Jed Shaw
CDL Software
“Use AI not to move people along quickly, but to free up your time to genuinely serve the candidates and the stakeholders you are working with.”
Jed Shaw 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 Jed's story.
A pair of broken legs ended one career and quietly started another. Jed Shaw was playing professional rugby when the injuries arrived, and the road out of the game ran through sales, then agency recruitment, then agency ownership, and finally to CDL Software, where Shaw has spent five years as Talent Acquisition Manager and manages all the recruitment for the business.
It is a single-owner remit inside a software company that runs heavily on artificial intelligence itself, which makes the job unusual in a useful way. Most talent leaders are learning about AI from the outside, reading the vendor decks and guessing at the roadmap. Shaw is learning about it from inside a business that builds with it, prices it, governs it, and has already lived through the cost swings that come with adopting products in a market changing this fast.
From the Pitch to the Sales Floor to the Agency Desk
The rugby career ended abruptly, and sales was the first landing spot. What Shaw discovered there was a pair of aptitudes that happened to sit at the exact intersection recruitment demands: a genuine ease with people, and an ability to sell. Recruitment looked like the obvious way forward, so Shaw went into agency work, and eventually built and ran an independent agency.
The move internal came later, and it came by invitation. Shaw was approached to join CDL, and it became the first in-house role of the career, five years in and counting. The agency background still shows in the operating style. Owning an agency teaches a person to think about capacity, cost, and throughput before anyone else raises the subject, and it teaches a healthy suspicion of anything that adds motion without adding outcome.
A Room Full of People Still on the Curve
The most formative influence on Shaw's thinking recently has not been a single manager but a peer group: a community of heads of talent acquisition, described as top of the game, global, and unsparing in the topics they put on the table. Shaw goes to the meetings to soak up information, and does so without any interest in appearing to already know the answers. Not being afraid of looking daft is, in Shaw's framing, the price of admission to actually learning something. Everyone has to learn.
One member of that group has been particularly influential, and Shaw credits them with a great deal of what has been absorbed over the past few years. But the value of the room is broader than any one relationship. Hearing senior practitioners describe their problems out loud is reassuring in a way that few things in this profession are. Whatever level a person reaches, the issues rhyme. And on AI and tooling specifically, the honest position across the room is that everyone is still on the learning curve, which is precisely why the conversations are worth attending.
The Internet Argument
Shaw's framework for AI borrows from an older disruption. When the internet arrived, businesses were frightened of it. They assumed it would not work, or that it would ruin them. Then they learned to use it, started selling through it, and made it work in their favour. AI is the same story running faster, and probably with even more impact. The rate of change, in Shaw's assessment, is phenomenal and is not going to stop anytime soon.
That optimism comes with a clear eye for theatre. There are AI tools built for the sake of being AI tools, and AI jobs that exist for the sake of the label. Put AI on top of what a person already claims to do, Shaw notes drily, and the salary goes up. The real work is less glamorous: automation as well as AI, applied deliberately to maximise time and capacity so the talent acquisition function runs smoothly. The dividend is positional. Reclaimed hours let Shaw operate as a business partner to the organisation rather than as a service desk, and they let the candidate journey be as good as it can possibly be.
Working inside an AI company adds discipline. CDL applies stringent internal governance to which AI tools can be used, and every prospective addition goes through review boards. That is red tape by one description and quality control by another, and it means Shaw has watched product costs fluctuate in real time and understands the commercial implications of committing to a vendor in a category this volatile.
Advice for the Year Ahead
Speaking at an event a couple of weeks earlier, Shaw delivered a message that landed harder than expected: most teams have no idea how much automation and how much measurable success they could unlock with the software they already own. The next shiny tool is rarely the answer, and the fortune spent acquiring it is often spent on capability sitting unused in the existing stack. Audit before you buy.
The rest of the advice is a matter of intent. AI should not be deployed to get rid of people quickly, to move candidates along quickly, or to hire quickly. It should be deployed so that time is freed to serve candidates and stakeholders properly and to do the job to the best of one's ability. Shaw expects the coming period to be interesting for exactly this reason. The first phase, where everybody simply uses AI and candidate CVs begin to look identical, is already here. The next phase belongs to the people who master it and apply it properly, and Shaw believes the talent acquisition function will be central to that shift. Candidate experience stays primary. Everything else is tooling.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Jed. We are honored to welcome Jed Shaw to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Jed. 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.
