Jamaal Jenkins
OneTouch Direct
“Get used to it, get comfortable with it, because it's not going anywhere. It's only going to get better and bigger.”
Jamaal Jenkins 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 Jamaal's story.
Jamaal Jenkins had just finished playing collegiate football at the University of South Florida and was doing what nearly every new graduate does when his phone rang. A former teammate, then an account manager at a small staffing company in Tampa, had a blunt instruction: put on a suit and come interview for this recruiter position. Jenkins had never heard of recruiting. He did not know it was a profession. He put on the suit.
"The rest is history," he says now, with the economy of someone who has told the story a few times. That history runs from that small Tampa staffing firm to leading a recruiting team in St. Louis, through the ranks at Kforce, and into his current post as Head of Talent Acquisition at OneTouch Direct. Along the way he has never lost the conviction that the center of the craft is not the tooling or the pipeline reports. It is the ability to understand another person well enough to know what they actually want.
A Business Built by People People
Ask Jenkins what recruiting expertise really consists of and he does not start with sourcing techniques or funnel math. He starts with the practitioners. A great deal of the profession's skill, he argues, comes from being "people people," from understanding how candidates are motivated, understanding the experiences they carry, and being able to genuinely communicate with them and talk to them.
It is a deceptively simple definition, and it is also a demanding one. Motivation is rarely what a resume advertises. Experience is rarely what a job title implies. Getting to either requires a recruiter willing to have a real conversation rather than a scripted screen, and it requires enough judgment to know when what someone says and what someone means have drifted apart. That is the standard Jenkins holds his own work to, and it is the lens through which he evaluates every new tool that lands on his desk.
Three Names He Keeps Coming Back To
Asked who shaped him, Jenkins names three people without hesitation, and the first is Alex Donnelly, the market president during his years running the recruiting team in St. Louis. He calls her one of the best leaders he has ever had, and the reason is specific: she was a servant leader who stayed hands on with everyone who reported to her. "She is and has been and still is a people leader," he says. What mattered was that it was not a philosophy he read about. It was something he got to see and feel from the inside, which is a different kind of education entirely.
The second is Kai Mitchell, the CEO of Kforce during his tenure there. From her he learned three things he still uses: how to look at the business, how to build genuinely impactful teams, and how to support those teams as a leader rather than simply setting a number and stepping back.
The third is Don Harvey, a mentor of many years who is no longer with us. Harvey's lesson was the internal one. He taught Jenkins how to drive himself as a leader and how to keep putting himself in a position to succeed year over year, not just quarter to quarter. Taken together, the three lessons Jenkins carries form a fairly complete curriculum: one about people, one about the business, and one about the self.
Metrics Where There Used to Be Instinct
On artificial intelligence, Jenkins is neither evangelist nor skeptic. He is an operator, and he frames the shift in an operator's terms: the technology has produced more data around hires. For a profession that has long run on relationships and pattern recognition, that is a real change in what a recruiter can know before the first conversation even happens.
The front end is where he sees the clearest gain. AI tooling now handles a meaningful share of the filtering, which frees his teams to connect with the strongest talent, and to identify who that talent is "based off of actual metrics and data versus feelings and experience." It is a careful formulation. Jenkins is not arguing that feel and experience are worthless; his entire career is evidence to the contrary. He is arguing that judgment performs better when it is aimed at the right people, and that data is what does the aiming.
What he will not concede is the human core of the work. The expertise that separates a great recruiter from an adequate one still lives in reading motivation, understanding an experience, and being able to actually talk to someone about their life and their career. That, in his view, has not been automated, and is not close to being automated.
Advice for the Next Phase
His counsel to other talent leaders heading further into 2026 is short and unsentimental. "Get used to it, get comfortable with it," he says of AI, "because it's not going anywhere. It's only going to get better and bigger." There is no hedging in it, and no anxiety either. It is the posture of a leader who has watched the tools of the trade change more than once and concluded that fluency, not resistance, is what makes a career durable.
That durability is the through line. Jenkins entered a profession he did not know existed, learned it inside a small Tampa staffing firm, and built from there into leadership across markets and companies. His family is from Jamaica, and when a family event calls he books the flight. It is a fitting detail for a leader whose whole professional argument is that people, not process, are where the value lives.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Jamaal. We are honored to welcome Jamaal Jenkins to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Jamaal. 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.
