Sreyas Paravastu
Pursuit
“How else are we going to shape the future if we don't take an active step in shaping the tools that are going to empower us?”
Sreyas Paravastu 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 Sreyas's story.
Sreyas Paravastu holds a master's degree in counseling psychology, which means he spent years being trained to listen to people at the moments when they are least sure of themselves. He now applies that training to hiring, and it shows up in an unusual conviction: that the point of every new tool arriving in talent acquisition is to buy recruiters back the time to be human.
As Head of Talent at Pursuit, Paravastu sits at the intersection of two things that rarely get combined well: a modern, AI-forward technical stack and a candidate experience built on genuine engagement. He is not a nostalgic about the old ways, and he is not a maximalist about the new ones. He is something more useful, a practitioner who has built and scaled startup teams long enough to know exactly which parts of the job a machine should never touch.
A Recession, a Phone Call, and a Cross-Country Leap
Paravastu graduated with his master's in 2011, into one of the deepest recessions in living memory. New graduates were competing for scarce roles, and the search was an education in itself. It was during that stretch that his attention turned, almost as an act of professional curiosity, toward the people on the other end of the line. Who were these recruiters? What were they actually doing? Why did some conversations leave him energized and others leave him nowhere?
A friend made the suggestion that changed the trajectory: opportunity was thin in Florida, but the Bay Area was full of it, and there was this thing called recruiting. Paravastu made the leap. "I love working with people," he recalls thinking. "I've had some really not great recruiting experiences. I'd love to make it better." That became the operating thesis of a career. He started on the agency side and later moved in-house, where he has spent his time building and scaling startups.
The counseling psychology background was never a detour. He always knew he wanted to do people things, to help people in some way. Recruiting turned out to be the version of that work with the widest reach, and he treated it as a way to supercharge skills he already had rather than a pivot away from them.
The People He Keeps Going Back To
Paravastu credits his foundation to Aerotek, the agency where he began. Agency recruiting is unglamorous and relentless, and he says plainly that it can be a hard role at times. What it gave him was resilience and a set of fundamentals for doing the work well, the kind of grounding that holds up years later under very different conditions. He extends the credit broadly to agencies as a training ground for the profession.
Heather Doshay, a people leader who now runs her own consulting practice, is the person whose advice he leans on most. Her contribution has been steady and personal: she has always seen the best in him, advocated for him, and served as a strong support system across every role he has held. Kirsten, now a chief people officer and a good friend, helped guide his path from pure recruiting into the wider people function, HR and all of it, and has been a reliable advocate at each step.
Chelsea Cohen, whom he worked with beginning at FullStory, is the one he names for craft. He calls her phenomenal at what she does, unusually detail oriented and creative in equal measure. "So many of the principles that I have around recruiting, I've also taken from her," he says. Taken together, the list reads like a philosophy: resilience from the agency floor, advocacy from leaders who backed him, and rigor from a peer who raised the standard.
Where the Technology Is, and Where It Is Not
Paravastu's read on the AI wave is refreshingly specific. On the recruiting side, he has watched applicant tracking systems and adjacent platforms move aggressively toward AI, and he has seen more names enter the space over the last two or three years than at any point before. The pressure driving that build is real. Companies processing enormous applicant volume are contending with fraudulent candidates, a problem that intensifies for remote organizations, which tend to be targeted.
The upside, in his framing, is not automation for its own sake. It is reallocation. When tooling handles the minutiae, the screening noise, the sourcing grind, the tasks that were always going to be automated eventually, a recruiter's hours flow back to the things only a person can do: quality candidate experience, real engagement, making sure the mission and the culture actually land rather than getting lost.
He is more skeptical about the other half of the stack. People and HR software, he argues, lags well behind recruiting software. "Oftentimes that's the last group to get products handed to them that are AI forward," he notes. He is starting to see promising names emerge in the people and HR market, but he will not pretend the category has arrived. "I don't think the people software is there yet."
Challenge the Headcount Reflex
Asked what he would tell other talent leaders, Paravastu starts with the obvious and then sharpens it. Always be learning. The market is moving fast enough that staying current is not optional, and leaders should keep an ear open specifically for the technology that will be transformative for them and their teams rather than merely new.
Then comes the harder advice, aimed squarely at an industry habit. The old-school reflex, he says, is that when a team is overstretched, the answer is to double or triple headcount. He wants leaders to interrogate that instinct before acting on it. Do you need to hire ten sourcers, or are there tools that can do some of this? Talent leaders are financial stewards of the companies they serve, and he cautions against over-inflating teams simply because bandwidth feels tight. The point is not to hire fewer good people. Great people remain the whole game. The point is to research tooling alongside people rather than defaulting to bodies.
His final instruction is the most demanding, because it asks talent leaders to stop being customers and start being co-authors. Stay ahead of the curve. Understand modern technology. Be in the Slack forums. Talk to the founders building in your field. Reach out to the people constructing recruiting and people software and tell them what the job actually requires. For Paravastu, that is not networking. It is the only way the profession gets the tools it deserves.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Sreyas. We are honored to welcome Sreyas Paravastu to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Sreyas. 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.
