Eric Villarreal

From Hawaii to the South Suburbs

The orders sent him home. Chicago is where Villarreal is from, and the south suburbs are where he learned the trade from the ground up, starting as what he calls a basic recruiter for the Marine Corps and building outward from there. Recruiting for the military is an unforgiving classroom. Numbers are public, months are finite, and the product you are selling asks a great deal of the person buying it.

By the time retirement approached, he was ready to close that chapter entirely. "I kind of wanted nothing to do with my military life," he says of that moment. "I wanted to pivot away and start a new chapter." He moved toward risk management, and then the work found him again. He began helping the Chicago Police Department with its recruiting efforts, a project that grew into his appointment as Deputy Director of Public Safety for the City of Chicago. When he was next weighing a move, friends in Washington, D.C. and at the Secret Service called about a Midwest recruiting manager role. Some of it drew on the pivot he had made. Most of it drew on everything the Marine Corps had already taught him.

There is a pattern worth noting in that arc. Twice Villarreal tried to leave recruiting behind, and twice institutions that carry real public consequence, a police department and a federal protective agency, came looking for exactly the skill he had built. Mission driven hiring is its own discipline, and very few people have practiced it at his depth across three separate organizations.

The Mentors Who Set the Standard

Ask Villarreal who shaped him and the first name comes fast: Terrell Timmons, a South Side Chicago guy and, in his description, a Marine through and through, with a simple operating philosophy that you get up and you work every single day. Villarreal remembers standing in front of him during an off month, when the numbers were not where they needed to be. What he braced for was discipline. What he got was a question. Why are you here? You are better than that. "To know somebody that I looked up to so much had the same expectation for me to go out there and do more," he says, "that was huge." It reframed accountability for him permanently: the weight was never fear of punishment, it was the fear of letting down someone who had handed you responsibility.

The second influence was a commanding officer named Tracy, now a general, who added what Villarreal calls the third dimension. Recruiting can be a flat, two person transaction, a conversation aimed at a signature. Tracy pushed for something more consultative. How are we connecting with this person? What do we actually know about them? Where is it they want to go? Are you even the right person to be having this conversation with them? It is a habit of mind Villarreal traces directly back to the military discipline of accounting for second and third order effects. "We take that into all aspects of training," he says. "Why not bring it here to recruiting? Are we placing the right people in the right place for a desired outcome?"

Inspect What You Expect

Villarreal is refreshingly unguarded about what artificial intelligence has done for his workload. He starts to hedge, then stops himself and says plainly that it has made his job a lot easier. Working across platforms including Indeed and Handshake, which he notes is particularly popular in his field, he uses AI to draft outreach and batch applicants in a territory that spans the Midwest. What he will not do is let the machine be the last set of eyes.

"There's still that portion of you that has to inspect what you expect," he says. That means going back through to confirm the batched applicants are genuinely the candidates he is looking for. It means reading every generated message for hallucinations and anything outside the norm before it leaves his outbox. And it means adding the human layer that determines whether the note lands at all. Villarreal tested this himself, sending messages out and tracking open and response rates. The generic versions underperformed. So he began writing to what he would want to hear if the message arrived in his own inbox, tailoring each one down to the profile of the individual. The response rate, in his words, shot through the roof.

The payoff is not a lighter calendar. It is a fuller one. The efficiency lets him reach further across his territory, which means more real conversations, including the Saturday morning coffee talks he sets up with candidates. Those have grown considerably. For Villarreal, that is the correct scoreboard: technology should buy you more time in front of people, not less.

The Connector and the Multiplier

His advice to other talent leaders begins with self knowledge and ends with generosity. "You have to know your role. You have to know what it is that you do," he says. "We can't rely only upon tools to actually get stuff done and call it work." No single lever carries the load, not an applicant screener, not an AI platform, not one sourcing channel. The job is putting them all together.

Underneath the tooling sits something more personal. A candidate wants a job in this field and is trying to achieve something real. An organization has brought you on to be its messenger, to carry its words out into the market and to have the critical conversations about which roles matter most and which need to be filled fastest. Villarreal urges recruiters to learn everything they can about the business they serve, even the parts that are not technically their job, and then to trade on that knowledge internally.

"Be the connector inside that organization," he says. "Be that multiplier that's going to help the organization." Carry that mentality into any company, he argues, and two things happen. You become the person they actually thought they were hiring. And you become the recruiter everybody wants to work with.