Ellis Livingston Briery
“I used to be a professional sailor. I used to race sailboats for a living.”
Ellis Livingston Briery 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 Ellis's story.
The job offer came off the water. Ellis Livingston Briery was racing sailboats for a living, two races into a single day at a non-pro regatta, when the man bringing the boat sized him up and made a pitch that had nothing to do with sailing. "Hey man, you're quick, you're smart in conversation. Do you want a job?" Briery said yes. That conversation, roughly a decade and a half ago, ended with him inside JCPenney's corporate offices doing recruiting research for the technical organization, and it started a career that has run through retail transformation, venture-backed startups, and the sourcing craft that underpins both.
Briery is quick to note that the sailing detail is unusual and the shape of the story is not. Ask anyone in talent acquisition how they arrived, and the answer almost always begins with an accident and a stranger. "I was backpacking and I ran into this one guy and he said that he thought that I might be good for the job," he says, imitating the genre. "In that sense, I feel like it's a relatively typical story." What separates Briery is how seriously he has taken the mechanics of that accident, and how carefully he can still name the people on the other side of each door.
From the Racecourse to Corporate Retail
JCPenney was an unlikely first employer for a professional sailor, and an unusually instructive one. Briery joined during the period when the company was pursuing a sweeping rebranding and internal transformation, the kind of top-to-bottom reinvention that puts enormous pressure on the people responsible for staffing it. He worked recruiting research for the technical team, learning the discipline before he learned the title, and moved into sourcing from there.
He is diplomatic about what he witnessed. "There's a whole bunch of interesting things that I cannot say in a public-facing interview," he says, with the practiced restraint of someone who has been in the room during a corporate turnaround and understands the difference between a story and a confidence. What he will say is that research and sourcing, done properly, were the foundation of everything that followed. Before he was an operator, he was a person who knew how to find people who did not want to be found.
The Discipline of the Open Door
Run the thread through Briery's account and a philosophy emerges without him ever labeling it as one. Every meaningful step in his career came from someone who noticed capability in a person who had not yet demonstrated it in the relevant context. A sailor is not an obvious sourcer. A young professional still figuring out how to operate in talent acquisition is not an obvious fit for a venture-backed operating environment. In each case, somebody made a bet on raw signal rather than on a resume, which is, stripped of jargon, the entire premise of good recruiting.
Briery frames those moments in terms of "what it meant to have a door of opportunity open in front of you." It is the sentence a recruiter earns the right to say only after they have spent years on both sides of it, first walking through doors, then holding them. Fifteen years on from a two-race day and an offhand question about a job, he still names the people who opened them, gets their titles right, hedges when his memory is uncertain, and refuses to inflate his own role in his own story. In a profession built almost entirely on introductions, that kind of accounting is not modesty. It is craft.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Ellis. We are honored to welcome Ellis Livingston Briery to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Ellis. 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.
