Daryl Escoto
BILL
“If you do a task more than twice, automate it. Write it once, run it forever.”
Daryl Escoto 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 Daryl's story.
Daryl Escoto’s career in talent began with a deep love for sourcing, the kind of work he still describes as detective-like. While still in college, he started as a sourcer and quickly discovered an affinity for uncovering hard-to-find talent through nontraditional channels. If money were no object, he says, he’d still happily do that work today.
What followed was anything but a straight line. Daryl moved from sourcing into full-cycle recruiting and spent years in consulting across both federal and commercial environments. In 2011, he stepped into his first leadership role with an opportunity to build a sourcing function from the ground up. There were no formal frameworks to lean on at the time, so he built his own, instinctively defining success metrics, structuring workflows, and setting expectations. He was, in effect, creating OKRs before he knew the term existed.
Rather than climbing the traditional recruiter-to-manager ladder, Daryl’s roles expanded horizontally as well as vertically. In consulting, he led recruiting for capture teams, partnering closely with business development and program management to support proposals, proofs of concept, and new client pursuits. His mandate was straightforward and unforgiving: if the work was won, teams had to be staffed immediately and optimally. That vantage point gave him a front-row seat to how companies grow, how opportunities enter the business, and how talent enables revenue long before roles are ever formally approved.
In 2015, he shifted into product-driven organizations, joining Amazon to support hiring across operations and business lines throughout North America. He later moved to Microsoft, where he led recruiting for global data center operations and Azure during a pivotal moment when cloud computing was becoming the industry standard. From there he joined Uber, recruiting for self-driving car technology at a time when the talent market largely lived in academia and research. Building teams for bleeding-edge autonomous systems that had not yet gone mainstream sharpened a conviction he still carries: hire for capability, not just job titles.
At BILL, Daryl took on responsibility for all technical recruiting, global recruiting operations, and sourcing, including teams in Australia. He also led multiple post-acquisition integrations, onboarding newly acquired companies into BILL’s compensation structures, leveling frameworks, and core processes. In April, he was named Head of Talent Acquisition, leading the function at a company that blends scale with a strong “Day One” mindset.
Ownership, Innovation, and Trust
What energizes Daryl most is watching his team do things they have never done before. Over the past year, that has meant deeply integrating AI into recruiting workflows, automating manual processes, eliminating unnecessary work, and giving recruiters time back to focus on higher-impact efforts. For Daryl, technology is not about replacing people. It is about freeing them to live their lives, partner more closely with stakeholders, and spend their hours where the work truly matters.
He is equally energized by BILL’s culture. Despite being nearly 20 years old, the company retains an entrepreneurial spirit in which ownership is encouraged and problem-solving is expected. Teams are empowered to identify broken processes, fix them, and scale those improvements across the organization without wading through layers of bureaucracy. That combination of ownership, innovation, and trust is what keeps him deeply engaged in the work.
From Filling Requisitions to Hiring Capabilities
Recruiting, in Daryl’s view, has fundamentally shifted from filling requisitions to hiring capabilities. Today’s recruiters are expected to be far more strategic and technical than ever before. Understanding data, identifying trends before they emerge, and advising leaders on workforce strategy are now core competencies rather than differentiators. Recruiters must understand the roadmaps of the teams they support, whether those teams drive revenue or manage costs, and how talent decisions ripple into business outcomes.
He also sees a growing expectation for recruiters to be technically fluent. At BILL, Daryl redeployed team members into IT and AI-focused initiatives, where they learned tools like Gemini and NotebookLM, built agents, wrote app scripts, and automated workflows. His expectation is unambiguous: recruiters are now “citizen developers.”
“If you do a task more than twice, automate it,” he tells his team. “Write it once, run it forever.”
Speed and quality are accelerating at the same time. What once took a week is now expected in a day, and access to benchmarks, metrics, and market data is faster and more transparent than ever. Recruiters have to keep pace. The role has evolved into one of proactive partnership: anticipating needs, building pipelines before roles open, and ensuring teams are always optimally staffed.
Getting the House in Order for 2026
Daryl’s advice to talent leaders heading into 2026 is simple but urgent: get your house in order. That means tightening core processes, centralizing playbooks, automating wherever possible, and training teams on the technical skills they will need going forward. Metrics, he argues, should be treated as diagnostics rather than weapons, used to surface trends, identify opportunities, and guide smarter decisions.
He encourages leaders to move faster in reviewing data, in identifying where automation can unlock time, and in sharing knowledge across teams and functions. The expectation is no longer to react once a role opens. It is to be ready before it happens.
Leaders want confidence that their talent teams have line of sight into workforce needs, pipelines already in motion, and systems built to start and stop without losing momentum. The future of recruiting, in Daryl’s view, belongs to the teams that can operate with agility, foresight, and technical fluency. That blend of strategic depth, operational rigor, and a builder’s mindset is what defines his leadership.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Daryl. We are honored to welcome Daryl Escoto to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Daryl. 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.
