Joaquin Titievsky, CEO at Talentum, Why AI Recruiters Are Making HR Firms 50% Faster

[00:00:04] Alright, so Joaquin, so for listeners, when did we meet Joaquin? Three months ago? Six months ago? I think six months ago. Yeah, I was in Switzerland at that time, right? Yeah, six. And the context was, you know, for you listeners, context was, saw you're doing AI Recruiters, and I reached out and I'm like, Joaquin, what the hell is going on with AI Recruiters? What's real? What's not real?

[00:00:27] So, and I was pretty blown away. I was like, Dan, alright, you're doing some really good stuff. You were in Switzerland at the time. And so, with this conversation, literally, we'll be like a masterclass on like, what is AI Recruiters? Why is AI impacting the workforce? How do you see it? And for you listeners out there, we went back and forth, what, like, for the last month, Joaquin, because you've been so busy in just consumer delivery. And so, thank you for the time.

[00:00:54] I can confirm you have not been trapped by PR department. This is all off the cuff and real. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Thanks for your time, Matthew. I'm so sorry that I postponed the goal a lot of times. As I was telling you, we have been very busy with Talentum, but it's a nice, nice program.

[00:01:15] It is a good problem. So, listen, let's start off, give us that boring intro, Joaquin, and then we're going to kind of dive into like, how in the world do you even got to building an AI Recruiter? But yeah, give us the full, give our listeners context of the company, what you're doing, all that. Perfect, perfect. So, my name is Joaquin. I'm 23 years old.

[00:01:36] I'm from Argentina. It's where I'm living right now, actually. I've been living in Switzerland for the past year, but now I'm in Argentina, full with my team. And I'm the co-founder and CEO of Talentum. So, how is our story and how a 20-year-old guy ended up in recruiting is a good question. We started Talentum almost 30 years ago, but we started it as a talent acquisition agency.

[00:02:06] We were the typical agency connecting jobs with candidates. Honestly, I didn't have any experience in recruiting. I was studying at college at the university here in Argentina. I am not from Buenos Aires. I am from the interior of the country. And I needed money to move into Buenos Aires. And a part-time job, I saw that it didn't gave me the money that I needed.

[00:02:35] So, I needed to become an entrepreneur or living in my home with my parents, very far from Buenos Aires. And I saw, hey, we have like, my classmates are really good, but they ended up working at corporations. So, I started to say, hey, what if there was a way to create an agency and connect candidates from universities with jobs as startups?

[00:03:04] And that's how Talentum started. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so you actually started, you were kind of like a talent marketplace, right? Yeah, we were creating a marketplace, actually. So interesting. And then, so why? So, give us the, from Talent Marketplace to today, give us the three years. And so, it's been three years or how long has it been? Yeah, I mean, we started the agency in November 2023. Yeah.

[00:03:33] And we closed the agency and started building the AI recruiter in December 2024. That's okay. So, it's like a year and two months. So, give me the three-year, like, life of Joaquin for those three years. And then, tell our listeners about Switzerland. Because this is also where, like, you've done some incredible shit with some really cool organizations. And, yeah, give us the lowdown on why when we talked last time you were in Switzerland.

[00:04:03] Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, the story is I started alone. The business went great in the agency. I mean, we had more than 80 customers in six months, more than 100 placements that we made. But, we found that when it was time to scale, the only way in which HR consulting firms scaled was by hiring more recruiters.

[00:04:28] And, we didn't like that much because we always dreamed to create something global, scalable. So, at that time, like, JGBT and OpenAI were, like, just burning, at least in Latin America. And, we saw that there was a big opportunity in implementing AI in the recruiting process because we saw that it was... We were recruiting ourselves. So, we saw that it was extremely inefficient.

[00:04:58] Sourcing Candidates 101, conducting the outreach, screening them, updating the ATS, which is the applicant tracking system, like the CRM of candidates. It was completely inefficient, and we always did the same thing. So, we found that AI could help a lot in the process. And, that's what we are solving today with Talentum AI Recruiter. And, in terms of Switzerland, yeah, it is a great country.

