Di Mansfield
EPAM Systems
“Don't remove the human element out of it.”
Di Mansfield 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 Di's story.
Di Mansfield was already halfway out the door of a Robert Half branch office when the branch manager stopped her with a question that redirected her career: had she ever thought about doing recruiting? She had, in fact, wanted exactly that for years. Her answer was one word. "Absolutely." More than fifteen years later, she leads talent acquisition work at EPAM Systems, a global engineering firm where the tools she uses to hire are often built in house by the very engineers she recruits.
That origin story explains a great deal about how Mansfield operates. She did not drift into the profession and she does not treat it as a waypoint. She wanted it, waited for it, and has spent a decade and a half building a practice that pairs analytical rigor with an insistence that hiring remains, at its core, a human transaction.
A Career She Chose Twice
Mansfield's academic and early professional grounding was in accounting and finance, a discipline that still shapes the way she reads data, builds reporting and interrogates a process for waste. She had a brief taste of agency work straight out of college, only a few months, but it left a mark. "I never lost my passion for it," she says of recruiting, and the intervening years in finance did nothing to dull it.
The turning point came with a move from Connecticut to Texas. She walked into Robert Half because it was the best known name in accounting and finance placement, expecting to be a candidate. She walked out on a path to becoming a recruiter instead. "That's how my career was born," she says. The finance background never went to waste. It became the analytical spine underneath her recruiting instincts, the reason she is as comfortable with reporting and forecasting as she is with a candidate conversation.
Today she is based in the Houston area and works inside one of the more demanding environments in talent acquisition: an engineering organization hiring technical talent for clients who expect solutions, not resumes. It is a setting that rewards recruiters who can speak the language of the business, and Mansfield has made that fluency part of her value.
The Leaders Who Shaped Her Standard
Ask Mansfield who has influenced her most and she starts with her current manager, the head of North America talent acquisition at EPAM. She describes him as phenomenal and, more tellingly, as someone whose own growth story informs how he leads. What she has absorbed from him is a leadership posture rather than a technique: people first, unfailingly fair, and equally invested in the betterment of the team and the craft of recruiting itself. That combination, she notes, is rarer than it should be, and it has become her own benchmark for what good management looks like.
Her second influence comes from outside the profession entirely. Dr. Shandra Webb, a colleague from earlier in Mansfield's career in the Houston area, moved into education and became what Mansfield calls a pillar of strength in that community. The lesson there is about the reach of leadership beyond a job description: Webb's impact on the people around her did not depend on the industry she happened to be in. Mansfield keeps her in the mentor column precisely because the example is transferable, a reminder that influence is built through consistency and service rather than title.
Between them, the two form a coherent philosophy. Lead with people at the center, be scrupulously fair, and understand that the strongest leaders are the ones others want to model themselves on.
An Everyday Practitioner of AI
Mansfield is a daily AI user, and she is candid about how quickly that dependency formed. "If I didn't have AI, how did I do it before?" she asks, looking back at work that once consumed hours and now takes minutes. Her most immediate use is translation of thought into output: taking her own thinking and having it, in her words, banged out in five minutes or less. Beyond drafting and summarization, she leans on AI as a sounding board for analytical perspectives and for reporting, the finance instincts of her early career finding a new set of instruments.
The technology, she points out, has not been in the workplace all that long in its current form, and the real shift over the past year is one of distribution. What was concentrated in a few teams is now extended across every business unit. At EPAM, that shows up differently than it might elsewhere. As an engineering company, it customizes and builds its tooling internally, from concept all the way through, including a pre screening capability being developed for the recruiting team. Mansfield's own function is engaged in continuous upgrading: streamlining processes and integrating automation as the standing priority rather than a one time project.
She frames the payoff in terms of the client, not the recruiter. Automation buys back the hours that let the business focus on clients more closely and satisfy their solutions more easily. "AI has been a game changer all the way around," she says, and she means it operationally, as someone who has rebuilt her own workflow around it and now uses it to project how she will work in the future.
Advice: Be the Talent Advisor, Keep the Human
For all her fluency with automation, Mansfield's counsel to other talent leaders is pointedly human. Continue to be a talent advisor, she urges, because people genuinely look for and look forward to someone who will offer them a leadership perspective on their own careers. Be encouraging. Be motivating. Treat those as the first obligations of the role, not the soft edges of it.
Then comes the line she returns to most insistently. "Don't forget people first," she says. "Be that example that people want to see." And, unambiguously: "Don't remove the human element out of it."
It is a coherent position rather than a contradiction. Mansfield has automated aggressively precisely so that the parts of the job only a person can do get more of her attention. The reporting can be accelerated. The summaries can be generated. The moment a candidate needs an advisor, or a team needs a leader who is fair and present, no tool substitutes. Fifteen years after a branch manager asked her a question on her way out the door, that remains the thing she is still in the profession to do.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Di. We are honored to welcome Di Mansfield to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Di. 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.
