Katie Potter
Healthie
“You don't have to absolutely love it, but you have to learn it.”
Katie Potter 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 Katie's story.
Katie Potter was on her way to a career in forensic psychology. She had the bachelor's degree in psychology, the plan, and the conviction. Then, at the start of her master's program, a graduate advisor pulled her aside and told her something she had not considered: industrial and organizational psychology was emerging fast, and her real talent pointed that direction. He convinced her. Years later, that conversation reads less like a detour than a correction.
Today, as Talent Acquisition Lead at Healthie, Potter builds hiring processes at a moment when almost every assumption underneath recruiting is being renegotiated. She screens, she designs workflow, she evaluates tooling, and she does it with the discipline of someone trained to assess people systematically rather than intuitively. Industrial and organizational psychology, she notes, ties naturally into businesses, talent, people, and the practice of actually assessing talent. That academic grounding is not decoration on her resume. It is the operating system.
The Startup That Made It Click
Potter completed her master's in I/O psychology and then, in her own telling, fell into recruiting. Her first role was inside a startup: scrappy, fast, building and scaling with no established playbook to inherit. For some people that environment is a trial to be survived. For Potter it was the moment the discipline resolved into something she could feel.
"Everything started to click for me," she says of that first job. "I haven't looked back since." The preference stuck. She has stayed in high-growth environments where the talent function is being constructed in real time rather than merely administered, and where a recruiter's decisions visibly shape what a company becomes.
The Manager Who Made Mistakes Cheap
Ask Potter about the people who shaped her and she goes straight to a direct manager from a few companies back, a talent leader who joined after Potter was already in the seat. Potter declines to name her publicly, but she is unambiguous about the impact: it was the biggest of her career.
What that leader did was arrive, look hard at everything the team had already built, and then work alongside them to iterate rather than override. Process. Candidate experience. Candidate volume. And employer branding, a discipline Potter cares about deeply, because in her view the question of how you highlight a company in order to attract talent is inseparable from the question of whether you can hire at all.
The cultural lesson was subtler and more durable. Her manager operated from the premise that mistakes are the raw material of learning. Make one, and the team picks it up and gets better. She also modeled a posture Potter now considers foundational: proactive rather than reactive. That distinction, Potter explains, is not just about efficiency. It buys a team the mental space to focus on what is actually ahead of them instead of spending every day absorbing what has already gone wrong.
AI as Assistant, Never as Judgment
Potter describes herself as an early adopter, someone who tracks new technology while it is still emerging rather than after it has been validated by everyone else. At Healthie, one of the first tools her team encountered was an AI recruiter capable of taking over initial screens. Her verdict is refreshingly unvarnished: "It wasn't the greatest, but we were like, let's give this a try." That willingness to run the experiment before the category matures is characteristic.
The stack she runs now is deliberate. AI helps screen resumes. A notetaker captures every interview, supported by recording functionality. Scorecards get drafted automatically after conversations. Her framing question is consistent: where can automation relieve bottlenecks and bandwidth, and where can AI assist the human in making workflows and experiences better for candidates and internal teams alike?
The boundary is equally firm. "I will never use AI to replace human judgment," she says. Every scorecard is reviewed, edited, and tweaked before it is submitted. Nothing goes out unread. AI, in her construction, is a tool that supports; it is not something you let run the full path unsupervised. She acknowledges the tradeoffs in both directions, then makes a choice about where to put her attention: on the positives. It is a habit she applies to management, technology, and most other things.
Her counsel to skeptics is blunt and generous at once. "You don't have to absolutely love it, but you have to learn it," she says. "And if you don't, you're going to fall behind."
Unprecedented Territory
Potter's favorite part of the job remains the least automatable one: speaking with many different candidates in a single day and learning about their backgrounds and the challenges they are living through. She calls it her biggest passion in the talent space, and she does not treat it as sentimentality. It is intelligence gathering about a market that has no precedent.
"The talent market today is something none of us have ever experienced," she says. Everyone is learning while flying through it. AI is reshaping candidate behavior, reshaping how resumes are written, reshaping every aspect of the process. Connecting directly with people to understand what they are actually experiencing has, in her words, been really special.
For anyone entering the field or already several years into it, her advice starts with two qualities she treats as non-negotiable. Flexibility and adaptability are the keys to success, she says, and you need both. The landscape is shifting every day, and she expects it to keep morphing and expanding. The ability to navigate that, to keep adapting as the ground moves, is in her view what will separate the people who thrive in the next few years from the people who get left behind by them.
Recognizing Others
Potter's instinct to elevate people extends past her own team. Asked to name a talent professional deserving recognition, she needed no time at all: Erik Santos, now at Atrium and working on the account executive side, but carrying a deep history in recruiting and talent. He always stands out first, she says, and she called him remarkable in the space without hesitation.
It is a small moment, but a telling one for a leader whose entire method rests on the same premise her advisor once acted on with her: that seeing someone's talent clearly, and saying so out loud, can redirect a career.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Katie. We are honored to welcome Katie Potter to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Katie. 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.
