Sharon Kardam
Foster + Partners
“Everything that you do has to line up to contributing to a business outcome.”
Sharon Kardam 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 Sharon's story.
Before 2000, Silicon Valley was the most exciting place on earth to hire, and Sharon Kardam wanted in badly enough to turn down her dream job in marketing to get there. She left a secure, well paid HR generalist role for commission based recruiting, sourcing C++ developers at the height of the tech boom. Trained as a marketeer, she has spent the decades since building and leading large talent functions, and today works as a fractional talent acquisition leader with Foster + Partners.
It is a career that has never followed the safe line, which may be why Kardam is unusually clear eyed about what the profession is actually for. She talks less about requisitions and pipelines than about value: where talent acquisition creates it, how it gets articulated, and what happens to a function that cannot explain itself to the business it serves.
The Turn Nobody Advised Her to Take
Kardam studied marketing and landed her first job in generalist HR, a role she still describes as wonderful. Early in her career she put her hand up for everything, and one of those things was recruiting. She loved it immediately. When the dream marketing offer arrived, she famously said no.
The trade was not a small one. She gave up permanence and a good salary for heavy commission and the raw end of tech hiring, in a market where the developers she chased had all the leverage. That decision set the pattern for everything that followed: an appetite for the harder, more interesting version of the job, and a comfort with building the plane while flying it. She has been implementing new technology into talent functions for her entire career since.
Her parents made that risk thinkable. Immigrants who arrived in the country with nothing, they taught her the value of opportunity and the habit of never saying no to it. When she walked away from the safe job, they were the ones cheering. "You kind of make your own destiny," she says, a line that reads less like a slogan than a family inheritance.
What AI Is Actually Giving Talent Teams
Kardam is blunt that the last year has tipped much of what she learned in talent acquisition on its head. But her read on the shift is more precise than the usual enthusiasm. The breakthrough she points to is not a single tool, it is the architecture: tech stacks that finally connect the whole ecosystem instead of automating one process at a time.
The consequence is space. For most of her career, she says, talent teams wanted to do more consultative work but stayed buried in sourcing and admin. That weight has begun to disperse. She now sees her teams free to be deliberate about assessment and to sit at the table helping leaders choose the right people for their roles, the work that was always meant to be the point. She counts herself fortunate that at Foster + Partners the space exists and the team can step into it, while at other organizations the same room is being created and not yet used.
The open question she keeps returning to is craft. If admin can be automated and sourcing can be leveraged, then the human interactions become the whole value proposition, and the profession has to develop them accordingly. "How do we develop our craft to a point that we can really bring different values, things that obviously you can't automate?" That, in her view, is the work of the next few years, and she is honest that nobody has finished answering it.
Razor Sharp on Business Outcomes
Asked for the single most important piece of advice she would give other talent leaders, Kardam does not hesitate. Be completely outcome and business focused. Whoever you are with, in whatever moment, be razor sharp on business outcomes, and make sure everything you do lines up to contributing to one.
It sounds simple, and she knows it. She also knows how often it fails. Too many talent acquisition and HR functions drift into what she calls TA speak and HR speak, an internal dialect that never connects back to a business result. The functions that drive the most value, in her experience, are the ones whose value is clearly articulated and understood by leadership from the very top. "If you're not part of the regular conversation from a leadership business point of view, that's a critical point where I see things go wrong."
Coming from someone who began in marketing, the emphasis makes sense. Kardam treats the credibility of the talent function as something that must be earned and communicated, not assumed. It is the throughline of her career: from commission based tech recruiting, where results were the only currency, to fractional leadership, where a client's outcomes are the entire brief.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Sharon. We are honored to welcome Sharon Kardam to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Sharon. 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.