Tony Teshara
Handle
“I just started grinding with outreach on LinkedIn until I finally got somebody down in Brazil interested.”
Tony Teshara has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing the 100 most exceptional leaders and practitioners in talent acquisition. Honorees are selected by the Talent 100 committee from thousands of nominations and candidates across the industry, chosen for the impact of their work, the depth of their craft, and their influence on the future of recruiting. This is Tony's story.
In the last 24 months, Tony Teshara has placed more than 300 people across Latin America into United States startups. Not a bench of recruiters working under him. Him, personally. It is a volume most people associate with a mid-sized agency, and it traces back to a single cold outreach message sent to a stranger in Brazil in 2019 by a man who did not speak the language, did not know the culture, and did not yet call himself a recruiter.
At the time of this interview, Teshara worked out of Houston, running the firm he founded to connect Latin American talent with the American startups that need it. He has since become CEO of Handle. He is candid that the path into the profession was not planned. "Nobody actually sets out to go into recruiting," he says. "Everyone sort of falls into it." What separates his version of that story is what he did after the fall.
A Sales Leader Who Went Looking for a Fix
Before talent, Teshara spent his career carrying revenue. He worked as an account executive and later as head of sales across multiple SaaS companies, the kind of roles where the scoreboard resets every quarter and excuses have a short shelf life. At one SaaS startup, the problem that would eventually redirect his career had nothing to do with sales at all. The company was building with a development team based in India, and the arrangement was straining under its own weight. Feedback loops were slow. The team was not hitting its spreads. The technology, in his blunt assessment, was lacking.
The turn came over coffee. A friend mentioned Latin America as a talent market worth exploring. Teshara looked into it, saw the opportunity clearly, and moved on it. The company transitioned off the India-based team and rebuilt with a LatAm development team instead. Then something more telling happened. He started hearing the same complaint from other founders in his circle, who told him they needed to do the same thing. That repetition was the signal. Crucially, this was all pre-COVID, before distributed work became a default assumption, which meant Teshara was acting on a thesis about remote and nearshore hiring while much of the market was still treating it as an experiment.
The Cold Start in Brazil
He started a company and stood up a team in Brazil to help with placements. The early going was slow, and rather than wait out the feedback timelines, Teshara did what sales leaders do when a pipeline stalls. He picked up the work himself. He had recruited before, for his own teams and for sales orgs, so the mechanics were not foreign to him. Almost everything else was. He is originally from San Francisco. He did not speak the language. He had no relationships on the ground and no cultural shorthand to lean on.
So he ground it out on LinkedIn, message after message, until someone in Brazil finally engaged back in 2019. That first hire went to a customer, and the placement landed so well that the customer came back asking for a second person. Teshara returned to his first hire, worked that network, and filled it. Then it happened again. "It just started snowballing," he says, and the word is precise. What he built came not from a funding round or a marketing engine but from one satisfied placement at a time, compounding organically across roughly five years.
The Work Behind the Number
Pace like his is easy to state and hard to picture. Every placement is a sourcing decision, an outreach thread that may or may not get answered, a screening conversation, a calibration with a hiring team that often does not know exactly what it wants yet, an offer, a negotiation, and a start date that has to hold. Multiply that by the hundreds and do it as one operator, and what emerges is a portrait of someone who never left the discipline of the sales floor behind: relentless outreach, tight follow up, and a low tolerance for the slow feedback loops that pulled him into this work in the first place.
There is a market read underneath the output, too. The case Teshara made privately to a handful of founders before the pandemic, that Latin America offered strong engineering talent with the responsiveness and overlap that more distant arrangements could not deliver, has since become a familiar argument across the startup ecosystem. He was building the muscle for it while the debate was still open.
Why This Work and Not the Other Kind
Teshara has sold software and run sales teams, and he is clear about which chapter of his career has meant the most. Placing people, he says, has been "the most rewarding" work he has done, more than selling a SaaS platform or a solution ever was. The reason he gives is specific rather than sentimental. The outcomes attach to households. The roles he fills let people support their families and reach opportunities they would not otherwise have had, in markets where a single well matched job can change a trajectory for years.
That is what has kept him in it since 2019, long past the point where the original business problem was solved. The company that started all of this fixed its development team a long time ago. Teshara kept going, because the work had quietly changed on him. What began as a supply chain fix for one startup became a career built on getting the match right, one placement at a time, three hundred and counting.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Tony. We are honored to welcome Tony Teshara to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Tony. 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.
