Thomas Evangelista
Zip
“I fell in love with the idea of helping people find their dream jobs, and the rest is kind of history from there.”
Thomas Evangelista has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 leaders in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are nominated by peers or found by committees that look for excellent work wherever it happens, then chosen for the depth of their craft and their impact on hiring. This is Thomas's story.
Thomas Evangelista walked into a networking event expecting to launch a career in financial advisory, following the path his father had cut over decades in financial services, in stocks and bonds. What he found instead was a recruitment agency working the room, hunting for financial advisors to place. He interviewed with them on a whim, and the conversation rerouted his life.
"I fell in love with the idea of helping people find their dream jobs," he says of that first encounter, "and the rest is kind of history from there." Today, as Head of Recruiting at Zip, Evangelista is one of the more clear-eyed voices in a talent market that has been reordered almost overnight by artificial intelligence. He has built pipelines through agency work, RPO engagements, corporate America, hypergrowth startups and an IPO. That range is the source of his perspective: he has seen recruiting done at nearly every scale and structure the profession offers.
The Market Has Rekindled Its Flame
Evangelista sees the AI boom operating on two distinct tracks, and he is careful to separate them. The first is what it has done to the market itself. The sheer population of AI companies, he argues, has rekindled a flame that most talent leaders last felt in 2021, when the war for talent was fierce, compensation bars kept climbing, and organizations leaned hard on cultural and bar raiser interviews to protect quality. That competitive intensity is back, and it is not confined to engineering. Recruiting, customer, sales, engineering: everyone is fighting over the same top tier.
The second track is what the products are doing to the daily mechanics of the job. Evangelista points to tools like Juicebox AI and the broader class of sourcing platforms where teams train agents and bots on the talent they want, send those agents out to scour the internet, and refine them through simple thumbs up and thumbs down feedback until qualified profiles arrive in the pipeline without a recruiter grinding through LinkedIn Recruiter every day. He points to companies like BrightHire deploying agents that screen top-of-funnel talent, record interviews and produce transcribed notes rather than inferred verdicts, freeing recruiters to be genuinely present in the conversation. "These products are definitely changing the way that we're working and giving us the ability to kind of get time back in our day and work a little bit smarter, which is awesome," he says.
Guard the Human Element
His enthusiasm comes with a hard boundary, and it is the closest thing he has to a governing philosophy. "Don't let the technology dictate your work and don't let the technology decide outcomes for you," he says. Recruiting, in his view, remains a fundamentally personable industry, built on making connections and meeting people face to face.
He believes there is a real competitive cost waiting for the companies that forget this. Organizations that drift too far from the human element and deploy AI too aggressively, he warns, may actually start to lose ground, because candidates still want a personalized touch and will notice its absence. It is a notable position coming from someone who is clearly an early and fluent adopter. Evangelista is not arguing against the tools. He is arguing that the tools should buy back time for the human work, not replace it.
A Reputation Built on Trust
The through line in how Evangelista describes his own career is the value of leaders who bet on people before the resume made the bet obvious. Early in his career, a leader brought an agency recruiter into corporate America. Another pulled him into the startup world. And a former counterpart running global tech recruiting at Rippling after a stint at Uber brought him in to run all of business recruiting, now at OpenAI. She, he says, gives people autonomy and entrusts them to be challenged while remaining available when they need her. What strikes him most about her is legacy: two decades in, everywhere she goes, people follow her.
That is the standard Evangelista holds himself to, and it explains the shape of his career. He has moved through Gartner, Yext, Snapchat, Rippling and now Zip, carrying forward the same conviction that first hooked him at a financial advisory networking event years ago. The job, at its core, is helping people find work they love. Every tool that comes after that is in service of it.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Thomas. We are honored to welcome Thomas Evangelista to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Thomas. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.