[00:05:20] I mean, coming from Buenos Aires, Argentina, in which everything is a mess, and a lot of poverty, and, yeah, everything a mess in this country. Going to Switzerland, in which everything is okay, the streets are secure. Everything works. The train stops at times. It's crazy.

[00:05:46] And, it was a great experience to also know the entrepreneurial ecosystem there. It is really big. It is not a safe, but going to Berlin, to London, we saw that there is a big opportunity there, too, I think. Yeah, so let me summarize. So, basically, all right, let's build up this HR consulting slash TA slash, you know, Talent Marketplace.

[00:06:10] And then, really quickly, you realize, what was it, like 80 hires a month that you were like, whoa, this is just so inefficient, so not sustainable, and just, like, so old, right? Like, manual recruiters. Which, what we've seen is, okay, you get to that inflection point, and then you go, all right, do I create a brand new contract, or do I automate the existing process, right? And, from my understanding, you've automated the existing process.

[00:06:37] Now, let's, can we talk about, like, when you were, like, AI, right? You were early. So, I'm assuming you weren't just, like, going into Cloud Code and being like, hey, Cloud Code, I want to build this, right? Like, so, and I'm not going to lie, man, that I get the fortune where I can do that. And I was, like, a past Microsoft VM, so I'm not a total idiot, but, like, I can be an idiot and still use Cloud Code. So, you had to actually, you know, be creating the infrastructure, architecture, probably create the whole full stack, you know, system.

[00:07:07] You didn't just have Cloud use Superbase and Vercel to hack some, you know, Vibe coded up for it. But, so, when you say AI, how do you define it? And, like, what has it really, really, really done for you early on and now? Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, I mean, as you say, there weren't anything like Cloud Code or GPT-4 coding.

[00:07:32] It was my CTO, Yoni, which I love him, coding 24-7, seven days a week. Yeah, it was a crazy ride. And we took pretty much, I mean, a lot of time to create a really solid product, you know? It took us, like, six months to create a really, really solid product.

[00:07:56] Because today with an MVP, I think that with an MVP today, I mean, the expectation of the customer is 10x more today. Because they compare you with Cloud and GPT and everything. So, it's not what Paul Graham said or YC said two years ago, which is like, hey, create something in two days and start delivering it to our customers. Because selling it is easy.

[00:08:26] But the true part is the delivery. It's the customer keep paying you and seeing the value.

[00:08:35] And in terms of what you say for us is, I mean, if you set to think about the recruiting process right now, you have a lot of parts in which there are manual, fully, like, execution things. It's fucked.

[00:08:59] And they don't need very much, like, thought process for that. Like, sourcing candidates 101 is like, hey, you say to chat GPT, hey, create me the Boolean search. And they paste it in LinkedIn recruiter and they see the candidates 101. They mentally compare with the JD. And based on that, they create an outreach 101. It doesn't require manual thinking, you know.

[00:09:25] So, if you set to use AI to automate that process and help the recruiter put in focus in tasks that they truly need to move the angle, that's the best part. I mean, interviewing the candidates, conducting a great candidate experience, making sure that they are hiring truly the best one is the most important part.

[00:09:56] And AI helps you in automating that process and shortening the time. So, I mean, I got millions of questions. But so, do you see, I'm trying to think of, like, similarities, right? Of, like, where you're seeing this work well. And so, are you noticing that there's similarities in terms of does this work great for specific skill sets, specific job roles, specific job recs, specific industries?

[00:10:25] What are kind of some of the best success stories use cases that you're kind of rallying around, right? Yeah, honestly, it depends a lot on the feature that they are using in Talento. I mean, because they are, like, different processes, you know. If you have, like, really operative, like, positions, massive positions, you don't source those candidates. You post the job in Indeed and the candidates apply.

[00:10:55] And then what you need is an AI screening, which Talentum has, an AI recruiter that screens the candidates. Don't interview them, but screen the candidates and qualify them. Because today, what a normal recruiter does is, hey, I post the job in Indeed and a lot of job portals. I get the resumes. I compare manually.

[00:11:15] 101, compare the resume with the JD and conduct an SMS screening via text to see if the candidate is available to start in two weeks, to see where they live, if they are open to relocate. That is the part that AI can help a lot. So our customers, what they are using in that part is they use our AI recruiter to compare the resume with the JD and screen the candidates. So they focus only on qualified candidates. Got it.

