Edgardo Perez

Two Halves of the Same Problem

What separates Perez from many talent leaders is that he has spent his career working both sides of the equation at once. On one end, he asks how talent gains access to the knowledge, capabilities, and skills required to land strong jobs. On the other, he asks how companies build recruiting systems that deliver fairness and consistency to every single candidate who enters them. Most practitioners pick a side. Perez treats them as one problem with two entry points.

That framing sent him back to school. After his time at Nickelodeon and Viacom, he went to graduate school to study program design, then spent the next five years building talent pipeline programs. Only after that foundation did he move into recruiting proper, where he could apply the same discipline to strategies and initiatives that support consistency and fairness across the full hiring process.

The through line is systemic thinking. Perez is less interested in whether any individual hire went well than in whether the system that produced it will reliably produce good outcomes again. That is a program designer's instinct, and it is rare in a function that often rewards speed over structure.

The Mentors Who Opened Doors

Perez credits two leaders in particular with shaping how he works, and he is candid that narrowing the list to two was difficult.

The first was a mentor who helped him break into tech. She had already scaled some of the world's best known brands, including Airbnb and TaskRabbit, and she saw transferable skills in Perez that others might have overlooked, trusting him with a leadership role at a product design startup. Her method was direct: throw him into the deep end, then debrief. Learning happened through experience. Just as importantly, she demystified the assumptions people held about what tech talent was supposed to look like. "She definitely was instrumental in sort of reminding me of the power that I do bring, the skill that I do bring, no matter what industry I sit in and no matter what company I sit in," Perez says. That lesson, that capability travels, now shapes how he evaluates candidates who arrive from unexpected places.

The second was a leader who taught him to think strategically about his own career, specifically about how to bridge business impact and mission driven work. People work, recruiting work, work centered on human beings, can drift toward the sentimental or get sidelined as soft. Perez learned to connect it directly to what the business needs. He calls himself lucky to carry that lens today, and credits it with helping him grow and adapt as businesses and industries shift underneath him.

Why AI Readiness Is Not a Tools Question

Ask Perez about AI and he goes immediately to a definitional problem the industry has not solved. AI ready. AI enabled. AI native. Everyone uses the phrases; almost nobody agrees on what they mean.

His warning is practical. Assessing AI readiness purely through the lens of which tools a candidate has used is a losing game, because the tools change every few months. "By the time we get ready to assess for competency areas in those tools, there's already going to be a new tool that's out, and then we're going to be a step behind," he says. Build an assessment around today's product and it is obsolete before it ships.

The alternative he sees taking hold, and advocates for, is a shift toward transferable skills and underlying competencies: the knowledge, skills, and experience that let a person extract value from whatever tool arrives next. Identify those competencies. Validate them with data and research. Then stay open and flexible as the required skill sets keep moving. It is the same systemic instinct he brought to pipeline programs, now applied to the fastest moving variable in hiring.

Advice for Talent Leaders

Perez offers two pieces of counsel, and neither is glamorous.

The first is to always be learning. He believes talent leaders need to be using the tools themselves, regularly, and keeping current on talent research, because that fluency is what allows a team to make quick, informed modifications to its systems rather than reacting late.

The second is collaboration, and here he is specific about who. IT. HR operations. Legal. Perez argues that driving consensus across those functions is what makes it possible to decide what genuinely serves the business, both in the moment and over time. In an industry transforming as fast as this one, the leader who tries to move alone will move slowly. The one who builds alignment across the organization can actually keep pace.

It is a fitting philosophy for someone whose career began with a question about access and fairness and has never really left it. Perez still believes recruiting systems can be designed, not just inherited, and that the difference matters to every candidate who walks through them.