Ronnie Kedrin
Samsung Electronics America
“Mentorship through the years has been extremely important to my growth, and also how I develop as a leader.”
Ronnie Kedrin 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 Ronnie's story.
Ronnie Kedrin was still a teenager when he took a job as an administrative assistant and intern at a staffing firm in New York City. Two or three months in, the team got hit with an influx of open positions, found itself short staffed, and handed him requisitions. He has been recruiting ever since.
He calls it a happy accident. What followed was not accidental at all. From that first agency desk, Kedrin built a career almost entirely in the technical talent market: software engineers, program managers, and technical roles across financial services, then executive hiring, then leadership. Today he is Head of Talent Acquisition at Samsung Electronics America, where he is rebuilding how a global consumer technology company finds, evaluates, and engages talent.
From the Agency Desk to Internal Leadership
Kedrin spent a long stretch on the agency side before making the move in house, and he is candid that the transition was the most formative professional shift of his career. His first internal role was at SunGuard, now Capco, where the head of talent acquisition became a mentor who shaped the leader he became.
What struck him was not her technique but her standing. She was a true partner to the business, and the business listened. Her advice on how to hire the best talent, how to structure recruiting cycles, and how to counsel hiring leaders carried weight in rooms where recruiters were too often treated as order takers. Kedrin studied that. He also studied how she wrote. In an era when most of the work moved over email, he watched her influence outcomes through the written word, and he came to see writing as a leadership instrument rather than an administrative chore.
She invested in him directly, spending significant one on one time on his development, checking in daily about what had gone well and what had gone wrong and what he might try next. Just as important, she widened his aperture. He had arrived as a tech recruiter and nothing more. She gave him opportunities to support other areas, including executive search, so that he could experience different parts of the talent acquisition process rather than mastering only one slice of it. "That support was really meaningful to me," he says.
Building AI Into Every Part of the Process
Kedrin has not watched the AI wave from the shore. During his time at Amazon he was embedded with the teams building the tools, providing feedback and observing how quickly the technology matured. He watched the arc firsthand: from internal chatbots and early GPT features to purpose built talent acquisition tooling for sourcing and candidate engagement, template generation, automated searches run directly off job descriptions, auto matching, and resume rating against requirements so recruiters could spend their screening time on the strongest candidates rather than the whole pile.
His team now leans heavily on AI driven market data, including LinkedIn talent insights, to track trends, understand what competitors are doing, and pinpoint where the best talent actually lives. At Samsung, the current project is structural: evaluating applicant tracking system solutions and asking, at each stage of the funnel, how AI can be embedded to create efficiency and a better recruiter experience.
The purpose behind all of it is unwavering. Every hour automated is an hour returned to relationships, with the business and with candidates. "It's been an amazing, super fast evolution," he says, "and I'm really curious to see what it brings in the coming years."
Embrace It or Stay Behind
Kedrin does not believe AI will replace human interaction in hiring, and he is precise about why. Candidates still want to speak to a person to establish a relationship, to negotiate an offer, to be guided through the process, to ask the candid questions they will not type into a chat window. Those moments are the job.
Everything else is fair game. Interview coordination, candidate templates, outreach, long term nurture of talent pipelines: none of it strictly requires a human, and automating it frees recruiters for the work that actually moves outcomes, which is influencing stakeholders and making sense of the insights the technology surfaces. His advice to talent leaders is blunt and unhedged: "Whoever's not embracing it right now is probably going to stay behind, and so for every role, not just in recruiting."
His own method for staying current is unglamorous and consistent. He reads. He follows the trends. He stays connected to a peer network of talent leaders who compare notes on what is working, a habit he says has helped him tremendously. Right now he is evaluating a wide range of solutions, some AI based and some not, all aimed at improving processes and the candidate experience. After more than two decades in the field, what comes through most clearly is not fatigue but appetite. He remains, in his words, super excited about what the future brings in the talent acquisition space.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Ronnie. We are honored to welcome Ronnie Kedrin to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Ronnie. 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.
