Jennifer Lopp
American Electric Power
“No one wants to feel like they're just applying to a black box.”
Jennifer Lopp 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 Jennifer's story.
Jennifer Lopp's career turned on a volunteer shift. Working a United Way campaign, she fell into conversation with a woman who worked in talent acquisition, listened closely to how she described the job, and decided it was the one she wanted. That single conversation carried her into a profession she has spent years shaping, and today she directs talent acquisition at American Electric Power.
Ask her why she does this work and the answer arrives without hedging. "I've always really enjoyed connecting with people, and that's how I got into recruiting," she says. It is a plain sentence that explains a great deal about how she leads: the weight she puts on candidate relationships, the way she treats application volume as a human problem rather than a throughput problem, and her insistence that no amount of automation should leave an applicant feeling unseen.
The Pivot That Started With Curiosity
Most talent leaders describe their entry into recruiting as an accident. Lopp's was closer to a deliberate act of curiosity. She was volunteering, not job hunting, when she met the practitioner who described the field to her. What she heard sounded interesting enough that she went after it and made the change.
The story matters because it is the same behavior she now prizes in recruiters: the willingness to have a real conversation with a stranger and take what they say seriously. The profession found her through a relationship. She has never treated relationships as the soft part of the work.
Volume Is the New Test of Candidate Experience
Lopp's read on the past year of upheaval is unsentimental. "Obviously, we're all facing a boom of candidate profiles," she says. Generative tools have made applying nearly frictionless, and the flood that follows has become the central operational reality of corporate recruiting. Her position is that the flood cannot be allowed to change what the process feels like on the other side of the application form.
"Keeping it a personal experience for the candidate while dealing with the volume of candidates that we're getting is critical for the success of the recruiting function," she says. Then comes the line that names the risk most precisely: "No one wants to feel like they're just applying to a black box." Lopp is careful to point out that the damage runs in both directions. When AI absorbs too much of the process, she says, it can feel like a black box for the candidate and for the recruiter alike. Her conclusion is short. Keeping the human involved is critical.
Unleash It, Understand It, Place It Correctly
None of that makes Lopp a skeptic of the technology. Her advice to other talent leaders is closer to the opposite. She talks about "really unleashing AI, but, you know, not fearing it," and the operative condition is comprehension: "making sure you understand it and where in the process you can use it."
The boundary she draws is specific. Administrative work is fair territory for automation. Candidate experience is not, and there, in her words, you still need to have a human involved. That single distinction gives a team a usable rule at a moment when many organizations are either deploying these tools indiscriminately or freezing in front of them. Lopp does neither. She wants the technology understood well enough that leaders can say exactly where it belongs, and assessed honestly enough that a person stays in the seats where judgment and empathy decide the outcome.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Jennifer. We are honored to welcome Jennifer Lopp to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Jennifer. 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.