[00:11:43] It's more of that, like, agent experience. So that makes total sense. And in terms of the other position, like professional positions, they use our AI recruiter to source the candidates. They, like, are, we saw that there was only one, like, big monopoly also in the US, which is LinkedIn. So they replace LinkedIn by using us.

[00:12:11] And they find a lot of more candidates with us. And they automate the complete process. Not only the sourcing. The sourcing, the outreach, the screening, and the interview scheduling. And that sourcing, so sourcing equals you are, like, are you creating outbound campaigns? Are you going through LinkedIn and setting up job posts as well? Everything? Everything. Everything. Okay. Everything.

[00:12:34] How do you decide in your own head, like, optimize versus disrupt? And what I mean by that is, like, okay, when looking at the, let's say, the screening. Okay. Optimizing what a perfect resume looks like versus disrupting and being like, hey, what if we don't even need a resume? What if we just decided to have three questions or, you know, AI interview?

[00:12:57] But, like, how hard is it for you right now, like, founder to founder to really decide, all right, we're going to actually invest one month doing this versus being like, yeah, fuck it. Let's just ship it quick on Claude, right? Because a lot of us, that's the reality right now. You could do this. So how are you determining what stuff is optimization versus disruption? Yeah. I think it's important to divide it in two different steps.

[00:13:23] Like, on one hand, you have, like, the vision, what you truly want to build and what you think the world should look like in this industry, let's say. And then you have to think about, okay, what's the inverse engineering that I have to do to create that vision? Because if I take, like, I don't know, PwC, I don't know, or Rans tab, let's say.

[00:13:48] And I say, hey, replace completely the resumes that you are asking for and start doing these AI interviews. It will be very more difficult than saying, hey, let's keep the process as you have it right now. So insert AI into this part of the process. No change the process. The process kit is the same.

[00:14:14] AI takes what is manual and operative, and then we start scaling from that. So it's like, step by step, we will get to the vision of, hey, the resume is not needed anymore. I know that this job is for you because I have this experience from you and you told me this information from you. This is a job that you are most, like, approachable to, let's say. Yeah. How, funny question, McCain. How do we avoid a world of just AI swap?

[00:14:44] Because that kind of terrifies me, right? In terms of what if you have AI building the resume and then AI filtering the resume. I mean, how do you think about this? And is it one of those where it's like, you know what? Okay, don't even think about it. It's just going to happen. Like, how do you think about this? No, I mean, yeah, I think it's really important to have this. And I think that point that you brought answered the question on why we still need human recruiters.

[00:15:14] Because the resume doesn't tell you who fits, actually. It tells you who doesn't fit. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah. Tell me more about this. Like, the science, like, the brain behind you, your co-founders. Like, because that's, I didn't know that. Yeah, so at the end, the person who fits needs to be known by the recruiter.

[00:15:42] Because I think that the soft skills, the culture is more important than the hard skills. You can learn the hard skills. But the personality of each person is pretty difficult, also impossible to change. And at the end, the person that validates that is the human recruiter. What AI helps you is, hey, I need at least 10 years of experience working at sales.

[00:16:11] If the resume tells you, hey, this candidate has three years of experience or he or she doesn't have experience working at sales, you know that this candidate is not right for this position. That is the part where AI helps you the most. Not invalidating the soft skills. Not invalidating the culture. We tried to do that and it was awful.

[00:16:36] So we say, hey, automate everything that happened below the actual interview of the candidate and start putting your focus in actually interviewing them. Not true. And I wonder, I mean, let me know if I'm wrong about this. I assume one of the beauties of AI is I always compare, like, compute power versus brain power. And, like, even if my brain is smarter than that compute, well, if that compute can do the same thing over and over for five hours,

[00:17:04] like, my brain maxes out at, like, 30 seconds, right? So when I look at that year example of, like, 10 plus years experience, it's not only that the AI can go and see, like, yes, no, but also it probably is searching multiple different channels, right? So it's like, hey, we looked at this LinkedIn, we looked at this, and there's going to be a lot of verification coming up. We speak with a lot of, like, verification-related providers. And it's like, well, how do we start to verify stuff in this digital age? Crazy world.

