Lou Zumpano

From the Trading Desk to the Sourcing Desk

Zumpano did not set out to be a recruiter. Out of college he went into finance and traded equities for six or seven years before concluding it was not the role for him. Next came a run at entrepreneurship with college friends, building in green technology and solar during the Obama years, until federal funding shifted and the solar bet went with it.

The pivot arrived through a friend at Google. The message was blunt and, as it turned out, career defining: anybody with a pulse, we are teaching them how to source and recruit. Zumpano wanted into tech, and this looked like the door. He spent a year at Google learning the craft.

Then he made a call that says a lot about how he reads markets. Watching Mark Zuckerberg push hard on a mobile first strategy, he decided that was where the next decade of engineering would be built, and moved to the company that became Meta. He is candid that raw craft was not his edge at the start. "I wasn't the best sourcer and I wasn't the best recruiter," he says, "but I could build out the metrics and I could do the presentations and I could influence the team to get the best out of what they were doing." Within roughly six months he interviewed out of a contract role and into leadership.

Both Sides of the Coin

What followed was nearly 12 years of range. Zumpano built out the mobile, front end and specialized suite recruiting teams, then took responsibility for software engineering leadership recruiting globally, overseeing an organization of about 400. For seven or eight years he ran M&A recruiting, absorbing acquisitions and the people who came with them, work that demands both speed and unusual delicacy.

Then he did something most senior recruiting leaders never do: he crossed the aisle. Moving to the demand side, he learned headcount planning so he could understand, as he puts it, both sides of the coin, how supply actually fits with demand. That fluency is now the backbone of how he operates at a startup, where every hire is a capital allocation decision and there is no margin for a plan that looks good only on the supply side.

The People Who Bet On Him

Ask Zumpano who shaped him and he starts with the friend from Google, Josh Peters, who died two years ago. They were fraternity brothers and close socially long before they were colleagues, which is exactly why the professional risk mattered. Peters did not have to vouch for a former equities trader with zero recruiting experience, and he did it anyway, then mentored him through the whole process. "He taught me it's okay to take a risk for somebody who doesn't look perfect on paper," Zumpano says. "I had zero experience. I just had curiosity, and I believe, tenacity."

That lesson became a hiring philosophy. Zumpano deliberately builds teams out of people who are not carbon copies of one another: agency backgrounds, recruiting coordination, sourcing, unconventional paths. Gaps in closing strategy or sourcing research can be taught. What he is buying is the person and the complementary shape they give the team. He hires for what someone's skills can become, not only for what they already are.

The second name is Glenn Evans, who runs recruiting at Greylock. Evans modeled something Zumpano decided to build his own career around: being trusted implicitly. "Not always liked, but always trusted," he says, and always understood to have the best interests of the company and the people he supports in mind, even when the decision is a hard one. When Zumpano finally decided to leave Meta, Evans was the first person he called. He pinged him at 11 a.m. and they were at dinner by 5 p.m., mapping out everything in the startup world that might fit. The two still speak every couple of days. "It's very hard to find people that you can trust implicitly," Zumpano says.

The Human Element Is Not Optional

For all the metrics fluency, Zumpano's operating thesis is stubbornly human. You can teach almost anyone to source or to close, he argues, with the right tools and enough repetition. What you cannot teach is how to be a good human, and that qualitative element is what he screens for hardest when building a talent team, because he wants people who actually want to share space with each other.

He applies the same standard to candidates. A recruiter is introducing someone to an opportunity that can change their life and, by extension, the lives of everyone around them, which means the work should be done with good intent, a good heart, and honesty about fit. Not every role is right for every person. Chasing the close, in his view, is how teams lose the plot.

He extends that to how people treat each other internally. "It's very easy to get caught up in pushing people down to push yourself up," he says. People remember how they were treated, as peers, as reports, as leaders being supported. Those are the relationships that ring the phone years later when someone is building a team and wants a partner they already trust.

AI as Co-pilot, Not Executioner

Now leading talent at an AI infrastructure company, Zumpano is neither an evangelist nor a doomsayer. He calls the technology genuinely transformative and insists the way through it is education. Used well, AI becomes a partner, a co-pilot, an accentuator of the work already being done. He is equally clear eyed that some jobs will become obsolete, as they have with every transformational technology.

His prescription is a division of labor. Let the technology take the remedial, high volume, low value tasks so that recruiters can spend their time on the high EQ work, and the role survives. "You can never find a way for technology to take away the human element of connecting with an individual," he says, understanding their motivations, why they might move, why this opportunity could be good for them. That, he believes, is permanent.

He does not soften the arithmetic. If a hundred people are doing the work and technology arrives, the twenty five or thirty who adopt it are the ones who will still be there. His job as a leader, one he practiced across a Meta organization of a couple hundred people, is to meet each person wherever they are on their AI journey, show them honestly what the end state looks like, and let them choose. Some will decide this is not the career for them, and Zumpano considers that a legitimate answer. For those who choose to build alongside the technology, he wants to be the leader who hands them the tools, the same way someone once did for him.