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 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 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.
Two Rons and a Door Opened Early
Asked to name the people who shaped him, Briery does not reach for a list of executives. He reaches for a sequence of introductions, each tied to an age. The first is Ron Young, whose boat he sailed on when he was sixteen or seventeen. Young, by Briery's own carefully hedged account, founded what he believes was the first DSL company providing internet access in the United States, a claim Briery flags as possibly imperfect memory rather than assert as fact. What is not in question is the access. Young's boat was where a teenager did the networking that Briery still describes as some of the most consequential of his life, in sailing and beyond it.
The second is Ron Hendrickson, the man who made the offer that day on the water, and who passed away recently. Briery calls that exchange pivotal not only in his career but in his life, the hinge on which everything after it turned. It is worth sitting with the asymmetry: a five-second read of a young sailor's intelligence and quickness, offered casually between races, became a decade and a half of professional work. Briery has never forgotten that someone chose to say it out loud.
Learning What Horsepower Looks Like
The third turning point arrived at twenty-six, when Max Kanter connected him with Atrium. Briery is candid that he was still finding his footing at the time, in his words "kind of just flopping around and trying to figure out how to operate in talent acquisition." What Atrium gave him was calibration: a firsthand education in what an early-stage, Andreessen-backed, Sequoia-backed company actually runs like. The pace. The operational standard. What he calls the horsepower.
That introduction produced another. Through Kanter came a connection to Justin Kan, and Briery does not pretend to be unique in that regard. "I bet I can introduce you to a thousand people, if not more, that'll say Justin Kan impacted their life significantly in some way, and I'm certainly one of them," he says. It is a characteristically unpossessive way to describe a mentor, and it says something about how Briery understands influence. He is not collecting names. He is tracking a network of generosity that he happened to be routed through, three times, at three ages: sixteen, twenty-one, twenty-six.
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 twenty-six-year-old 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 three 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.
