Haritha Kamakoti
Walmart Global Tech
“I love being in the recruiting space. I love making the impact.”
Haritha Kamakoti 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 Haritha's story.
Two decades ago, Haritha Kamakoti was a program manager whose job was to connect technology teams to the business. The part she loved most was never in the job description: putting the right person in the right seat. That instinct became a career.
Today, as a Director at Walmart, Kamakoti sits several layers removed from the candidate conversations that first drew her in. She is unsentimental about that trade. "I don't talk to candidates anymore," she says. "I don't regret it, because I know I'm making an impact from a different perspective." The impact she means is structural: how a hiring machine is built, how fast it moves, and whether it still feels human at the other end.
From Matchmaking to Machinery
Kamakoti's entry into talent acquisition came after a career break and a decision to start something new. What she chose was, in her own framing, matchmaking. "It's almost like a matchmaking where you're getting people to match with the right skill sets, right teams," she says of those early years. It started small and personal, one requisition and one conversation at a time.
Fifteen years ago she joined Amazon as a contract recruiter and converted to a full-time employee, and the scale of the place changed the way she understood the work. Over more than a decade there, the lesson that stuck was not about customers alone. It was about people. Providing the right opportunity, making sure a person had the right path into the company, being the bridge that carried them across it. That reframing, from filling roles to building careers, is what turned a second act into a calling.
The way she runs a team today still carries the fingerprints of that period. She sets her people against things they can actually move: the number of candidates loaded into a hiring event, the volume of outreach, the effort that goes in before anyone gets a vote. She is candid that the craft itself has been rebuilt underneath her. "I don't think 15, 18 years back when we recruited, we do the same thing as what we do today with the AI world," she says. The evolution is precisely what keeps her engaged.
The Two Anands
Ask Kamakoti who shaped her and she offers a coincidence she still finds funny: the two people who changed her career the most share a first name.
The first is Anand Victor, now a VP at Amazon and a senior manager when she joined. He was her business partner, someone she supported, and he refused to let her operate as an order taker. He asked her why she would not challenge every request her hiring managers brought her. Growth, he argued, comes from understanding the why behind a hire: why this decision, why these skill sets and not those. Then he delivered the line she has carried for years. Customer is not always right. You do what is right for the customer. "If my hiring manager comes to you and tells you he wants this," she recalls him saying, "you tell them, no, I don't think you want this based on what you answered me." That coaching, she says, turned her into a genuine business partner rather than a recruiter working from a requirements list, and it drove her promotions inside a company where standing your ground is the price of credibility.
The second is Anand Varadarajan, currently the CTO of Starbucks, another former business partner and still her mentor today. His lesson was about focus: think about the inputs, because you cannot control the outputs. Kamakoti repeats it to her teams constantly. Put in this many efforts. Put this many candidates into the hiring event. The rest is not yours to command. "The candidate can come and really bomb or they may do fantastic, so you just cannot control that," she says. Managing to inputs has become the operating discipline of every team she runs, and by her account it has never failed to produce results.
What AI Has Actually Changed
On artificial intelligence, Kamakoti has the credibility of someone who has run the pilots rather than read the decks. She has tested tooling inside both Walmart and Amazon, and she is precise about where the gains have landed. "Where is it highly impacted is speed to hire," she says. Not scheduling links like Calendly, which she distinguishes from the AI she actually means, but genuine orchestration: a candidate selecting a time from a pool of interviewers, the system reassigning quickly to whoever is available rather than waiting on the people you were trying to pick. Faster turnaround, and candidates who can chat, get quick answers and know where they stand.
She is equally precise about the limits. AI will shortlist for you. Whether it shortlists the right people is a separate question. In her pilots, results have come back eliminating profiles because the model latched onto certain skill sets in how it parsed a resume. "Is AI completely ready? I do not think so," she says. "But AI is shaping us to get to where fast turnaround for candidates, and candidates like it."
The unresolved frontier is sourcing at volume without surrendering judgment. If the tooling matures, she expects to use it there. What she will not trade is contact. Walmart, an organization of enormous scale, has been deliberate about protecting the human element rather than quietly engineering it out, and she counts that as a mark in the company's favor. "It is so easy to go to a place where you just reduce headcount and you just have AI doing the job," she says. Scheduling does not need a person staring at a calendar. A career conversation does. Her summary of the landscape is characteristically balanced: an unknown world, but one shaping into a genuinely better candidate experience, "as long as we do not lose the human touch."
Advice: Embrace It, Do Not Resist It
Her counsel to talent leaders is direct, and it is aimed squarely at people like her. Focus on AI. Evolve talent acquisition toward a machine that can run itself. Then guard the thing the machine cannot replicate, "because that is such an important piece of how we connect people, connect roles and provide a career for folks."
She names the resistance openly, and includes herself in the group most likely to feel it. Many of the field's most experienced practitioners, veterans of twenty years or more, are inclined to call the old way the right way. Kamakoti's position is that seniority is a reason to lead the change, not to sit it out. "There is so much goodness to it," she says of the new toolset.
It is a fitting philosophy for someone whose career began with a simple pleasure in matching a person to the work that suited them, and who has spent twenty years turning that pleasure into systems. The technology keeps changing. The point of the job, as she tells it, has not moved an inch.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Haritha. We are honored to welcome Haritha Kamakoti to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Haritha. 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.
