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Daryl Escoto, senior director of talent acquisition at BILL, a leading financial operations platform for small and midsize businesses, knows the job market is never static. The positions he’s hiring for today will no doubt change tomorrow. Dealing with a dynamic job market and satisfying BILL’s talent needs requires a creative strategy. Escoto identifies the skills most in need now, predicts how they will evolve, and then snaps up individuals with transferable skills working in other industries.
“You never know where your top talent’s going to currently be working,” Escoto explains. “They could be in a totally different industry, at a totally different company that’s focused on a totally different product.”
He insists that his recruiters understand BILL’s tech stack and the competition in its verticals. He looks for individuals with “learning agility” who have demonstrated a consistent career trajectory. “I’m looking for people who grow into their job, not necessarily those who’ve already done it,” he says.
A shortage of tech talent requires Escoto to stay ahead of the curve. “If we wait until the need is right on top of us, it’s already too late,” Escoto says. “I’m always telling my team, stay out in front. You know the business; learn your business’s road map.”
Escoto leads two managers, each with their own cadre of recruiters. He encourages growth by teaching strategies, including the ability to embrace failure. F-A-I-L, he says, stands for First Attempt In Learning. “I’ll ask them, ‘Have you failed lately? What notes do you have as a result?’” Escoto says. He urges team members to log their failures, with notes, in the team’s playbook.
When Escoto signed on with BILL in 2021, the company was growing quickly. It had gone public two years earlier and acquired two companies, Divvy and Invoice2Go, which increased the demand for Escoto’s team. Growing from six hundred employees to two thousand presented new opportunities, such as scaling quickly, bringing the team together, and bracing for year-over-year growth.
“We had to hire faster and hire higher-quality people who were going to join BILL and grow. We did,” Escoto says. He integrated both the Divvy and Invoice2Go recruiters into his current team at BILL, forming one cohesive unit. “We got everybody on one workflow, one platform, so we could conduct all of our recruiting and get everybody on the same page,” Escoto says.
“You never know where your top talent’s going to currently be working. They could be in a totally different industry, at a totally different company that’s focused on a totally different product.”
Daryl Escoto
Escoto, a first-generation Hispanic American, embeds his values of community, love of learning, and curiosity about the world into his leadership style. At a young age, Escoto’s father, who immigrated to the US and taught himself English while building a career, taught Escoto to break things down to their constituent elements and never stop learning. Now, Escoto passes his father’s philosophy on to the next generation of Hispanics.
“I did a fireside chat at the Tejano Tech Summit a couple of years ago. [I told them that] whether you were born here or your family brought you here, you don’t even know the possibilities that exist until you get out there and learn,” Escoto says. “Be curious, try things, break things. Have you failed? What was your first attempt at learning?”
Escoto studied economics in college with ambitions of trading on Wall Street, but he changed his career path when a summer job as a research analyst got him hooked on recruiting. “You’re basically the first line [from the company], calling these people and getting them interested, screening them, finding out if they’re qualified for your role,” Escoto says. To this day, he prefers making first contact over the phone, eschewing other technologies.
“I’ll ask [my team], ‘Have you failed lately? What notes do you have as a result?’”
Daryl Escoto
While working as a recruiting team lead at CGI, a government contractor, Escoto experienced an inflection point in his career when he met the person who’s now his boss at BILL. “He unlocked a lot of what I didn’t realize at the time. I was very good at completing tasks, but he taught me there’s more than just task management,” Escoto says. Under his tutelage, Escoto learned to see beyond the immediate and forecast what can’t yet be seen. On his way to BILL, Escoto also had career stops at Uber, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Escoto would never work for a company that doesn’t understand that people have lives outside work. “One of the things I love about BILL, and many of the other companies I’ve been with, is that [they understand] you do have a life to live,” Escoto says. “A lot of the hobbies and interests that you bring to the table you’re free to express here.”
