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 the 100 most exceptional leaders and practitioners in talent acquisition. Honorees are selected by the Talent 100 committee from thousands of nominations and candidates across the industry, chosen for the impact of their work, the depth of their craft, and their influence on the future of recruiting. 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 alongside his brother.
The Manager Who Believed and the Boss Who Pushed
Ask Kennedy who shaped him and he names two people, for opposite reasons. The first is Stacy Ferrenti, his manager when he joined MongoDB. At the time the company was publicly listed but still small, a little over three hundred people, and Ferrenti became the first leader in his career who genuinely believed in him. He knows how that sounds. He says it anyway. She motivated him, he trusted her implicitly, he wanted to succeed for her, and the two built a real friendship. She may not even realize the size of the imprint she left. From her he learned what it looks like to lead with trust and empathy, and he has carried it since.
The second is the person he credits with influencing his career the most: his boss at his previous company, and unusually for a talent leader, not a talent person at all. He reported directly to the chief revenue officer of a pre-IPO business that went public during his tenure. It was, by his own account, the hardest boss he will ever have. They argued. They shouted. They fell out a hundred times, and he figures he quit about as often. But the pressure was formative. "He pushed me to the absolute limits," Kennedy says, "and then he pushed me to a point where I know what great looks like." Two or three weeks before this profile was reported, the two met in New York and Kennedy told him so directly: you crafted me, you made me think differently, you made me act differently. He credits that relationship with moving him to the next level of his career.
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 Leaders He Points To
Kennedy is generous about the people he has built with. He singles out Patrick Whelan, known to most as Paddy, who reported to him for several years and whom he calls an incredible human and a great leader. What stands out is Whelan's priorities: he cares about his people and their development more than almost anything else, which Kennedy notes is genuinely unusual to see. He also points to a former colleague, Gia, whom he rates among the strongest analytical leaders he has worked with, someone who cares deeply about numbers and metrics and about coaching her team against them, with real business ownership.
Between the two of them sits a fair description of what Kennedy himself is chasing: people development on one side, pure metrics and ownership on the other. He has spent a career learning both halves, from the brother who taught him to pick up the phone, to the manager who taught him to lead with trust, to the CRO who taught him what great looks like. What he does now with a global team and an enterprise AI license is simply the same discipline at larger scale.
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.
