Soreta Grobler
Outsourced CFO
“AI can't do what we can, and that's what people want.”
Soreta Grobler 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 Soreta's story.
Soreta Grobler built her career inside accounting firms, and she started at the front desk. Receptionist first, then personal assistant, then HR, and finally the move into pure talent and recruitment: a progression that gave her something most recruiters in financial services never get, which is a ground level view of how a professional services firm actually runs before she was ever asked to hire for one.
Today she works in talent at Outsourced CFO, recruiting into the financial services market. The route was not designed. Responsibilities kept getting added, she kept taking them, and each addition moved her closer to the part of the work she found most compelling: people, and what happens to them after the offer is signed. "That's the journey," she says of it, with characteristic economy.
The Long Way Around Is the Best Preparation
There is a particular kind of credibility that comes from having sat in every seat in the building. Grobler has answered the switchboard, managed a principal's diary, administered HR, and now owns hiring. She knows what a candidate is walking into because she has been in the room on an ordinary Tuesday, not just on interview day.
That accumulated context matters more in financial services than almost anywhere else. The roles are technical, the market is narrow, and the difference between a placement that holds and one that unravels is rarely about the CV. Grobler's advantage is that she reads the environment as fluently as she reads the requirement.
What AI Should Do, and What It Should Never Touch
Grobler is clear eyed about where AI belongs. Automation should take the mundane work and compress the process, freeing the recruiter to do the thing that actually compounds over a career: building the network. She is candid that the sharpest AI adoption is happening among high volume teams hiring hundreds at a time rather than in the specialist corner of the market she occupies, but she does not treat that as an excuse.
Where she draws the line is the candidate experience. She hears the feedback directly, and it is not subtle: candidates interviewed by a bot respond very differently from candidates interviewed by a person. Her advice to other talent leaders follows from that. Automate the process, never the relationship. And keep yourself in the work. "Everyone's got different personalities and there's different markets," she notes. In a market as specific as financial services, authenticity is not a soft value, it is a differentiator. Keeping yourself at the forefront, personality intact, is the part no model can replicate.
Get on the Boat
For all her defence of the human element, Grobler is emphatic that defensiveness is the wrong posture. She holds herself to the same standard she sets for others, and she is unusually willing to say out loud where she has ground to make up. She has been talking about going deeper on large language models and has not done it yet, and she views that gap as a live opportunity rather than a comfortable status quo, because of how much it could open up in the recruitment space.
Her forecast is unambiguous. Looking toward 2030 and beyond, she believes the work simply cannot be done without AI, and that the people who are not yet on the AI boat are really going to be left behind. She frames it as a leadership question as much as a personal one: when you are looking at people, expanding your own team, and planning growth forward, capability with these tools has to be part of the calculation.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Soreta. We are honored to welcome Soreta Grobler to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Soreta. 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.
