Jamie Adasi
Merit America
“Learning to use AI responsibly matters as much as learning to use it well.”
Jamie Adasi 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 Jamie's story.
Jamie Adasi's first real hiring assignment came with a number attached: go hire 250 resident assistants. She was the graduate coordinator for HR in the Department of Resident Life at the University of Maryland, College Park, working toward a Master's in Counseling and Personnel Services, and she was handed a project plan and the entire hiring process, start to finish. She loved it. Two decades of inclusion and workforce equity work later, that instinct has not changed: hiring is the lever, and pulling it well changes who gets access to a career.
Today she is Director of Inclusive Excellence at Merit America, a national nonprofit that creates fast, flexible pathways to family-sustaining careers for workers without four-year degrees. Jamie describes hiring as one of the main ways people achieve economic mobility, not only in the United States but abroad. It is a fitting home for a leader who has spent her career arguing that a hiring process is not an administrative function. It is a distribution system for opportunity, and who it reaches is a question of equity.
The Work at Merit America
Merit America exists for the nearly half of American workers who do not earn a living wage and for whom a four-year degree is neither practical nor affordable. It pairs technical training with career coaching so working adults can move into skilled, family-sustaining careers without quitting their day jobs. Jamie's role is to make sure the organization lives its own mission internally, and hiring is where that starts.
Jamie joined Merit America after leaving Greenhouse Software last June, and she now partners closely with the organization's hiring team to, in her words, reimagine what hiring looks like for America. That partnership is not theoretical. She recently went through the full process herself, hiring the first team member for her Inclusive Excellence function alongside Merit America's hiring partners, which put her on both sides of the table at once: the architect of inclusive hiring standards and the hiring manager living inside them. She came away with plenty of feedback and, she is quick to add, great experiences with the team.
That dual vantage point runs through everything she says about the work. Every scorecard, every job description, every debrief carries weight because of what sits on the other end of it: a person whose access to a career depends on the process being fair.
Roots in Identity and Leadership
Jamie's path into hiring was never separable from her path into inclusion work. Fresh out of college and thinking hard about her own identities, she built her early leadership portfolio around LGBTQ+ leadership, Black leadership, and making sure women were represented across the board in the work being done at Maryland. Hiring became the place where those commitments could be operationalized rather than merely discussed.
The commitment persists in the ordinary rhythms of her week. She still writes for her own people, including a Transgender Day of Visibility post for her staff members, drafted in the middle of a crowded calendar, because visibility is not an initiative to her. It is a habit.
AI as a Tool for More Thoughtful Hiring
Having spent her most recent chapter inside a technology company with a heavy AI focus, Jamie is refreshingly unromantic about the tooling now flooding the profession. She is pro-AI, and she believes talent leaders should learn to use it rather than fear it. But the distinction she holds is between AI as an amplifier and AI as an authority. The tool can extend a hiring team's reach and sharpen its thinking. It should never become the decision-maker. Her framing is less AI versus humans and more AI plus thoughtful humans who stay accountable for the outcome.
On the amplifier side, she sees real value in places that matter to equity: making job descriptions more inclusive so teams can cast a wider net, and supporting scorecards so candidates are compared on credentials and on the skills they are building rather than on personality or pedigree. She sees the benefit flowing to candidates too. Candidates can use AI to better articulate their experience, prepare for interviews, and understand opportunities, which matters especially for people without a traditional degree. But she draws a firm line: no one should have to become an expert prompt engineer just to be seen as qualified. Access to opportunity cannot depend on fluency with the newest tool.
Consistency Is Not Equity
The point Jamie cares about most is the one that is easiest to get wrong. AI can make hiring more consistent, and consistency is a genuine improvement over the ad hoc processes many teams still run. But consistency and fairness are not the same thing. Structure alone does not eliminate bias. Teams still have to examine the data, the assumptions behind the tools, and the outcomes they produce. A process can be perfectly uniform and still narrow access if the inputs carry old patterns forward, and for a leader recognized for her work in inclusion, that is the line that matters.
Keep Humans Accountable
Her advice to people and inclusion leaders comes in two parts. The first is not to be afraid of it. The technology is changing rapidly, she notes, and leaders who use it and learn about it will find it an advantage rather than a drag on their effectiveness. The second is the guardrail, and review is only part of it. AI can help teams move faster, reduce repetitive work, surface patterns, and even challenge their thinking. But speed and efficiency cannot replace judgment, context, or accountability. That means understanding the toll AI takes on society, including the environmental cost, and it means a human owning every decision the machine helped shape. In hiring above all, she argues, because hiring is one of the primary mechanisms by which people move up.
It is a characteristically balanced position from a leader whose career has been spent making systems work better for the people inside them, and for the people still trying to get in. Adopt the tools. Keep the judgment. Stay accountable for the outcome, and never forget who is on the other end of the decision.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Jamie. We are honored to welcome Jamie Adasi to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Jamie. 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.
