AI Recruiting That Works: Automate Below the Interview

Joaquin Titievsky shares what he learned building an AI recruiting platform from scratch at age 20, and why the future of hiring belongs to firms that automate everything except human judgment.

AI Recruiting Tools That Actually Work: Automate Below the Interview

Most AI recruiting pitches promise to replace recruiters. Joaquin Titievsky built Talentum to do the opposite: free recruiters from the manual work that never required human judgment in the first place.

Talentum automates sourcing, outreach, screening, and interview scheduling. Everything that happens before the actual conversation with a candidate. The insight that shaped this approach came from Joaquin's own experience running an 80-client talent agency in Argentina: the only way agencies scaled was by hiring more recruiters. And that model breaks.

"We found that when it was time to scale, the only way in which HR consulting firms scaled was by hiring more recruiters. And we didn't like that much because we always dreamed to create something global, scalable."

"The resume doesn't tell you who fits, actually. It tells you who doesn't fit." -- Joaquin Titievsky

That distinction matters. AI excels at filtering out mismatches based on hard requirements. Ten years of sales experience? Three years in a specific market? AI handles that in seconds across thousands of candidates. But evaluating whether someone will thrive in your culture, whether their personality fits the team, that still requires a human sitting across the table.

Context-Aware AI: Why Keywords Are Not Enough for Talent Sourcing

LinkedIn Recruiter searches by keywords. Type "leadership" and you get every profile that mentions the word. Miss everyone who actually led teams but described it differently.

Talentum's AI understands context. If someone was a manager at a 10,000-person company, the system infers they likely led teams of 10 or more people, even if "leadership" never appears on their profile.

"Our AI understands the context. If a person was a manager of a 10K-plus employees company, our AI understands that this person led teams of at least 10 people." -- Joaquin Titievsky

This is the same infrastructure problem Human Cloud solves from the buyer side. Companies searching for workforce solutions on our platform need context-aware matching, not keyword filters. When a company searches for "AI recruiting," they need to see providers like Talentum who actually deliver the capability, not just vendors who put the words on their website. Discovery infrastructure that understands what companies actually do, not just what they claim, is what makes the marketplace work on both sides.

The ROI That Matters: Speed Equals Revenue for HR Consulting Firms

Joaquin's team used Talentum internally before selling it. The result: placements got 50% faster. For HR consulting firms, that math is straightforward. Faster placements mean more closed deals without adding headcount.

"If I can provide better quality of talent at 10x speed, they can close 50% more deals than they are closing right now." -- Joaquin Titievsky

This is not a cost-cutting play. It is a revenue multiplier. The firms using Talentum are not shrinking their teams. They are making each recruiter dramatically more productive.

Optimize First, Disrupt Later: The Smarter AI Founder Playbook

Every AI founder faces a choice: optimize the existing process or disrupt it entirely. Joaquin chose a third path that more founders should consider.

"If I take PwC and say, replace completely the resumes that you are asking for and start doing these AI interviews, it will be very more difficult than saying, let's keep the process as you have it right now. Insert AI into this part of the process."

Start with what the customer already does. Automate the manual parts. Prove ROI. Then expand. The vision might be a world where resumes are irrelevant and AI handles the entire candidate experience. But you get there step by step, not by asking enterprise clients to leap.

The Bottom Line

AI recruiting tools that try to replace human judgment fail. The ones that automate everything else succeed. Joaquin Titievsky proved this at 23 years old by building Talentum from scratch in Argentina, growing it to serve HR consulting firms across the US and Europe, and delivering a 50% speed improvement that translates directly to revenue.

The future of recruiting is not fewer humans. It is humans doing human work while AI handles the rest. The firms that figure this out first will close more deals, serve more clients, and build better teams.

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About Joaquin Titievsky

Joaquin Titievsky is the CEO and co-founder of Talentum, an AI-powered recruiting platform serving HR consulting firms across the US and Europe. He started Talentum at age 20 as a talent agency in Argentina, grew it to 80+ clients and 100+ placements, then rebuilt it as an AI-first platform.

Listen to the full episode: Human Cloud Podcast on Spotify

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This article was adapted from the Human Cloud Podcast. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.