Carlos Lezama

A Career He Chose on Purpose

Most people in talent acquisition describe arriving in the field by accident. Lezama knows he is the exception. "I actually looked at recruiting as a career," he says. "I think I might be an outlier there."

His original plan was child psychology. He wanted to work with kids, then concluded the path was more intense than the one he wanted and began looking for something that would keep him closer to the moving parts of a business. He took the question to a handful of mentors, including someone then working at LinkedIn, and the answer came back quickly: he could be very good at recruiting, and he might find it genuinely interesting. He did not take that on faith. He spent a month researching the profession before committing, then used the last two quarters of his college career to run a job search in the field. He landed at Oracle as a recruiting coordinator, the start of what he calls the most incredible journey he has taken.

The early years at Oracle and later at LinkedIn taught him what the job looked like before the current wave of tooling. "A lot of it was administrative," he says. Outbounding, chasing responses, following up, building a system and feeding it. The craft was real, but so was the overhead.

Running Talent the Way Sales Runs Sales

The organizing idea behind Lezama's work at Serval is that recruiting was always supposed to be a relationship business and that technology, used correctly, gives it back. He and his team have spent significant time automating away the administrative work that used to slow them down, standing up systems and operational improvements that now run quietly on the backend. What that buys is time, and time gets spent on the one-to-one connection.

The second shift is structural. Serval runs talent the way a sales organization runs pipeline and the way a marketing team runs demand. That means identifying the top ten candidates for a role that is coming up, then engineering reasons for those people to engage with the brand long before a requisition opens. Sometimes that is an invitation to a fjord event the company hosts in Sausalito. Sometimes it is poker. Sometimes it is an intimate dinner with Serval executives. The goal is that when a strong engineer eventually starts looking, Serval is already top of mind.

He is equally direct about the discipline the industry has let slip. "We have to bring back candidate experience," he says. Augmenting an interview process with AI is fine, in his view, as long as it is supplemented with connection. The bar he sets is high: make the experience so delightful that, regardless of the outcome, candidates recommend Serval to their peers and their network. Done consistently, he argues, that becomes a ripple effect and one of the largest untapped levers a growing company has for attracting talent.

The People Who Shaped Him

Asked who has left the deepest mark on his career, Lezama starts with the teams he has worked alongside, whom he describes as incredible and credits with pushing him in different directions until he became the leader he is now. Then he goes somewhere less expected.

The people who changed him most, he says, were some of his own hires: high school students and interns, early-career candidates he took a chance on. Several went on to build well-known companies of their own. Others became engineering leaders on his teams. What stayed with him was their appetite. They were hungry and motivated and determined to push themselves, and that, he says, motivated him to be better as a talent leader. It is a telling answer from someone whose job is evaluating potential. The hires he is proudest of are the ones who outgrew the roles he hired them into.

He is generous about peers, too, pointing to leaders who he worked with closely across his career.

Advice for 2026

Lezama's counsel to other talent leaders is forward-looking by design. Anticipate where technology will be able to unlock the talent organization's potential, he says, and ask where else the recruiting team can be augmented so that its people can get back to human connection. His framing is a sequence: read the needs of the business before they arrive, leverage technology to augment the team, then think about recruiting in a non-traditional way.

In a market where the gaps are eating at the talent space, he does not see that as one option among many. "I think that's the only way to stand out right now," he says. The recruiters who thrive will be the ones who use the machinery to buy back time, then spend it breaking down walls one conversation at a time.