Naché Robertson
Attentive
“Creating that personalized, human experience requires a human.”
Naché Robertson 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 Naché's story.
The recruiter at Disney could have taken offense. Instead, when a young coordinator walked up and told her plainly, "Hey, I think I want your job," she asked one question back: "Are you sure?" Then she showed Naché Robertson the ropes. Robertson, now Head of Talent Acquisition at Attentive, never looked back.
That exchange contains most of what there is to know about her: the directness, the willingness to ask out loud for what she wants, and the belief that careers get built when someone chooses to hand something over to the person coming up behind them. Years later she is still repaying that debt, and still making a case that a market obsessed with automation is at risk of forgetting: that the most valuable thing a recruiter brings is the part a machine cannot do.
A Part-Time Job That Became a Career
Robertson has a theory about how people end up in this profession. "We trip and fall into recruiting," she says, and then it goes one of two ways. Either you dust yourself off and think, oh, I kind of like it here, or you decide, absolutely not, get me the hell out of this place. She dusted herself off.
Her own fall started in customer service, and it started exhausted. She was working full-time while going to school full-time, an arrangement she now describes with the authority of someone who survived it: "10 out of 10 do not recommend." Wanting to flip the equation, part-time work and full-time school, she found a part-time coordinator role at Disney.
The assignment was not a quiet one. She was brought in to coordinate hiring for the launch of Aulani, Disney's resort in Hawaii, which meant lining up a ton of candidate conversations and working shoulder to shoulder with recruiters she came to respect. Sitting that close to the craft, she started watching how they operated, how they read people, how they moved a hiring process forward. The conclusion arrived quickly: she wanted to do that. So she said so, in the most direct terms available. She could have been more tactful, she admits. It worked anyway.
The Three People She Names
Asked to narrow a long career down to the handful of people who shaped it, Robertson does not hesitate. There are three.
Tammy Edwards and Rita Brew were the two recruiters at Disney who, in her words, taught her everything they knew. They are the reason she has a career at all, the ones who converted a coordinator's curiosity into an actual skill set rather than treating her ambition as a threat.
The third is Meredith Fish, her leader during her years at Alteryx. It was, by Robertson's account, a crazy time: the company was growing like crazy and went through a successful IPO. What made the difference was not the market conditions but the management style. Fish empowered her and let her run. Her recurring phrase, "inspect what you expect," functioned as both promise and standard, and she lived up to it, keeping Robertson accountable while giving her the space to come into her own in the role and to build a team at Alteryx. That combination, real trust paired with real scrutiny, is the model Robertson carries into her own leadership.
Running Talent at Attentive in the Age of AI
At Attentive, Robertson leads talent acquisition inside a technology company, which means the questions the rest of the industry is debating in conference panels are simply her operating conditions. She is not remotely opposed to the new wave of tooling. She frames artificial intelligence plainly as a way to help talent teams work better, smarter and faster, and she is specific about where it belongs: sourcing, candidate coordination, and the rest of the tasks defined by repeated action. That is the mundane and administrative layer that has always eaten into a recruiter's day, and she is happy to see it absorbed.
What she resists is the leap from useful to total. She does not see AI replacing the job of a recruiter, and she is unsentimental about why. "Creating that personalized, human experience requires a human," she says. Truly connecting with candidates and genuinely advocating for them is, in her view, best done by the recruiter themselves. If other companies want to run a different playbook, that is their business and she says so without judgment. Her own line is clear: AI should be supplemental to the work, not a wholesale replacement for the tasks that define it.
The pressure on that line is not theoretical. Like every team operating at her scale, hers is getting hit really hard with inbound applications, the kind of volume that makes full automation look less like a strategy and more like a mercy. Robertson's answer is to let the technology take the repetition and keep the judgment, the advocacy and the candidate relationship squarely in human hands.
The Golden Rule, Applied at Scale
Given the chance to distill everything she knows into advice for other talent leaders, Robertson does not reach for a framework or a metric. She reaches for the golden rule: lead with empathy, and treat everyone the way you would want to be treated, especially candidates.
Her standard holds even under volume. If someone takes the time to apply, they deserve the time it takes to give them a response, whether or not it is the answer they were hoping for. Even a decline delivered plainly carries something worth protecting. As she puts it, it gives people the dignity of knowing their resume is not going into a black hole. Treat people the way you want to be treated, she adds, both personally and professionally.
Underneath that insistence sits a conviction about the stakes of the profession itself. Talent acquisition is not usually described as changing lives, Robertson notes, but boiled down to black and white, people rely on their jobs for their livelihood and to provide for their families. That is why she wants the work treated with respect and empathy, and why she keeps returning to the human aspect of things. Recruiting may be underrated by the rest of the business. She is not interested in conceding the point. "It truly is a big deal," she says.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Naché. We are honored to welcome Naché Robertson to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Naché. 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.