[00:17:30] But is that true that, like, your AI is more than just, oh, I looked at the resume and, like, yep, we filtered 10 plus different factors? Yeah, definitely. So basically what AI can help a lot too, and in Talentum, our customers are really happy with this, is it doesn't look for only keywords. It also understands the context. So let's say you are looking for a person that led teams of at least 10 people.

[00:18:03] The tools that you have right now, like LinkedIn, let's say, search only via keywords. The candidate has to say, like, lead or leadership or lead or everything related to that. Talentum understands the context, understand that if a person was a manager of 10K plus employees,

[00:18:27] this company, our AI understand that, hey, maybe this person led teams of at least 10 people, you know? Gotcha. Gotcha. So very boring question. You ready? Let's travel back into the ROI. So help me understand, one of the things I'm thinking about is like, okay, if I have a 100-person TA team right now, is this just adding cost for all these TA people?

[00:18:55] Is this increasing time to make the hire? Is this increasing accuracy? Am I taking this 100-person TA team, turning it into five TA professionals? Help me. What's it like when you're talking ROI with your customers? Yeah. One of our main differences between Talentum and other competitors is that we put a lot of focus,

[00:19:20] not only in enterprise teams, but in HR consulting firms, like TA agencies. So the ROI is more revenue. It's totally linked with more revenue because as we have been a TA firm, a TA consulting firm, we know that the most important thing for them is quality and velocity. Yes. Okay.

[00:19:49] If I can provide better quality of talent at 10K speed, they can close 50% more deals than they are closing right now. And this is what I love. I mean, so one of my trying to describe like, okay, where's work and talent, whatever, where's it all going? One of the words that I always use is like specialized. And if we look at technology, I mean, hell man, like 20, I don't know, around like early 2000s,

[00:20:18] even early 2010s. Do you remember the term is like decentralization of the crowds or like democratization of the crowds? But the whole principle was like, okay, technology is going to enable, you know, thousands of micro crowds that you can sell to rather than selling bland shit for everyone's crowds. And what I love is when hearing you, you know, that point right there, it's like, if you are a, let's say industrial manufacturing company, from what I'm hearing,

[00:20:45] I don't want to speak for you, but like probably not the best fit. But if you are a HR consultancy, HR transformation, HR, you guys are awesome. Yeah. Specialization, like that's, that's phenomenal that you're not saying, oh yeah, we do everything for everyone. It's more, it's totally linked with more revenue. And we saw not only with our customers, but with ourselves. The first version of AI recruiters, Talentum's AI recruiter was for ourselves.

[00:21:13] We didn't want to build an AI recruiter to sell it, but we saw, hey, we built this that automate the source in the outreach, the screen and the interview schedule. And our placements got 50% faster. And so what's going on here? We need to show this to the other consulting firms. So they start using it. And that's how we've been there. So yeah, definitely. What's the model?

[00:21:41] Is it pay per placement then, or is it a flat SaaS or both? Right now it's a flat. It's a flat, it's a flat pricing, I guess, typical SaaS based on the amount of users they have. But I think the future is going to pay per placement or pay per interview scale. Yeah. We are going to that authentic future. So let's like stay on that thread.

[00:22:08] Did you see A16Z's post yesterday about like the headless software? I didn't. So easy, easy concept, which you probably get, Joaquin, but for the audience. So for our listeners out there, I mean, if we think about traditional SaaS, it was, hey, coming to our UI UX and we're, you know, building all around as little clicks as possible, as much stickiness and retention as possible. But the assumption is that you're going to come to our SaaS, our app.

[00:22:38] And so you see hundreds of different apps in the app store and yeah, yeah. What Claude and these various LLMs do is they might become the head of everything. And so I don't, I no longer go into HubSpot and other tools and PostHog, but I expect that Claude is connecting with PostHog and Poobler for social and that kind of stuff. So exactly what you were mentioning, you know, keep going down this agentic path, but you know, A16Z came out on PostHog yesterday about like headless, right?

[00:23:08] And then the implication there is if you are headless, what, what are you, right? And implication is, well, it's the data infrastructure and the experience that still matters, but at a much different level. And so how do you think about agentic when you look at Talentium? Like, do you assume that people are going to come to your site? Like what, how are you thinking about the way the world will look in two to five years? Yeah. I mean, I think that's great.

