Simon Liu
OpenAI
“You can never remove the human aspect out of recruiting.”
Simon Liu 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 Simon's story.
Simon Liu's path into recruiting started somewhere he never expected: knocking on doors. After graduating with a marketing degree, Simon took what he thought was an advertising role. It turned out to be a commission-only direct sales job representing T-Mobile, selling personal phone lines specifically to managers inside businesses. He spent his days going business to business, knocking on doors, starting conversations with complete strangers, and often doing it in 100+ degree heat.
As he grew his territory, he also had to recruit, hire, and develop his own sales team. That became his unexpected introduction to recruiting.
What stayed with Simon wasn't the sales pitch. It was the human interaction. He enjoyed talking to people, understanding what mattered to them, and finding ways to genuinely help them. The job also taught him how to handle rejection in person. When someone tells you no while you're standing directly in front of them, you learn how to listen, adapt, communicate, and keep going. Those skills ended up translating naturally into recruiting.
That interest eventually turned into a career. Simon went from Aerotek, a staffing agency where he learned the fundamentals of recruiting, to Meta and TikTok, then Autopilot, a seed-stage startup where he helped build the recruiting and people function from the ground up, and now OpenAI. Across very different companies and stages, the part of recruiting he continued to value most was the same: understanding people.
Why Human Interaction Still Matters in an AI-Driven World
Simon sees a lot of potential for AI across recruiting. It can help recruiters find information faster, improve sourcing, reduce repetitive work, and spend more of their time on the parts of the job that require judgment and context.
But he doesn't believe making recruiting more efficient should mean removing the human interaction from it.
As companies experiment with recorded video interviews and fully automated candidate screens, Simon thinks it's worth remembering what it feels like to be on the other side of the process. Job searching can be a vulnerable experience. People are making decisions about their careers, financial security, families, and futures. When the stakes are that personal, there is value in being able to talk to another person.
Simon compares it to trying to resolve an important issue with a bank, insurance company, or healthcare provider and repeatedly being routed through automated systems when all you want is to speak with someone. The automation might be efficient, but sometimes what you need is a person who understands the context, can answer a question you didn't anticipate having, or simply listens.
He sees recruiting in a similar way.
A resume can tell you where someone worked and what they built. AI can help a recruiter understand that information much faster. But a conversation can reveal things that are harder to capture in a profile: what motivates someone, how they think through a problem, what they care about, and what they're looking for next.
It also gives the conversation somewhere to go. A recruiter can hear something interesting and ask a follow-up question, change direction, or learn something about the person that neither side expected to discuss going in.
For Simon, the goal isn't to choose between AI and human recruiters. It's to use AI to make recruiters better at their jobs while preserving the parts of recruiting that benefit from human interaction.
"You never know who you're talking to and what you learn about that person beyond the resume."
Evaluating Talent in the Age of AI
That balance matters on the evaluation side as well.
AI is making people faster and giving them the ability to build and create things that would have taken significantly longer just a few years ago. Simon sees that as a positive. Knowing how to use these tools effectively is becoming an increasingly valuable skill.
At the same time, the final output doesn't always tell you everything about the person who created it.
Someone might build an impressive product, write great code, or solve a difficult problem with the help of AI. Rather than discounting the work because AI was involved, Simon thinks the more interesting part is understanding how the person worked with the technology.
Why did they take that approach? Which decisions did they make themselves? Where did AI help? What did they disagree with or change? What are the tradeoffs?
Those conversations help reveal the judgment and understanding behind the work.
The strongest use of AI isn't about handing over the thinking. It's about using the technology to extend what someone can already do. Someone with strong judgment, curiosity, critical thinking, and domain expertise can use AI to move faster and explore ideas that previously would have taken much longer.
That changes what hiring teams need to look for. It's becoming less useful to ask simply whether someone uses AI and more useful to understand how they use it, how they think alongside it, and what they bring to the work themselves.
For Simon, the same principle applies to recruiting itself.
AI can help us find people faster. It can help us understand information faster. It can remove work that used to consume hours of a recruiter's day.
But hiring is still about people.
The more powerful the tools become, the more important it is to be thoughtful about where they make the experience better and where human judgment, conversation, and connection still matter.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Simon. We are honored to welcome Simon Liu to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Simon. 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.
