Kellie Shotwell
SMS Group of Companies
“You don't realize how much you touch someone's life when you give them a job.”
Kellie Shotwell 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 Kellie's story.
Kellie Shotwell oversees an operation with 25 direct reports and roughly 300 people beyond them, and she still refuses to let software decide which resumes deserve a human read. That position is not nostalgia. It is the conclusion of 37 years in staffing, most of them spent watching candidates whose paperwork looked ordinary turn out to be exactly the right hire.
As Executive Vice President at SMS Group of Companies, Kellie runs the entire operation, with recruiting at the center of nearly everything the business does. She has been with the company for almost 25 years. Ask why the work suits her and she does not reach for a mission statement. She is good at problem solving and, by her own assessment, better at managing a crisis. Staffing supplies both daily: the round peg, the square hole, and the figuring out.
From Yellow Page Advertising To Partner
The first chapter happened in Florida, where Kellie sold Yellow Pages advertising for a directories publisher and collected awards for it. Sales and marketing was the discipline. Then she had a child, and with her family in Michigan, she moved back and started looking for work.
What she found was a sales and marketing position at a staffing company, and it stuck. At that first firm she moved up to sales manager and eventually became a partner in the business. From there she joined a couple of additional staffing companies, each time helping rebuild and reorganize from the ground up and get them running successfully. Nobody, she notes, sets out to land in staffing. She took a sales job that happened to be in the industry, found an affinity for it, did it well, and stayed.
Variety is what held her. Outsiders assume the work repeats itself; her experience has been the opposite. Follow a single employee through the full life cycle and there is a great deal of ground to cover, and never a dull moment in it.
The Staffing Firm That Operates Like A PEO
Kellie's remit is unusually wide for a staffing company. A couple of large clients treat the firm much the way they would treat a PEO, which means she handles benefits administration and 401(k) administration alongside the recruiting operation. For other clients, the company serves purely as the employer of record. The mix runs a broad gamut, and that is precisely what keeps it interesting to her.
One of the firm's niches is hospitality staffing, a segment that draws candidates working to turn their lives around and use the industry as a route back into steady employment. Those placements are where Kellie locates the meaning in the job. It is easy, she admits, to get caught in the mud and the weeds and lose sight of what a viable position does for someone. She has many stories of the other outcome: a candidate who had been incarcerated or had some other issue in the past, placed into real work, earning money, supporting a family. She is careful not to oversell it. She is not performing heart surgery, as she puts it. But she is convinced the work gives something back to the community, and those accumulated stories remain her strongest motivator.
Lessons From Poor Leadership And Patient Vendors
Kellie's clearest instruction in leadership came from watching how she did not want to lead. Early on, before she held any leadership role, she worked under managers she found genuinely poor, and she drew a line: if she ever reached a position of authority, she would do it differently. The commitment was to be a collaborator and a compromiser, to transform, and to inspire through motivation and positive feedback. Judging by recent feedback from employees, that early frustration turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It taught her the model to avoid, and she has carried the alternative through decades of managing teams.
Other teachers were the specialists most executives never think to learn from. Insurance agents she worked closely with over the years walked her through the mechanics of assembling benefit packages. The gentleman who handles the company's unemployment matters and hearings taught her the nuances and small details of that process. Both relationships translated into lower costs for the organization, and Kellie is unambiguous: none of it would have happened without vendors willing to teach.
A Love-Hate Relationship With AI
Kellie holds strong opinions about artificial intelligence, strong enough that she recorded a podcast on the subject. Her own shop is fully integrated with it. The firm runs a fully connected front and back office platform with AI built into the HRIS and the ATS: tech setup, onboarding workflows, automated reminders that a candidate still has paperwork outstanding. All of that she endorses without reservation. AI belongs on administrative tasks, making them faster and easier for the company and the candidate alike. She also likes what it does for written communication, giving a recruiter who is not a natural writer a way to sound polished and professional with a client.
The line she draws is around human contact, and she expects to go kicking and screaming before she gives it up. Over the years, people have sat in her office and told her they had never worked for an agency that treated them as a number, that no one else had asked what they needed, what they wanted, which shift actually worked for a single parent. If the industry becomes fully automated and that disappears, the fun goes with it.
Her sharpest criticism is aimed at using AI to sort through resumes and applications, a practice she considers actively damaging to the industry and one she will not adopt. There are too many diamonds in the rough in her own history: candidates whose resumes did not read well, whose depth of knowledge or actual experience was invisible on paper, or who were simply eager enough to prove themselves that they became the right hire. Those people cannot be found without looking closely, and looking closely takes time. She understands the objection from teams facing hundreds of applications. She just believes the trade is a bad one, because what gets discarded is talent that would have meshed with very little work.
Advice For 2026: Sequence The Change
Kellie's counsel on adopting new tools is about sequencing. Anyone familiar with the industry, she points out, understands how hard it is to get a team to change the way it does things. Once people are trained, layering on something new has to be planned rather than improvised. Her own organization recently renewed its software, brought in upgrades and a substantial amount of built-in automation, and is in a training phase now. Adding another system on top of that would only complicate what has just started working.
The underlying principle is about where the leverage in the job actually sits. Automate the paperwork, the documents, the onboarding, the reminders. Then spend the hours that frees on the part no platform can do: reading the resume that does not look impressive, asking which shift fits a candidate's life, and staying close to the people you place.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Kellie. We are honored to welcome Kellie Shotwell to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Kellie. 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.
