Reece Fallon
Liberate
“Stick to the principles that made you successful and got you where you are today.”
Reece Fallon 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 Reece's story.
Reece Fallon was eighteen or nineteen when he had to choose between continuing to play professional soccer and going out to earn. His heart said sport. His head, with some encouragement from home, pointed him toward a meritocratic industry where the harder you worked, the more you made and the faster you moved. He went looking for that kind of industry rather than for a job title, and recruitment ticked every box.
Twelve years into the industry, Reece is Head of Talent at Liberate, an AI company. The route there ran through London agency floors, a short stint in Canada, and a Toronto software development company he joined as employee number 30 and helped grow to roughly 330 before it was acquired by Thoughtworks, the global technology consultancy.
What holds that arc together is a conviction he returns to constantly: the tools change, the fundamentals do not. Reece uses AI every day and argues that anyone frightened of it is simply using it badly. He is just as insistent about the other half of the equation. Candidate experience, a genuine human exchange, understanding what motivates a person, plain transparency: those practices worked a decade ago, and in a market drowning in automated noise they are worth more now than ever.
Cutting His Teeth in London
Reece is from England, went to school in the United States, and had soccer as the plan. When the plan changed, he returned to a country where recruitment and sales are enormous industries and entered one of its stranger corners: rec to rec, recruiting recruiters. "It sounds a little like Inception," he says. The salary was extremely low and so was the commission, but London's agency market taught fast because it had no patience. Sixty and seventy hour weeks were normal. The job was the life.
He did very well in it. By his own count Reece was promoted three times in a year and hit quota after quota, and the market gave him a grounding in urgency and standards he still trades on. Then one of his clients, who ran a firm in Canada, offered him a seat there. The decision was less about the role than about the window. "If I don't leave London now, I'll never leave," he remembers thinking. He went.
Employee Number 30
The Canadian job lasted about six months. Reece had intended to stay far longer at the large global recruitment firm that brought him over, but an opportunity arrived he could not pass up. A former teammate from his soccer days had become a successful founder in the Toronto tech scene, and his software development company, then 30 people, needed someone to build a recruitment practice from the ground up.
Reece was employee number 30. He helped take the business to roughly 330 people and through an acquisition by Thoughtworks. That stretch also rewired what he wanted from the work. In agency he had been chasing money; inside a 30 person startup, he knew everyone and could see the consequences of every decision. "Every hire you make has a huge impact on the company you work for," he says, and that visibility is what moved him in-house for good.
The People Who Shaped the Work
The people who shaped him fall into three groups. Leaders first, particularly in technology, whom he describes as genuinely inspiring, and who taught a recruiter with no technical background how to hire deep into technical teams. Twelve years in he understands that world completely, but he is clear he was taught it rather than born into it. Colleagues second, some of the sharpest people he has worked alongside, which he reduces to an old line he takes literally: "Surround yourself with people that you want to be."
Candidates come third, and they are the reason he is still doing the job. Recruiters sell people and sell themselves, he notes, and the effect of that on an individual life is not abstract. It is why, after scaling an organization and going through an acquisition, he chose a Series B company where he is hands-on in the funnel again. "Once you see someone have that energy, it's very transmissive," he says.
AI With a Human Final Check
Working for an AI company means using AI is not optional, and Reece has no patience for the panic around it. "If you are scared and worried about AI taking your job, then you're not utilizing it correctly," he says. His own use is broad: sourcing, screening, top of funnel, bottom of funnel, presentations. The rule is that a human makes the final judgment or the final edit, every time. Left alone, the output has no soul and no storytelling, and storytelling runs through every part of recruitment.
The upside is time. Work that would have taken him 20 hours now takes 30 minutes, which frees him for upskilling, training, coaching and strategy. He also points out that the labs building this technology, Anthropic and OpenAI among them, have some of the largest openings for software engineers anywhere. His caveat matters as much as his enthusiasm: best practice from ten years ago still holds in the right context, and the recruiters who pull ahead will blend the two rather than hide behind the tools.
The Volume Problem
Reece is warier about what AI is doing on the candidate side. Post a job on a Friday and 2,000 applications arrive; by his estimate around 70 percent are fake. Resumes have converged into one document, the job description reflected back with the right buzzwords, written on the assumption that an applicant tracking system is scanning for keywords. That assumption is largely a myth, he argues, at least at every company he has worked for.
The damage is not mainly to recruiters, and he has been fooled himself, and he knows resumes, people and industries. It lands on strong candidates, who now sit somewhere in the middle of an unreadable pile and may never get reviewed. In a market like that, the recruiter who still speaks to a candidate as a person is holding a competitive advantage, not extending a courtesy.
Advice for the Year Ahead
The pressure Reece sees on his peers is less operational than psychological. Talent leaders are told daily that they should lead a certain way, buy a certain tool, hire a recruiting engineer, or be left behind. He gets around 40 messages a day from companies selling something. The doubt that creeps in is corrosive: the quiet worry that a competitor running different software has somehow moved ahead. He speaks with plenty of mentors and leaders who are, in his words, a bit all over the place right now because they do not know how to be successful in this new world.
His advice for the year ahead is a corrective. "Stick to the principles that made you successful and got you where you are today." Most leaders got where they are because their principles hold under pressure, and those principles have not expired. Adopt the tools, keep elevating the practice, look for ways to improve. But spend the bulk of your thinking on the noise and there will be no attention left for the work that actually moves the number.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Reece. We are honored to welcome Reece Fallon to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Reece. 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.
