Kerris Hougardy
Ting
“You have to hold both hands out, one with the opportunity and one with the potential risks, and just be able to balance those constantly.”
Kerris Hougardy 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 Kerris's story.
Halfway through a meeting about her own next career move, the recruiter sitting across from Kerris Hougardy stopped and turned the question around: had she ever thought about doing this for a living? She had not. That single redirect, inside a boutique firm that placed people in the travel industry, rerouted a career that now spans decades and lands her at Ting, where she is responsible for the people side of the business from her base in Vancouver.
What made the pitch land was not the job description. It was the recognition that the work already matched what she cared about. "Connecting with people, helping people, giving people opportunities to be their best selves and to enjoy their career," as she describes it. Everything she has built since, an agency founded from scratch, in-house functions inside heavy industry and technology, and a considered position on how artificial intelligence should and should not be used in hiring, traces back to that premise.
From Round-the-World Trips to Career Moves
Before recruiting, Hougardy spent roughly four years as a travel agent, booking round-the-world itineraries and once-in-a-lifetime vacations for other people. It was good work and she was good at it, but the ladder in front of her had run out of rungs. Looking for progression she could not find inside her own organization, she approached a specialist recruiting firm that focused on the travel sector. She went in as a candidate. She came out with a new profession.
The parallels are not hard to see. A travel agent listens for what someone actually wants rather than what they first ask for, assembles the pieces, and manages the anxiety that comes with a big decision. Hougardy took her first recruiting role inside the same industry she had just left, which meant she understood the jobs, the employers, and the people on both sides of the table from day one. It is a grounding that has shaped how she reads a hiring problem ever since.
The People Who Built the Leader
Two names surface when Hougardy talks about influence. The first is Lisa, whom she met at a recruiting firm after a couple of years in the profession. The two clicked immediately, and rather than settle for a comfortable arrangement inside someone else's business, they left and founded their own recruiting agency. They ran it together for about five and a half years. Hougardy describes the experience without sanding down the edges: influential, educational, informative, thrilling, stressful, exciting, one of the defining chapters of her life. The friendship survived the business. They remain close today, and Hougardy is direct about the debt. Lisa shaped "so many parts of who I've become as a leader."
The second is Len Posniak at Catalyst Paper, who gave Hougardy her first opportunity in-house. If Lisa taught her how to build something, Posniak taught her how to operate inside something already built: how to think about management and leadership, how to hold her own in the room with an executive team, how to approach a problem rather than flinch at it. Above all, she says, he gave her confidence. She is careful to widen the frame beyond the two of them, noting the many colleagues, direct reports and managers accumulated over the decades who each left a mark. But those two are the standouts.
Two Hands Out on AI
Hougardy calls herself "super passionate about AI," and she watches the market closely. She is also refreshingly unwilling to pick a side in a debate that mostly rewards absolutists. The past year, she says, has produced a dramatic shift across every part of the people function, and talent acquisition has felt it most acutely.
The upside, in her reading, is time returned to recruiters so they can finally deliver what only a human can: critical thinking, judgment, connection, empathy, compassion. Automation, done well, does not make recruiting less human. It clears the calendar so the human parts can actually happen. But she is equally attentive to the pressure landing on both sides of the process, on candidates and on recruiters alike, and she argues that leaders owe it to their teams to know exactly where those pitfalls sit. Her standard is education over enthusiasm and a permanently balanced posture. "You have to hold both hands out, one with the opportunity and one with the potential risks, and just be able to balance those constantly."
Talent Strategy Starts With the P&L
Asked what she would tell other talent leaders, Hougardy paused, then delivered the argument she has clearly been refining for years. The single biggest opportunity for the profession, she says, is to connect itself as deeply as possible to the business strategy of the organization it serves. Not the org chart. The actual machinery: where the bottlenecks are, where the challenges and opportunities sit, how the business makes money, how it builds culture, what its values and mission and key goals really are.
That fluency is what changes the nature of the conversation. A talent leader who understands the business arrives with solutions, problem solving, programs and practices that map onto real objectives rather than generic best practice. The result, in her framing, is a genuine win on every side: for the organization, for the talent team, and for the candidates, new hires and employees who get to be part of the outcome. It is a case for talent as a commercial discipline, made by someone who has run a P&L of her own.
An Eye for the Next Generation
Hougardy is generous about the people coming up behind her, and specific about why. She singles out Anne Ngo as one of the most tenacious and ambitious talent leaders she has worked with, with a rare pairing: relentless drive alongside a deep, evident care for the people around her, whether that is her own team, the candidates in her pipeline, or the hiring managers she partners with. "Her passion for connecting people and how much she cares about people is off the top," Hougardy says.
She speaks with the same warmth about Hira Mubasha, who once worked for her, and about Brandy Skaggs. It is a telling instinct in a leader of her tenure. The travel agent who once built other people's itineraries has spent a career doing the same thing for careers, and she still measures her own success partly by how far the people she has backed manage to travel.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Kerris. We are honored to welcome Kerris Hougardy to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Kerris. 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.
