Sarah Hatfield
The Tipping Point Group Corporation
“I wanted to hire somebody that could be with us three to five years down the road as we continued to grow and expand.”
Sarah Hatfield 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 Sarah's story.
Sarah Hatfield learned the most durable lesson of her career while filling a single open role at a startup called Peapod, a company she watched become one of the first grocery delivery organizations in the country. The requisition in front of her was for right now. The company she could see coming was going to need something else entirely. Reconciling those two facts is, in her telling, the whole job.
Sarah is a people consultant at The Tipping Point Group Corporation. Recruiting was not the career she set out to have. She came to it sideways, through the realization that the right people in the right roles were the variable that determined whether an ambitious company actually became what it intended to be.
The Peapod Question: Who Will Still Be Right in Five Years
The startup years gave Sarah a problem that most recruiters encounter only later, if at all. Peapod was expanding categories and adding scale continuously, which meant the job she was hiring for had a short shelf life. A candidate who could clear the current workload might be entirely mismatched to the organization eighteen months out. "I wanted to hire somebody that could be with us three to five years down the road as we continued to grow and expand," she says.
What makes that standard demanding is that it applies across functions that look nothing alike. Sarah describes running the same test on a marketing hire and an IT hire. Their skills had no overlap. The question underneath both searches was identical: can this person still be the right answer after the company has changed twice? That reframing pulls a recruiter away from the comfort of matching a resume to a description and toward a harder judgment about range, adaptability and trajectory.
It also changed what she thought she was building. Sarah came to see her output not as a series of closed requisitions but as pipelines and foundations, structures that serve the immediate need to scale and the growth that follows it. Urgency is the natural enemy of that discipline. Fast growing organizations always have a reason to hire for this week. Her argument, formed early and held since, is that hiring for this week is how companies end up rehiring for the same role a year later.
A Long View, Applied to People
Put the two educations together and a coherent method emerges. Hire people who can grow for three to five years, then fight the internal friction that would otherwise strand them. The first half is a sourcing and assessment discipline. The second half is a political one. A talent leader who only masters the first ends up watching strong hires stall out inside the building.
The same long horizon shows up in how Sarah holds onto professional relationships. Ten years after working with a former colleague, they are still in each other's orbit despite having moved through different industries. That is not incidental to her approach; it is the approach, applied to colleagues rather than candidates. People are not closed transactions. They are ongoing.
Sarah's path has crossed from a category defining startup to advising organizations on their people strategy, and the constant across it has been an unwillingness to treat a hire as a short term fix. The right person in the right role, she decided early, is one of the most consequential decisions an organization makes. Everything she has built since has been an attempt to make that decision on purpose rather than under pressure.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Sarah. We are honored to welcome Sarah Hatfield to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Sarah. 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.
