she has now tested it herself.
Her advice to other talent leaders heading into the next year is a distillation of that experience. Do not be afraid to make a major change, regardless of how old you are or how long you have been somewhere. She does not know anyone who has ever regretted it. Even in the cases where the new situation does not turn out to be better, the experience teaches you something. The sentence she keeps returning to is the simplest one: you have to take risks.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Cheryl. We are honored to welcome Cheryl Chasen to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Cheryl. 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.
