Jeff Kennedy
Decagon
“I don't work in talent. I work for the business.”
Jeff 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 Jeff's story.
At Decagon, Jeff Kennedy does not forecast hiring on feel. His team runs weekly forecasts and individual pipeline inspections the way a sales organization does, so when the business asks where the quarter is going to land, the answer is a number and not a hunch: 131 or 132 net new people. As he puts it, "no more vibes."
That instinct, treating talent as a revenue function rather than a support function, is the through line of a career that began in a recruiting agency before Kennedy was old enough to drive. He now leads a global talent organization at Decagon, and he arrived there by way of agency work, a stint inside a hypergrowth database company, and a pre-IPO business that went public underneath him. Along the way he stopped describing himself as someone who works in talent at all.
A Family Business, Learned at Fourteen
Kennedy did not stumble into recruiting. He grew up inside it. His brother was managing director of a publicly listed recruiting company at twenty-seven, an executive at an age when most people are still learning to manage themselves, and Kennedy watched closely. At fourteen or fifteen he was taking summer jobs in the business, picking up the phone and trying to drive new revenue. "I was in agency when I was a baby," he says. It was, for a long time, the only world he knew.
He worked for his brother for a couple of years, and then came the moment familiar to anyone who has grown up in a family enterprise. "I can actually do this myself," he remembers thinking. "I'm actually good in my own way." He left to find his own path, but he is unequivocal about the debt. The willingness to pick up the phone, to not be shy, to go and create something rather than wait for it, all of that traces back to those early years with his brother.
Where AI Has Actually Changed the Work
Kennedy is refreshingly unwilling to overclaim on AI. Recruiting, in his assessment, has not been fully disrupted yet. He sees the first real crack in sourcing, where tools like Juicebox and Findem are pushing agentic workflows into a task that used to consume entire days, but he does not believe anyone has won that category or even pulled clearly ahead. Across the wider stack, from the Greenhouses and Ashbys to newer HRM platforms like HiBob, he still has not seen the thing that flips the profession over. "We're not there yet, but we're getting closer."
The genuine shift, for him, has been personal rather than product. At Decagon the team has been given an enterprise license for Claude, and Kennedy uses it as an analyst. He pulls the raw data sitting inside the ATS and the rest of the recruiting stack, pumps it in, and asks the model to help him build the chart, the graph, the view he needs. The result is a sharper grasp of his own business: the reporting, the metrics, which leading indicators actually predict outcomes. "That's actually changed everything," he says. Not the tooling layer. The thinking layer.
Run Your Team Like a Franchise
Asked to put his best advice for other talent leaders in a box, Kennedy immediately rejected the premise. Think outside the box, he argues, because the box is exactly the problem. Talent leaders too often reason from a talent lens, deciding internally what matters and then defending it. The reality is different. What matters is what supports the business and the growth of the business. "I don't work in talent. I work for the business," he says. "I work for sales, or I work for revenue generation."
His preferred metaphor is a franchise. You are the CEO of your own operation, and you should run it that way, with the accountability and the ownership that implies. In practice that means Kennedy runs his team like a sales team: weekly forecasts, individual pipeline inspections, a real-time read on where things stand and a defensible number to take upward. Do not behave like a consultant presenting findings, he says. Behave like an owner who has to make change happen. The more he talks it through, the more fundamentally he believes it.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Jeff. We are honored to welcome Jeff Kennedy to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Jeff. 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.
