Kylie Penn
GeneDx
“Lead by example. Show your team how you are trying things out.”
Kylie Penn 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 Kylie's story.
Like many leaders in talent acquisition, Kylie Penn never originally planned to build a career in recruiting. The path found her while she was preparing to graduate and trying to determine what direction she wanted to pursue professionally, a stretch of time she filled with job shadowing opportunities arranged through friends and family connections. One of those introductions came through a family member who worked for a recruiting agency, and the experience immediately sparked her interest.
“I loved the buzz, the excitement, the variety,” Kylie explained, reflecting on that first exposure to the recruiting industry. Soon after, the agency offered her a role on the East Coast, a major opportunity for someone originally from Portland who had always wanted to experience living in a different part of the country. Like many recruiting professionals, she “fell into recruiting,” but she quickly discovered it was the right fit.
Building a Foundation in Recruiting
Kylie began her career in agency recruiting, where she gained an early foundation in sourcing, relationship building, candidate engagement, and talent strategy. It did not take long, however, for her to realize she wanted to move beyond the agency world and into an in-house corporate environment where she could help build talent functions from within. Within her first year, she transitioned into an in-house recruiting role with one of the agency’s clients, a move that ultimately defined the direction of her career.
Since then, Kylie has built a reputation as a strategic talent acquisition leader focused on scaling teams, developing recruiting organizations, and helping businesses align talent strategy with long-term growth.
Embracing AI With Curiosity and Action
As AI continues reshaping the recruiting landscape, Kylie believes talent acquisition leaders must approach the transformation with curiosity, experimentation, and a willingness to evolve quickly. She describes it as one of the most dominant conversations currently happening across the industry. “Every single person I network with or talk to is discussing AI,” she explained.
Although she had exposure to automation and recruiting technology years earlier, Kylie notes that the past year has been the point where AI truly became operationalized inside talent acquisition teams. At New Relic, she has seen recruiting teams actively embrace AI tools to remove administrative burdens, streamline workflows, and create greater operational efficiency. In her view, the technology has significantly accelerated tasks that previously consumed major portions of recruiters’ time: writing and refining job descriptions, building Boolean search strings, creating interview guides, generating recruiting insights, streamlining sourcing workflows, and reducing repetitive administrative work.
Those efficiencies, she believes, allow recruiters to spend more time acting as strategic advisors to the business rather than operating solely as process managers. For Kylie, AI is not simply about automation. It is about enabling recruiting teams to become more strategic, proactive, and business-focused.
Advice for Talent Leaders Navigating AI
Kylie encourages recruiting leaders to begin exploring AI immediately, even if they start with small use cases. Her message is simple: “Start somewhere.” Whether that means experimenting with job descriptions, sourcing workflows, interview frameworks, or talent insights, she believes taking action now is critical. “I really think the people who aren’t exploring it are going to fall behind more quickly,” she explained.
Rather than waiting for a perfect strategy, she advises leaders to build cultures centered on experimentation, learning, and adaptability. That means leading with curiosity, maintaining a growth mindset, experimenting and failing fast, sharing learnings openly with teams, and creating environments for best-practice collaboration. It also means using AI deliberately to remove low-value administrative work so recruiters can focus on strategic business impact.
Kylie also emphasizes the importance of leadership visibility during periods of transformation, arguing that recruiting leaders must model exploration and learning themselves in order to create confidence across their teams. “Lead by example,” she shared. “Show your team how you are trying things out.”
Building the Future of Strategic Talent Acquisition
Kylie believes the future of recruiting will belong to organizations and leaders who can combine technology, strategic thinking, and people-centered leadership. As AI continues accelerating the pace of change, she sees talent acquisition evolving far beyond transactional hiring, with recruiters increasingly operating as strategic business advisors who influence workforce planning, organizational capability, talent branding, and long-term growth strategy.
At the same time, she remains deeply committed to the human side of leadership: mentoring others, creating opportunities for growth, and helping recruiting teams operate at their highest potential. For Kylie Penn, the future of talent acquisition is not just about hiring talent. It is about building stronger organizations, empowering people, and creating recruiting functions that can adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Kylie. We are honored to welcome Kylie Penn to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Kylie. 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.
