Jessica Messreni Topp
Clio
“What energizes me most is not headcount, it is people.”
Jessica Messreni Topp 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 Jessica's story.
Jessica Topp never planned to build a career in recruiting. Like many talent leaders, she found her way into the field through curiosity, opportunity, and timing, and stayed because the work fit.
The first spark came while she was studying at UC Santa Barbara, where campus recruiters were a regular presence at career fairs. The idea of traveling to campuses, meeting students, and connecting people with opportunity stuck with her. An older friend who had joined TEKsystems encouraged her to give recruiting a try, and shortly after graduation in 1999, right in the middle of the tech boom, Jessica joined as an agency recruiter in the Bay Area.
She loved it immediately. The pace, the people, and the responsibility all clicked. After recruiting, she moved into an account management role, leading recruiters and sourcers and getting her first exposure to leadership. Then the tech bubble burst, volatility swept through her client base, and Jessica decided it was time to go in-house, a decision that would shape the next two decades of her career.
Building Depth Across Industries and Scale
Jessica joined PeopleSoft and spent several years learning the foundations of corporate recruiting. From there, an opportunity at Goldman Sachs brought her to New York, where she deepened her experience within a large, complex organization. Personal circumstances eventually pulled her back to the Bay Area, where she joined 24 Hour Fitness. There, she combined her interest in fitness with her growing leadership experience, overseeing corporate recruiting as well as large-scale, distributed hiring for gym and club employees nationwide. It was her first experience managing recruiting at true operational scale.
Her next chapter began at PwC, where she would spend ten formative years. The firm restructured frequently, and Jessica held several roles across that period, supporting regional recruiting, specific tax practices, and eventually national specialty hiring. Working across offices and time zones long before remote work became mainstream prepared her well for what was to come.
Midway through her tenure, PwC faced a major inflection point: for the first time, the firm needed to hire partners externally. Jessica helped build PwC's first-ever executive recruiting function, navigating not just hiring strategy but compensation, change management, and the emotional complexity of bringing external leaders into a traditionally "grow-your-own" partnership model. It was challenging, complex, and deeply rewarding work.
Building While Flying at Meta
After a decade at PwC, Jessica paused to reflect on what she wanted next. Innovation, growth, and building something new rose to the top of the list. She ultimately chose Meta, then Facebook, drawn by the opportunity to build while scaling rapidly.
She joined the data center organization when it was still emerging. At the time, the team had three data centers in North America, plans for a fourth, and a recruiting team of six. Within a year, both the scope and the team had tripled. Over her tenure, Jessica's organization grew to roughly 120 people globally as Meta expanded its data center footprint worldwide. The work was fast, demanding, and energizing, and it was also deeply human, supporting leaders, teams, and candidates through massive growth and constant change.
In 2023, Jessica was impacted by Meta's layoffs alongside much of the recruiting director cohort. She took intentional time off, planning for six months away. Three months in, the pull back to building and leading proved too strong.
Leading Talent at Procore
Jessica joined Procore to oversee global recruiting delivery, managing recruiters, sourcers, and leaders across regions. From there, her role expanded into an integrated talent leadership position, and as Head of Global Recruiting she oversaw coordination, sourcing, executive recruiting, and delivery globally. She has since moved to Clio as VP of Global Talent Acquisition.
At the time of this interview, her team of approximately 50 supported hiring across North America, EMEA, MENA, India, Egypt, and Costa Rica. From building teams from zero to hundreds in new regions to developing leaders internally, the scale and complexity of the work continued to grow.
What energizes Jessica most is not headcount, it is people. She finds the greatest fulfillment in developing others: helping managers become senior leaders, supporting directors as they step into broader impact, and unlocking potential across her organization. Growth, both personal and organizational, is where she thrives.
How Recruiting Is Changing
Jessica sees AI as the most transformative shift in talent acquisition today, not as a replacement for recruiters but as an accelerator. By removing manual, repetitive work, AI creates space for recruiters to operate as true talent advisors, thinking strategically about internal mobility, external markets, workforce planning, and long-term capability building. The goal, in her view, is not efficiency for efficiency's sake but elevation of the role itself.
At the same time, she is clear-eyed about the risks. Technology should support relationships, not replace them. Recruiting, at its core, remains deeply human.
Jessica's Advice for 2026
Stay curious. Experiment, test, and learn. Not everything will work, and that is precisely the point.
Embrace AI thoughtfully. Use technology to remove friction and free up time for higher-value work, not to distance recruiters from people.
Protect the human element. Relationships, trust, and care are irreplaceable, and as tools evolve, intentional connection matters more than ever.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Jessica. We are honored to welcome Jessica Messreni Topp to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Jessica. 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.
