Mawulom Nenonene
Flux
“Life gave you time and we wanted to fill it with things we loved.”
Mawulom Nenonene 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 Mawulom's story.
Mawulom Nenonene, Talent Consultant at Flux, came to recruiting through grief, a fridge full of magnets, and a simple question about what he truly loved.
In 2010 and 2011, he lost both of his parents. His partner lost her mother around the same time. The couple was living in Somerset, New Jersey, with their young child and a refrigerator covered in magnets. They took every one of them off and wrote a single question in their place: "What do you love?"
"We realized that life gave you time," Nenonene says. "You don't know how much." What became clear to both of them was that a life contains two categories: the things you have to do, and the things you choose to do. They decided to fill theirs with as many of the latter as possible. A few months later, Nenonene understood what that meant for him. It meant recruiting.
The clues had been there for years. Straight out of college, he spent half a decade at the Department of Defense, where eighty percent of his time was engineering work and twenty percent was EEO counseling and solving what the organization called the groupthink problem. The Defense department could only hire US citizens, yet it was buying weapons and systems from people who weren't, and leadership wanted to understand why it wasn't solving problems as fast as others. The question sent Nenonene down a rabbit hole. What his team discovered was that they needed groups of people who were diverse in their upbringing. Even if everyone had gone to the same school, did one grow up on a farm and another in the city? That alone brought enough diversity in.
That twenty percent turned out to be the most fulfilling part of the job. He went to conferences and spoke with candidates. He was doing no sourcing at the time, so as far as he knew, recruiting was all fun. The real satisfaction arrived by email, months after a conversation, from people who had gone through the process, gotten their clearance, and been hired. So when his parents passed and the magnets came off the fridge, the choice made itself. He loved engineering, but he loved traveling and connecting with people more. He cut his teeth at Google, and the rest is history.
Learning From Great Leaders
Nenonene is quick to point to the leaders who shaped his approach. Most recently, Caitlin Cook brought him to Nava as a talent consultant, a role that grew until he was leading talent there. What he admired in Cook was aptitude blended with high empathy, and an ability to move in and out of situations with grace. He watched her advocate for individuals who would never know she had done it, simply because of the nature of the game in corporate America. Earlier, during his time at Thumbtack, Jeff Winters took him under his wing and gave him grace.
His most powerful influence, though, came from outside the industry entirely.
A Father's Legacy
Lately, Nenonene has been thinking about his father, who was born in 1938 and attended a prestigious university in France. His own father's wealth afforded him opportunities few others had, but the environment was not friendly to outsiders, let alone African Americans. He was going to school in a country that had colonized his own; Togo wasn't freed from the French until 1964. He became a Chevalier, built an empire, and navigated secret societies. In the old pictures, he is the only person of color in the room. That detail speaks to Nenonene now.
His mother is the other guiding light. She brought the family to this country and worked two jobs while attending NYU and Columbia, spending her nights as a labor and delivery nurse and her days at another job entirely. Neither example is ever far from his mind.
The Practice That Became a Philosophy
Nenonene studied biomedical engineering at a small tech school in northern New Jersey, where his program attended tech conferences every year in search of career opportunities. He leaned hard into resume building and interview practice. One mentor gave him an instruction he never forgot: go through ten interviews every year for internships, and keep practicing even after you have secured one.
That discipline stuck. It taught him that preparation and repetition create opportunity, and it is the same lesson he carries into how he builds teams and coaches candidates today.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Mawulom. We are honored to welcome Mawulom Nenonene to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Mawulom. 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.
