Lori Schwartz Noel
ZenBusiness
“Growth is not a ladder. It's a lattice.”
Lori Schwartz Noel 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 Lori's story.
Some of the best hires Lori Schwartz Noel has seen come through a hiring process arrived with some of the worst resumes. That single observation, gathered over a career that has moved from market research to collegiate recruiting to the startup world, sits at the center of how the ZenBusiness talent leader thinks about her craft in an era of keyword filters and automated screens: the document is not the person, and the story between the lines is the part worth reading.
It is a conviction she has held long enough to have tested it, and one she now spends a fair amount of her time defending. As Head of Talent Acquisition at ZenBusiness, Noel operates in a market where speed is prized and tooling is abundant. Her position is not that technology is the enemy. It is that efficiency without judgment is a false economy, and that recruiters exist for a reason.
From Hospital Floors to Campus Career Fairs
Noel is candid about the through line in her career: she loves people, always has, and is unapologetically an extrovert. The first job out of college, however, tested that affection in an unusual way. She worked in market research, calling into hospitals to ask clinicians about medical equipment and their experiences with it. Anyone who has tried to hold the attention of a nurse mid shift, running a unit and a floor, understands the degree of difficulty. It was a tough job, and it was also an education in listening quickly, building rapport in seconds, and hearing what someone means underneath what they have time to say.
The move into collegiate recruiting is where the work clicked. She found the people, and she found a mission she genuinely believed in: higher education, adult learning, and development. Wanting to take that belief further, she moved into startup and corporate recruiting, then earned a master's degree in adult learning and development specifically so she could bring that discipline into the corporate world rather than leave it behind on campus. She has since spent her career inside the startup environment across a couple of companies, where talent decisions are rarely abstract and always consequential.
AI That Works With You, Not Against You
Noel is clear eyed about what artificial intelligence has done for recruiting. It has made the practice more efficient and added speed, which matters enormously when ample candidates are arriving at your door. Her framing is that AI should work with a recruiter rather than against one, and that it should be used ethically. The ethics of AI in HR and recruiting is a live conversation on her teams, not a compliance checkbox.
Where she pushes back is on the temptation to let the tool do the thinking. There is a meaningful difference, she argues, between screening a resume with a keyword search and screening it with your own eyes. A resume is the story of somebody's history. Running a keyword pass and moving on is not always the answer, and it is not always faster either. That is the part practitioners miss. Lean on AI too heavily as a sourcing crutch, and you are judging a book by its cover, which is precisely how strong candidates with imperfect paperwork get filtered out of consideration before anyone reads their story. Noel has practiced this way since AI first shifted into the marketplace, and it is what she advises the many people who reach out to her asking how to think about it: do not lose the human touch.
Send the Elevator Back Down
Pressed for the advice she would give other talent leaders, Noel offered a set of principles that read like a working philosophy rather than a list. It is not about where you came from or how you got here. It is about empowering the people around you and remembering to send the elevator back down. It is about staying connected to people instead of pushing technology and technology only. It is about being human first and foremost, and about doing what is right rather than what is easy.
She extends the same thinking to how leaders build their own tables. Sit in a boardroom, look around, and you should not be the smartest person in the room. The job is to put players in the game who create a one team, one goal mentality, with genuine diversity in skill sets and ways of thinking. That, she says, is what makes the journey impactful as you grow.
And growth itself, in her telling, is widely misunderstood. "Growth is not a ladder. It's a lattice," she says, acknowledging how hard that is for ambitious professionals to accept. The seat she occupies today is the one she wanted eight years ago, and she did not reach it by moving straight up. She took a zigzag, a switchback. She considers that entirely fine, and wants others to hear it: you will arrive where you wanted to be, and it will make sense only when you look back at the path from somewhere further along it.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Lori. We are honored to welcome Lori Schwartz Noel to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Lori. 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.
