Jay Mansavage
Insulet Corporation
“I don't think it's ever going to fully replace the need for recruiters. It's only going to enhance what we do.”
Jay Mansavage 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 Jay's story.
Out of college, Jay Mansavage got the thing most kids only dream about: four years inside a professional baseball organization. The wood bat proved the tougher opponent, and the same competitive instinct that carried him through the minor league system now powers a talent acquisition career built on relationships, on the phone, and lately on an unapologetic bet that artificial intelligence makes good recruiters better rather than obsolete.
Today he leads talent acquisition at Insulet Corporation, where he arrived in the middle of a broad transformation, including a Workday implementation, with foundational pieces still to be built. It is exactly the kind of assignment that rewards someone who has seen recruiting from the agency side, the corporate side, and both coasts.
From The Minor Leagues To The Phones
When the playing career ended, Mansavage went back to school, finished his degree, and moved to New York with his now wife. A college friend working at a staffing company put him through an interview and asked whether he had any interest in tech recruiting. The word landed strangely. "I come from a sports background," he recalls thinking. "I got recruited to play baseball. Is it like that?" The friend's answer was yes, with one adjustment: the athletes are professionals.
What followed was an education in the trade at its most fundamental. This was the era of writing everything down on a resume, of smiling and dialing, of interviewing candidate after candidate. He knew nothing about technology when he started. He knew how to get to know people and ask a lot of questions, and over time the technical fluency followed. Four years in New York gave him the full agency experience, requisitions to chase and business development to win, and it also gave him the part of the work he still loves most: the energy of the conversation, on both sides of the table, and the satisfaction of matching the right person to the right career move.
After those four years he made a personal decision to trade New York for San Diego, chasing a different pace, a different lifestyle, and the sunshine.
The Light Bulb Moment On AI
Mansavage watched the recruiting profession split into two camps as generative AI arrived. On one side, the early adopters, leaning into ChatGPT and everything adjacent, embracing it and owning it. On the other, what he believes was the majority: skeptical, cautious, and privately worried that the technology was coming for their jobs.
He was somewhere in between, and honest about why. In the earliest days the tools were not broadly encouraged or sanctioned, so using them felt faintly illicit, like circumventing a system that had not agreed to be circumvented. Then, at a conference he attended with his previous employer, a speaker reframed the whole question. The message was blunt: if you are not interacting with it every day, you are falling behind. The speaker also made a distinction that stuck. Most people begin by treating AI like a Google search. "I remember I was like, yep, that's exactly what I was doing," Mansavage says. The instruction was to talk to it instead, engage with it, learn from it, keep going.
That was the moment he went all in. His leadership at the time had already given the green light, and the team leaned into the Google stack, Gemini and NotebookLM among the tools in rotation. At Insulet the approved tool is Copilot, a different badge on a similar capability. What changed permanently was the mindset. "It's not cheating," he says. "It's just making yourself better."
Assistants, Not Replacements
Mansavage's conviction about where this lands is unequivocal. In talent acquisition, he does not believe AI will ever fully replace the need for recruiters. It will enhance them. The recruiters who win, he argues, will be the ones who hunt for efficiency wherever it hides: the administrative task, the presentation that has to be built, the wording of an outreach message, the search string that surfaces better candidates. Think of the tools as assistants, he says, rather than as threats.
His advice to other talent leaders is deliberately simple, because he thinks complexity is what keeps people frozen. Embrace it. Learn it. Explore with it. Play around with it on your own time. And do not be afraid of it. The fear he hears most often, that AI is coming to replace someone's job, is in his view the single biggest obstacle between a recruiter and the version of themselves that AI could unlock. "Those that embrace it and can find ways to make themselves more efficient," he says, "are those that are going to be successful."
It is a philosophy consistent with everything else about him: the athlete who learned the value of an adjustment, the agency recruiter who learned a business by asking questions, and the leader who decided early that how you treat people on the way up is the whole job.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Jay. We are honored to welcome Jay Mansavage to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Jay. 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.
