Dan Lockhart
Lockhart Consulting
“Half of being a leader is just taking the call.”
Dan Lockhart 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 Dan's story.
Dan Lockhart was fifteen or sixteen years old, running Cat5 data drops for a telecom company across colleges and schools in the Dallas Fort Worth area, when he first ran into a problem that would define his career. The staffing agency supplying his contract labor kept sending him people who could not do the work. He had never recruited anyone in his life, but he remembers the thought clearly: he could do this better.
Two or three years later, he got the chance. A man he had met at a Starbucks, who happened to own a staffing firm, called him out of the blue and asked whether he had ever considered staffing. Lockhart was eighteen or nineteen. The answer was yes. At the time of this interview, as Head of Talent Acquisition at SonderMind, he led a team inside a behavioral health company and spent as much energy building recruiters for the industry as he did building them for his own org chart. He has since become Fractional Talent Acquisition Leader at Lockhart Consulting.
From Cat5 Cable to Candidate Pipelines
That first agency seat put him across the table from clients like GameStop and McAfee, the antivirus company, and he stayed in the staffing world for roughly five or six years. From there the arc widened in stages: contract recruiting, which he is careful to distinguish from consulting, then in-house work, then consulting proper.
For the last eight to ten years, his focus has narrowed to a specialty he clearly enjoys. He helps high growth private companies scale their recruiting practices, the messy, unglamorous work of turning improvisation into a repeatable function. It was a useful lens on his role then at SonderMind. SonderMind was a smaller organization, and Lockhart was candid that the vendor landscape did not always account for teams his size. He ran into HR technology companies with polished enterprise plans and, as he puts it, nothing for the small guy. That constraint has made him a sharper buyer and a more resourceful operator.
AI as a Tool, Not a Competitor
Lockhart came to AI in recruiting as a skeptic, and for a specific reason. He is the person who shouts "operator, operator, operator" into an automated phone tree, and he refuses to inflict that experience on candidates. So when SonderMind began using Purplefish to run AI-led first interviews for its non-exempt hiring, he watched the feedback closely. It came back genuinely positive. Purplefish has since shifted its focus toward larger clients and was sunsetting the contract, which had Lockhart in the market for a replacement to handle screening calls for non-exempt roles, an evaluation he was running with the same candidate experience filter he started with.
His framing of the broader question borrows from a line he has encountered: AI is not going to replace recruiters, but it will replace recruiters who are not using AI. He credits the book The AI-Driven Leader with sharpening the point further. Stop thinking about what AI can do to replace you, and start thinking about what AI can do for you. "How you leverage AI is going to dictate what your future looks like," he says. The practical conclusion is deliberately unromantic. AI belongs in the same category as a sourcing platform or a Google Sheet. Another tool on the belt, not the competition.
Building Recruiters for the Future
The advice he offers other talent leaders heading into 2026 is about honesty as much as technology. Leaders owe their teams a clear statement of where they stand on AI, and they owe them reassurance that the goal is augmentation rather than replacement. He does not pretend the ground is stable. The market across the board is shaky, and recruiting, he notes, is always among the first functions to go.
That reality shaped how he invested in his people. "I don't just want to build them as members of SonderMind," he says. "I want to build them as members of SonderMind, but also as human beings and as recruiters for the future." In practice that meant bringing his team inside his own learning curve: the books he was reading on AI, the conferences he attended, the tools he was testing. Keeping any of it to himself, he says, would be selling them short. It is the same instinct that made him answer the phone in the first place, applied to the people who reported to him.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Dan. We are honored to welcome Dan Lockhart to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Dan. 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.
