Elizabeth Gormley
Rapid7
“I really fell in love with the idea of aligning talent with growing organizations and solving business problems through people.”
Elizabeth Gormley 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 Elizabeth's story.
Four months ago, Elizabeth Gormley and her team at Rapid7 sat down and mapped their recruiting workflows against a simple question: if we had a crystal ball, what here could be automated? It was the third time they had run the exercise. When they ran it again, the answer had already changed. That gap, between a considered plan and a market that will not hold still long enough for the plan to age, is where Gormley has spent the most interesting stretch of a twenty year career in talent.
She leads talent acquisition at Rapid7, the Boston based security company, and she talks about the work the way an operator talks about a business unit rather than the way a service function talks about requisitions. The vocabulary is telling: she does not describe filling roles, she describes building talent engines, and she measures them by whether they hold up when the business underneath them changes shape.
From the Sales Floor to the Search
Gormley began her career in sales, and like many recruiters, she says, she fell into the profession rather than planning for it. Sales led her to an agency, where she started out as a headhunter. It suited her. Cold outreach, persuasion and pipeline management were familiar terrain, but the part that caught her was less mechanical than that.
"I really fell in love with the idea of aligning talent with growing organizations and solving business problems through people," she says. That framing, people as the answer to a business problem rather than a headcount line, eventually made agency life feel too transactional. She wanted to see what she was building. Many years ago she moved in house, choosing one company, one team, and the long work of building those teams out. She has built her career there ever since, and describes the last few years of designing talent engines as a lot of fun, which is not a phrase most leaders reach for when describing the current hiring market.
The Two Voices She Carries
Ask Gormley who shaped her and she starts with her father. An attorney who ran his own business, he taught her, in her words, that hard work will always win. She adopted it early, and she credits it for the way she has handled every step up she was not yet qualified for. There were a lot of those. Hey, I am a salesperson and I have never done this before. Hey, I am a new manager and I have never done this before. She had resources and people around her, she is quick to note, but what carried her through was a decision to push herself and outwork the gap.
The second name is Christina Luconi, Rapid7's longtime Chief People Officer, who moved on from the company within the last year after more than twelve years in the seat. Gormley knew her before joining Rapid7 and worked alongside her for eight or nine of those years. She describes Luconi as a hugely influential voice in both the business market and the people market, particularly on the question of how to shape a people function so that it operates as a genuine strategic business function rather than an administrative one.
What Gormley took from her was partly perspective and partly permission. Luconi kept putting her into situations that were new and creative, and kept expecting her to think her way through them. "The continued belief that she's had in me," Gormley says, is what made almost a decade of learning by watching, working alongside and looking through a different lens possible. She calls herself extremely lucky for it, personally and professionally.
AI, and the Speed Nobody Has Seen Before
Gormley spends real time comparing notes with peers, not only in Boston but with leaders running talent engines across different industries and company sizes. Her read on the moment is unsentimental. The speed of the technology and the speed of change are, she says, unprecedented, and not something most people in the profession have had the chance to see in their careers.
Her most interesting argument is that the second order effect matters more than the first. There is massive opportunity for AI to change how recruiting engines work. There is a bigger question in how those engines will have to respond to the businesses they support once AI reshapes those businesses. Talent leaders who only optimize their own workflow, in other words, are solving the smaller half of the problem.
She has watched the mood flip in twelve months. A year ago there was hesitation and uncertainty about what adoption would even look like. Today, among her own team and her peers, she sees a tremendous amount of curiosity about how to adopt automation responsibly, with the explicit goal of giving time back to the parts of the job that are most critical and most often squeezed out. That means drawing a clear line: where can we automate, and what has to remain human led. Rapid7 has built a number of tools internally, and the workflow reviews continue on a rolling basis precisely because the answers keep moving.
The candidate side has shifted just as sharply. Application tooling has made applying easier, so volumes have risen dramatically, and candidates now have more help in how they present themselves. More applicants is not the same as more signal. Gormley's team has always oriented around finding the highest quality candidate, and she is candid that AI has made that harder rather than easier. The consequence is that the way talent is interviewed and evaluated is changing, in her words, every day, and she is in the middle of rebuilding for it.
Stay Curious, Think Transformatively
Her advice to talent leaders is short and consistent with everything else about her. Stay curious. Be very open to thinking transformatively. Business overall is in the middle of significant change and talent acquisition is feeling it acutely, which makes incrementalism a poor bet.
It is advice that traces directly back to both of her mentors: her father's conviction that effort compounds, and Luconi's habit of pushing her into unfamiliar rooms and trusting her to think creatively once she got there. Twenty years in, Gormley is still doing exactly that, running the exercise again because the answer changed, and treating that as the fun part.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Elizabeth. We are honored to welcome Elizabeth Gormley to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Elizabeth. 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.
