Sarah Hatfield
Children's Hospital Colorado
“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 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 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.
Hatfield is a talent acquisition leader at Children's Hospital Colorado. 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 Hatfield 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. Hatfield 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. Hatfield 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.
What Laura Oliver and Angela Siegel Taught Her
Asked which leaders shaped her, Hatfield names Laura Oliver first. The two worked together and have stayed in touch across the last ten years, continuing their journeys in different directions and different industries. What Oliver brought was a whole different perspective, and Hatfield is specific that the difference is the point. It is why she valued working alongside her and why, she suspects, both of them have kept the connection alive long after the shared employer fell away. A decade of contact with someone who reliably sees the same problem from another angle is its own form of continuing education.
Angela Siegel taught a subject that rarely makes it into job descriptions: the internal politics a talent acquisition leader has to navigate inside an organization. Hatfield is direct about the specific dynamic Siegel helped her handle. Teams do not always want to let go of the people on them, even when leaving is what would help that person develop and grow forward. The resistance is not malice. It is a manager protecting a functioning team. It is also, structurally, one of the most persistent obstacles to internal mobility that exists.
Siegel's contribution was practical. She showed Hatfield how to maneuver that situation rather than avoid it, and she showed her that the maneuver looks different at scale. Inside what Hatfield calls the very, very large enterprises, the ones that describe themselves that way, persuading a leader to release good talent so it can continue developing somewhere else is a negotiation with its own etiquette, timing and internal audience. That skill has nothing to do with sourcing and everything to do with organizational literacy, and Hatfield is careful to name where she acquired it.
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 Hatfield holds onto professional relationships. Ten years after working with Laura Oliver, 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.
Hatfield's path has crossed from a category defining startup to a major pediatric health system, 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.
