Edward Moncayo

From Manhattan Sales Floors to East Tennessee Staffing

Born and raised in New York City, Moncayo spent the first stretch of his working life in retail, roughly seven to eight years in Manhattan with J.Crew and Abercrombie. He dabbled in hiring there, though as he is quick to note, it was nothing like actual recruiting. When he moved south, the plan was to continue the retail journey. His soon to be mother in law had a different idea and convinced him to try staffing.

So in 2000, in East Tennessee, Moncayo joined StaffMark doing light industrial staffing. It was his first real foray into the profession and, by his own account, a job he never in a million years imagined doing. The hours were long, the client list was deep, and the business came fast. He spent roughly the next eight years in staffing agency recruiting before being recruited himself to Vanderbilt University.

Vanderbilt accounted for about ten years in total, first as an on-site vendor representative and then inside the institution, managing its temporary staffing group and carrying HR management responsibilities. From there he moved to Walgreens, an organization that became Take Care Health and later Premise Health through a run of acquisitions. Somewhere in those transitions, a pattern became visible to him. He was unusually good at tearing down and rebuilding teams. That became the thread of everything after.

The Three People Who Rewired His Thinking

Ask Moncayo who shaped him and he names three people without hesitation, each attached to a specific lesson.

Andre Boulay, whom he has known the better part of seven years, was a vendor to him in one of his roles and became something rarer: a trusted sounding board on technology. What Moncayo took from him was an observation that reframed how he consumed the market. The people in the vendor space knew recruiting almost intimately, in ways practitioners inside organizations often did not. They knew the trends coming, the labor market intelligence, the shape of the technology. Having someone close enough to hear an idea about pushing a new tool into a workflow and give a direct, frank answer was, Moncayo says, something he could not find in many people. It permanently changed how he thinks about technology and the human machine cohabitation that he believes now defines good talent work.

Nina Brody, his first boss at Walgreens, was the person who supercharged his brain about recruiting. He had come from enterprises he describes as bureaucratic and slow to react. Her team, a subsidiary of a massive corporation, behaved like the opposite. The constant question was how to transform something: candidate experience, recruiter experience, hiring manager experience. Here is the process, and here is how we make it better. That journey ran on ideation, innovation and creativity, and Moncayo still counts her among the most influential people in his career.

Tracy Nordberg was his CHRO at Vanderbilt, and she gave him the most direct career counsel he has ever received, along with a steady supply of stretch assignments he did not want. HR professionals like their lane, he admits. She dragged him out of it repeatedly. One line of hers he now repeats to nearly everyone he meets: before you can be a great talent professional, you have to be a really good business professional. Understand the business you support, its customers, its touch points, what makes those customers happy. What she instilled was rigor and discipline, business person first, everything else falling in line behind it.

AI Is Not One Thing

Moncayo's favorite illustration of the industry's confusion about artificial intelligence came from his thirteen year old daughter, who announced that she used AI at school. He asked which one. Gemini? Grok? Copilot? Manus? Claude? She did not know. It just said AI on her computer. From the mouth of babes, he says, because that is precisely how a great many professionals think about it too.

His own view is that AI is not monolithic and that the field is nowhere near the top of what he calls the AI food chain, the progression from a large language model to a fully autonomous system. He saw the beginning of the current wave at a conference in Anaheim in 2018, where he met a room of vendors, Boulay among them, and concluded immediately that this was where the future was heading. Automation had been the struggle. Here was the answer to making it better.

Today that conviction is operational. He preaches to his directors and managers that they hire people with AI fluency and train the ones who do not have it. His team builds marketing collateral, manages social media and creates career site landing pages with AI, and uses AI-powered sourcing tools. It is the language, part of the vernacular, used every day. He also makes a sharper point about where the profession sits relative to the rest of HR: TA tech tools have reached a period of enlightenment, producing genuinely good output that practitioners understand, while other corners of HR lag because their tools are less mature. That asymmetry is opportunity, a chance to improve throughput, experience and the way work streams are streamlined. He expects human in the loop to remain the model for the next two to four years. After that, he says, we will see. Either way, the future is bright for talent acquisition, provided leaders embrace it.

Never Stop Reinventing Yourself

Asked for the single piece of advice he would leave with other talent leaders, Moncayo does not hedge. Never stop reinventing yourself. The trap he sees most often is the leader who declares a problem fixed, when in reality any fix buys 12 to 18 months at best. HR spent a decade worrying about what millennials would do, he notes, then moved on to worrying about Zoomers, and will soon be worrying about alphas and betas. The worrying always arrives too late.

His prescription is unglamorous and specific: do an environment scan, do some futuring, stay on top of what is happening in the marketplace instead of reacting to it. Otherwise you end up standing in the future looking backward, wishing you had moved two years earlier. Innovation and creativity should not be stifled. Reinvent the way you work as often as you can, because if you do not, you will fall behind.

Leaving People Better

For all the systems thinking, Moncayo's measure of a career is human. He is proud to be a first generation Latino man who has made it in an environment that can often be challenging, and he is careful to frame that pride as purpose rather than accomplishment. His goal, he says, is not to brag on himself but to help other people through their journey.

The evidence is in his alumni. A number of people who once worked for him now sit above him, having far exceeded what he could do, and he mentions it with evident satisfaction. What he wants is simple and demanding at once: to leave people better than when he first met them, and to share whatever gifts he has been given so that others can be successful in their own careers.