Jessica Messreni Topp
Jessica Topp
Head of Global Recruiting, Procore
Jessica Topp never planned to build a career in recruiting. Like many talent leaders, she found her way into the field through curiosity, opportunity, and timing—and stayed because the work fit.
While studying at UC Santa Barbara, Jessica noticed campus recruiters regularly visiting for career fairs. The idea of traveling to campuses, meeting students, and connecting people with opportunity stuck with her. An older friend who had joined TEKsystems encouraged her to give recruiting a try, and shortly after graduation in 1999—right in the middle of the tech boom—Jessica joined as an agency recruiter in the Bay Area.
She loved it immediately.
The pace, the people, and the responsibility clicked. After recruiting, she moved into an account management role, leading recruiters and sourcers and getting her first exposure to leadership. When the tech bubble burst and volatility swept through her client base, Jessica decided it was time to go in-house—a decision that would shape the next two decades of her career.
Building Depth Across Industries and Scale
Jessica joined PeopleSoft and spent several years learning the foundations of corporate recruiting. From there, an opportunity at Goldman Sachs brought her to New York, where she deepened her experience within a large, complex organization.
Personal circumstances eventually pulled her back to the Bay Area, where she joined 24 Hour Fitness. There, Jessica combined her interest in fitness with her growing leadership experience, overseeing corporate recruiting as well as large-scale, distributed hiring for gym and club employees nationwide. It was her first experience managing recruiting at true operational scale.
Her next chapter began at PwC, where she would spend ten formative years. During that time, Jessica held several roles as the firm restructured frequently—supporting regional recruiting, specific tax practices, and eventually national specialty hiring. Working across offices and time zones long before remote work became mainstream prepared her well for what was to come.
Midway through her tenure, PwC faced a major inflection point. For the first time, the firm needed to hire partners externally. Jessica helped build PwC’s first-ever executive recruiting function, navigating not just hiring strategy, but compensation, change management, and the emotional complexity of bringing external leaders into a traditionally “grow-your-own” partnership model.
It was challenging, complex, and deeply rewarding work.
Building While Flying at Meta
After a decade at PwC, Jessica paused to reflect on what she wanted next. Innovation, growth, and building something new rose to the top. She ultimately chose Meta (then Facebook), drawn by the opportunity to build while scaling rapidly.
She joined the data center organization when it was still emerging. At the time, the team had three data centers in North America, plans for a fourth, and a recruiting team of six. Within a year, both the scope and the team had tripled. Over her tenure, Jessica’s organization grew to roughly 120 people globally as Meta expanded its data center footprint worldwide.
The work was fast, demanding, and energizing—and deeply human, supporting leaders, teams, and candidates through massive growth and constant change.
In 2023, Jessica was impacted by Meta’s layoffs alongside much of the recruiting director cohort. She took intentional time off, planning for six months away. Three months in, the pull back to building and leading proved too strong.
Leading Talent at Procore
Jessica joined Procore to oversee global recruiting delivery, managing recruiters, sourcers, and leaders across regions. Since then, her role has expanded into an integrated talent leadership position, overseeing coordination, sourcing, executive recruiting, and delivery globally.
Today, her team of approximately 50 supports hiring across North America, EMEA, MENA, India, Egypt, and Costa Rica. From building teams from zero to hundreds in new regions to developing leaders internally, the scale and complexity of the work continue to grow.
What energizes Jessica most is not headcount—it is people.
She finds the greatest fulfillment in developing others: helping managers become senior leaders, supporting directors as they step into broader impact, and unlocking potential across her organization. Growth, both personal and organizational, is where she thrives.
How Recruiting Is Changing
Jessica sees AI as the most transformative shift in talent acquisition today—not as a replacement for recruiters, but as an accelerator.
By removing manual, repetitive work, AI creates space for recruiters to operate as true talent advisors—thinking strategically about internal mobility, external markets, workforce planning, and long-term capability building. The goal is not efficiency for efficiency’s sake, but elevation of the role itself.
At the same time, she is clear-eyed about the risks. Technology should support relationships, not replace them. Recruiting, at its core, remains deeply human.
Jessica’s Advice for 2026
Stay curious
Experiment. Test. Learn. Not everything will work—and that is the point.
Embrace AI thoughtfully
Use technology to remove friction and free up time for higher-value work, not to distance recruiters from people.
Protect the human element
Relationships, trust, and care are irreplaceable. As tools evolve, intentional connection matters more than ever.