[00:23:34] I think that's great because that, but I mean, I totally agree with that future. The IT team won't put much more focus on making the best UI and interfaces. We, I want the entire company to put focus in the North Star metric, which is, hey, let's make our customers make more money with us.

[00:24:00] And we will like build everything and we are building everything thinking of that ROI. Not the, not providing, not, I mean, not only providing the best candidate and recruiter experience into the platform and make, making everything like good looking. But also at the end, the most important, the most important like metric is, hey, I am earning,

[00:24:27] hey, by using Talentium, am I earning more money or this is a cost for me? I mean, what's the, what's the actual ROI of this? I think with that thought, we will be the next unicorn. Yeah. Now that, that hits to the core. And I, it's hard, man. It's hard to just have a North Star and stick with it and not get too distracted. Whether like you're an executive or an entrepreneur, it's just so hard.

[00:24:54] Kind of last question for you, man, is when you look at actually two questions. The first is everyone listening to this, what do you want them to do? Do you want them to literally upload a CSV of OpenRex into your platform? Do you want them to just set up a demo call, have a, you know, conversation with someone on your team or you? So that's probably the most important question. Actually, we'll lead with that one. What, yeah. What do you want our listeners to do right now? Let's set up a demo. Let's set up a demo.

[00:25:23] I will leave you, I will leave you with my own currently. So you can set up a call with me and I show you the platform, everyone. Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to do that. Also our biggest market is in the U.S. right now. I mean, our customers are in the U.S. We are building from Latin, but in the U.S. And Europe too. So yeah, happy to scale the call and show you the product. Is the talent, Joaquin? Is the talent Latin based? Where's the talent mostly coming from? Everywhere. Yeah, it is. It's fully global.

[00:25:53] Are you noticing any trends? Like, are you seeing like growth in certain areas, decline in certain areas? We have customers that are looking for a lot of candidates in the Philippines, Portugal, like crazy countries, you know? I mean, obviously in the U.S. too, but we have a lot of customers from Latin looking,

[00:26:16] I mean, which are like HR consulting firms from Latin looking for candidates in Europe, in Asia, in Oceania, everywhere in the world. So yeah, I mean, I think that after the pandemic and everything, we have a more like globalized world.

[00:26:37] So I think that's right because you can enter into a vast talent pool bigger than looking for your own, only in your country or in your city. Yeah, no, it's funny. I always think about like, I'm always very honest with executives about this like global remote

[00:27:03] and I'm like, hey, I actually would love nothing more than to have an office in the town that I want to live and everyone's in the office and we don't have to worry about, did we document this? Everyone's just there from nine to five. I'm not going to lie. For an executive shoes, sounds kind of nice. Now, the implications of that is you're only going to be stuck with people that live within 45 minutes of where your office is. You're probably going to be priced out or priced too little.

[00:27:30] So it's just not, it's not realistic anymore. Yeah. Right. It's just not realistic. So I mean, I think, I think it depends on the company size, you know, because I am not, I am not walking my talk. That end of we work in person, actually. Oh, which? That's not a thing. Yeah, that end of we work in person every day in Buenos Aires here.

[00:27:53] But it is because we are a team of eight people just grinding and everyone doing everything. I know that when we will be like a 20 people team, we will start looking for more remote positions. Because we see now that we are hiring right now and we see that the candidates that live near here and also want to work in person every day are not so many.

[00:28:23] Yeah. Oh, I know. Oh, I know. But listen, Joaquin, so for listeners out there, you're literally, you, you committed this. Okay. Your Calendly link will be on your profile and it'll be in this episode. So everyone go book demos with him ASAP. And then Joaquin, first to many, first to first to many. And what I love is the focus on the HR firm, right? Like it's very, very clear. So if you're driving, if you're an HR firm, you better reach out to Talentum right now.

[00:28:51] So Joaquin, thank you for hopping on. I know you're about to go service a bunch of customer stuff. And so thanks for carving time out. And I hope freaking busy you are. But thank you, my friend, for hopping on. Thanks to you, Matthew.