Lourdes Perez-Castillo

The Assignment That Redirected a Career

Reviewing resumes for that particular job forced a kind of thinking most hiring managers never have to do. Perez-Castillo was not screening for keywords. She was screening for temperament, for judgment, for the sort of person who could carry the weight of a letter that a grieving family would read once and remember forever. "You only have one time to make an impression on the family," she says. Two questions ran in parallel through every interview: how do we get this done on time, and how do we find the right talent?

That combination of urgency and consequence became the through line of everything that followed. "I think that just launched my career into a completely different path," she says of the assignment. The path led out of government contracting and into enterprise talent acquisition, including a period with Alexander Mann Solutions supporting Johnson & Johnson, and on to her current work at AgileOne. The stakes changed. The standard did not.

Scale Fast, Keep the Human in the Loop

Ask Perez-Castillo what artificial intelligence has actually changed about recruiting and she answers in terms of velocity. AI, she argues, is enabling companies to scale faster, and speed is exactly what her teams are focused on at AgileOne and what she focused on supporting Johnson & Johnson before that. How do we get talent. How do we get people in seats quicker. Those are the questions the technology is finally equipped to help answer.

But she draws a firm line around what the machine is allowed to decide. AI can review resumes and rank a slate from top to bottom in seconds. That ranking, in her view, is the beginning of the conversation rather than the end of it. The recruiter's job is to understand why a candidate was ranked the way they were, and then to use that understanding to influence the hiring manager's decision with real insight rather than deference to an output.

The prerequisite is fluency in the work itself. Recruiters who genuinely know their jobs and their roles, who have read and pressure tested the job description, who hold real knowledge of the function they are hiring for, are the ones who can push a tool past its default behavior. "Making sure you have the insights and the knowledge for the role will just allow you to use AI in ways that have never been seen before," she says. Her formula is simple to state and difficult to execute: scale aggressively, and keep the human in the loop.

The Data Problem Nobody Wants to Own

Her advice to other talent leaders is unglamorous, and that is precisely the point. Continue to scale for AI, she says, but make sure your data is warehoused properly so that you can actually use it. She sees a significant gap across the industry in data fragmentation within teams, and no algorithm compensates for a fractured record.

That means discipline about the things recruiting organizations habitually let slide. Capture rejection reasons. Capture what the skill set actually looks like in a specific market. Enable recruiters and sourcers to conduct market insights and then store those insights rather than losing them in a thread. "Store them cleanly so that AI can use them effectively," she says. Feedback loops sit at the center of the discipline, and she notes that they are easier than they have ever been now that AI resources are shared across teams. Ask hiring managers for feedback, record it, and treat data hygiene as the infrastructure that makes every tool downstream worth buying.

The People Behind the Practitioner

Perez-Castillo credits her current manager, Leigh Cuevas, as the single largest influence on her trajectory. Cuevas has consistently pushed her to follow her ambitions, to make sure her purpose aligns with the work in front of her, and to take the next step rather than wait for permission. The message, delivered repeatedly, was that her talent and her passion for the craft would make her an asset anywhere she went. Perez-Castillo also points to Cuevas's depth in the sourcing space and her ability to read business needs at a granular level, along with a book she recently published, as evidence of a leader who understands what it takes to make the work function.

She names Martha Chavez at Johnson & Johnson for a different strength: bringing talent acquisition teams together, thinking clearly about capacity, and building organizations that stay agile under pressure. And she credits Michael Hardeman, her team lead at Alexander Mann Solutions, for market mastery, an unusual talent for market analysis and for locating candidates in the hardest corners of the labor market, work he continues on the supply chain account at Johnson & Johnson.

The influence she returns to most often, though, is domestic. Her children, she says, made her want to be a better person and a visible example. The lesson she wants them to absorb is one she has lived across relocations and role changes: no matter the age, no matter how many times you move or change jobs, follow your purpose, and if something is not serving you, move on. It is the same instinct that made a project manager at Fort Knox stop and think hard about who deserved to write those letters.