Calder
OpenSea
“Those are the real problems I enjoy, and those are the type of folks I prefer to work with.”
Calder 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 Calder's story.
Calder Zwerling moved from the East Coast to California with a plan: get into sales. The recruiting agency he joined was supposed to be a waystation, a place to cut his teeth before tracking into one of the firm's sales seats. He never made the transfer. Somewhere in the middle of those early months, comparing the sales conversations to the recruiting ones, he noticed he preferred the latter, and he has spent the rest of his career proving that instinct right.
Today he leads talent at OpenSea, and the through line from that first agency desk to a leadership seat in one of the most technically demanding corners of the market is remarkably consistent. Zwerling was drawn to the mechanics of matching people to opportunity, and he stayed because the work kept getting more interesting.
The Pivot That Wasn't a Pivot
The conventional wisdom holds that sales and recruiting are different disciplines. Zwerling's early experience taught him otherwise. Going through the motions in those first months, learning what each scope and process actually demanded day to day, he came to a conclusion that has shaped everything since: "they're pretty similar." The difference was not in the craft. It was in what the craft was for.
What tipped the balance was the conversation itself. He found more satisfaction in talking with candidates, understanding what they wanted, and getting them connected to the right roles and opportunities than he did in the sales equivalent. That preference sent him in-house, and in-house is where the work opened up. Building out teams. Working closely with hiring managers. Seeing things through from first conversation to signed offer to a person actually thriving in the seat.
It is a distinction worth dwelling on, because it explains the durability of his career. Plenty of people enter recruiting through an agency side door and leave when the volume grinds them down. Zwerling stayed because the in-house version of the job gave him ownership of the outcome. "Those are the real problems I enjoy," he says, "and those are the type of folks I prefer to work with."
The People Who Built the Leader
Ask Zwerling who shaped him and he does not reach for a list of famous operators. He starts with Lou Zumpano, a colleague from his time at both Google and Facebook, who helped him develop and grow as a manager. Zumpano's contribution was not a single lesson but a lens: a sharper read on the business and the broader tech world, and a firmer foundation for the harder personal questions. How do I want to develop my career. What do I want to be. Where do I want to go. Zumpano invested in those answers over time, and Zwerling credits him with much of the clarity he now brings to his own team.
Then there is his wife, who is also in recruiting and who has a background running through the same terrain: large tech companies and smaller startup environments alike. She is, in his description, a genuinely trusted thought partner, the person he talks shop with, works through problems with, and bounces ideas off. Coaching and prescriptive guidance from someone who understands the specific pathologies of the function is a rare asset. He calls the impact on his career significant, and he does not hedge the word.
And then his parents, whose influence he is careful to describe as something other than professional. What they gave him was the value of hard work, doing right by people, showing up every day, and being grateful for what you have. Those are not recruiting lessons. They are the ones underneath the recruiting lessons, and Zwerling names them as central to who he is outside of work as much as inside it.
AI, Hype, and the Parts That Actually Work
Zwerling is neither an AI evangelist nor a skeptic, which in the current climate makes him something more useful: a practitioner keeping score. He acknowledges the enormous hype and excitement in the market, then does the harder work of naming the specific places where the technology has actually delivered value inside recruiting.
His clearest example is the AI note taker, now a standard presence on his team's calls. The gain is not simply administrative. It is a redistribution of attention. When a recruiter or interviewer no longer has to jot down every note and construct a comprehensive transcript in real time, they can do the thing only a human can do in that half hour: focus solely on the candidate, guide the conversation, and extract the context they actually need. What comes back afterward is succinct, thorough, and often more detailed than what a person scribbling would have produced.
The second gain is velocity. Feedback moves faster through the process, which is the quiet lever behind almost every good hiring outcome, because in a competitive market the organization that decides quickly is usually the one that wins the candidate. Zwerling's framing is instructive for anyone drowning in vendor pitches: the tools that matter are the ones that give recruiters back the resource they are most starved of, which is undivided attention on a human being.
The Craft Beneath the Tooling
What emerges from Zwerling's account of his own career is a philosophy that resists the industry's current tendency toward abstraction. He came for sales, stayed for conversations. He measures his mentors not by their titles but by what they made possible in him. He evaluates AI not by its ambition but by whether it clears space for the part of the job that never automates.
That consistency is why his teams tend to hold together. Leaders who learned the value of hard work at the kitchen table, who were taught by a manager to ask where they actually wanted to go, and who go home to a partner fluent in the same problems, develop a steadiness that shows up in how they hire, how they coach, and how they treat the candidates who do not get the offer.
The plan was sales. The career turned out to be something else entirely, and OpenSea is the better for it.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Calder. We are honored to welcome Calder to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Calder. 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.
