James Kennedy
Palo Alto Networks
“Experiment, run pilots, run A/B tests, figure out what suits your business.”
James Kennedy 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 James's story.
Ask James Kennedy about AI in recruiting and he does not reach for the buzzwords. He reaches for the distinction he has spent the last year making in round tables, peer conversations and internal briefings: the difference between micro gains and macro impact. A recruiter using a chatbot to draft a project plan is a micro gain. A tool that helps a global business making thousands of hires a year zone in on the best suited candidates faster, and give the ones who are not moving forward a quicker answer, is something else entirely. "We can definitely see the pathway," he says of the second kind. Kennedy, a talent acquisition leader at Palo Alto Networks based in London, has built a seventeen-year career on exactly that instinct: separating what sounds transformative from what actually moves a business.
A Conversation After Graduation
Kennedy first heard the words "recruitment consultant" at university, from a friend a year or two ahead of him who had graduated into the agency world. The pitch was simple: if you are not sure what path you want when you leave, this is worth a look. It stuck. On graduating in 2008, Kennedy got in touch with a rec-to-rec firm in London, was sent packing to a run of interviews across a range of agencies, and came away with offers from several of them.
He chose a large agency specialising predominantly in contract and interim hiring, and started a couple of weeks after graduating. That first foray lasted a number of years and set the shape of everything that followed: agency first, then the RPO arena, and for the past several years the in-house talent acquisition world. It is a route that has given him an unusually complete view of the market, having sat on the supplier side, the outsourced-partner side and the client side of the same transaction.
The RPO chapter was the longest single stretch of his career. Kennedy spent just under eight years with a global RPO business, and it was there that he moved from practitioner to leader, taking on progressively larger teams and wider remits. His in-house work has since taken him inside some of the most demanding hiring environments in technology, including AWS, and now Palo Alto Networks, where he leads recruiters through a period of both platform change and genuine technological upheaval.
From Micro Gains to Macro Impact
Kennedy's view of AI in talent acquisition is neither evangelical nor dismissive. He accepts that it is a buzzword topic, surfacing in virtually every round table and external conversation he has, and he speaks about it often. What has changed in the past twelve months, in his experience, is that practical application has started to catch up with rhetoric.
The micro benefits, he argues, have been available for years: using a tool to help write a project plan, build employer brand collateral, or shave time off low-level tasks across a week. Useful, but largely invisible on a company's top or bottom line. His own team has pushed that layer as far as it will go, building notebooks so that recruiters can self-serve answers on the current ATS implementation rather than hunting through a hundred different documents or waiting on a colleague. The knowledge exists; the notebook makes it interrogable.
The macro shift is what interests him now. Palo Alto Networks recently implemented HiredScore, and Kennedy is candid that adoption is at an early stage while also clear about the direction of travel. It is already saving recruiters time day to day by helping them zone in on the candidates best suited to a role. That produces a better candidate experience, gets the business to the right talent faster, and means that those who are not taken forward receive a quicker outcome too. Multiply that across a global business making thousands of hires a year, he notes, and micro transactions become macro gains: better experience, right talent, faster.
Learn by Doing
His advice to other talent leaders is unglamorous and hard-won. Do not simply hand your team a new tool and instruct them to use it. Use it yourself first. Kennedy is upfront that he is no expert in AI; what he claims instead is a learner mindset, something he credits to his years at Amazon and AWS, where curiosity and being willing to be bad at something for a while are treated as professional virtues rather than weaknesses.
So when he asks recruiters on his team to experiment with a product touching the sourcing stage of the life cycle, an area he sees as unusually ripe for transformation, he has been in the tool himself. "Learn by doing," he says. "Experiment, run pilots, run A/B tests, figure out what suits your business." He pairs that with a critical lens, noting bluntly that there are a lot of good sales pitches in the market, and that a product excellent for an enterprise may be wrong for a scale-up or a startup. Get your hands dirty, get comfortable being uncomfortable, and keep re-testing, because the tooling that disappointed you a month ago is not the tooling you would evaluate today.
It is a philosophy that echoes his own entry into the profession: no grand plan, a willingness to take the conversation, and then the discipline to make something durable out of it. Seventeen years on from that first agency job a fortnight after graduation, Kennedy is one of the practitioners the industry now asks what is actually working.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than James. We are honored to welcome James Kennedy to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, James. 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.
