Grace Turner
Pallet
“Just remember that there's always somebody behind the resume.”
Grace Turner 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 Grace's story.
Two months into her first recruiting job, at a boutique agency in Tokyo, Grace Turner brought in the fastest deal the firm had seen. She had been teaching English in Japan, had done a pile of research on what recruiters actually did, and had applied, in her words, very timidly. Before she left that firm a year and a half later, she had also upsold some of her contracts from 20 percent to 40 percent.
That was January 2018. Nearly nine years later, Turner is Head of Talent at Pallet in San Francisco, where she runs a function built on two ideas most people treat as opposites: aggressive automation and relentless personalization. She wires Claude into her workflow to scope roles her team has never hired for, pipes Greenhouse, BrightHire and Modern Loop into a single system so leadership gets real-time dashboards, and then spends the saved hours making sure a candidate in final stage gets a birthday gift before anyone asks them to sign anything. The systems exist, she argues, precisely so that people can be treated like people.
From Tokyo to San Francisco
Turner's entry into the profession was geographic accident turned career. Living and working abroad in Japan roughly eight years ago, she went looking for what else she might do, stumbled across recruiting in Tokyo, and shot her shot. The boutique agency that hired her gave her a fast, unforgiving education in commercial recruiting: speed, fees, client negotiation, closing.
Agency life, she decided, was not where she wanted to build. Personal reasons brought her to the United States, and San Francisco is where the rest of the story has played out, in startups, in tech, and eventually in leading talent for one.
Her first in-house role, at a startup called Pathrise, produced the frustration that shaped everything after it. Three strong candidates would reach final round for a product manager opening, Turner would be certain a hire was imminent, and then the process would dissolve into a series of small objections. One thing wrong, then another, then another, and nobody hired. "Me and my little fresh recruiting brain," as she puts it, kept asking the same question: what should I have done differently?
The Mentors Who Gave Her Frameworks
Two people answered that question in different ways. Her manager at Pathrise, the company's head of operations, gave her the operating discipline she still uses: how to project manage, how to organize work, how to hold a process together rather than react to it. Turner credits her with the frameworks that turned recruiting instinct into a repeatable system.
The recruiting answer came from outside the company. Using an early LinkedIn mentorship feature that surfaced a roster of profiles willing to take a call, Turner connected with Kristen, then head of talent at an ad tech company. Kristen's lesson was blunt and structural: align on the core competencies early, before candidates are ever in a room. It is the fix for exactly the failure mode Turner had been living through. The two stayed connected for about two years, with Turner pinging her whenever a new question surfaced, and she still leans on that thinking today.
Three Prongs of AI, and No Illusions
Turner is clear-eyed about the noise in the market. She hears the claims that entire recruiting stacks have been fully automated, and she is unimpressed. What she actually does is more specific, and she organizes it into three prongs.
The first is administrative leverage: reviewing and stack ranking resumes, automated sourcing, particularly for non-technical roles, and drafting the endless volume of email that recruiting generates. The second is intelligence. With Claude, her team can scope roles the company has no institutional knowledge of. When Pallet opened a security platform role, her recruiter could take everything the hiring managers offered, digest it, then go find out how other tech startups interview for that profile, what the best practices are, and what her team might be missing. "Having that wealth of knowledge really helps us to formulate the best plan," she says. Beneath both sits the infrastructure work of connecting Greenhouse, BrightHire and Modern Loop into one system so that analytics and dashboards reach leadership in real time rather than in a monthly deck.
The third prong is the one most talent leaders have not started thinking about yet. Candidates now ask ChatGPT what a company's culture is like, or why they should choose one offer over another, and the answer they receive is not written by the employer. Turner is working on that: SEO and what she calls AEO, getting Pallet's story, its culture messaging, and what distinguishes it from competitors into the models that candidates consult. "We kind of want to control that narrative," she says. It is employer branding rewritten for a world where the first recruiter a candidate talks to is a language model. Even so, she thinks the profession is only touching the surface of what is possible.
Somebody Behind the Resume
Ask Turner for advice and she does not talk about tooling. She talks about the thing tooling is supposed to protect. Recruiters, she says, can drift into judgment and volume, churn and hire, hire, hire, without ever seeing the person underneath. Her counter is operational, not sentimental: train the hiring managers, reject candidates properly at the application stage, never ghost anyone. Build the systems so that the humanity is possible at scale.
The other half of her philosophy is that selling is not an event. "You can't just sell them when they get an offer, you have to sell them throughout the process," she says. In practice, that means noticing things. A finalist mentions a birthday tomorrow; a few hundred dollars of whiskey shows up. It costs the business almost nothing and it builds a partnership, which is the word Turner reaches for when she describes the relationship she wants with the people she hires.
She is not worried about being automated out of the work. She jokes about the online sentiment that runs the other direction, the fear that AI will not manage to take the job. What she is watchful of is the industry losing the human touch on the way to scale. Her advice for 2026 fits in a sentence: build the systems, then remember there is always somebody behind the resume.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Grace. We are honored to welcome Grace Turner to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Grace. 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.
