Is the AI recruiter already here?

The same question keeps surfacing during the executive dinners, the Recruitment Tech Talks webinars and 1:1 conversations with agency leaders.

For sourcing and pre-qualification, the answer might be yes.

It seems candidates would rather interview at 10pm from their own kitchen with a context-aware AI than at 3pm with a human recruiter who picked up the brief five minutes before the call.

So, should every agency leader be rewriting the recruiter job description this quarter? If you have a clean answer, I'd love to hear it.

In this edition: the full Recruitment Tech Talks recap with Paul Lagrange (Omogen) and David Kieffer (Achil). A portrait of an agency that won the 2025 DEI Talent Business Awards by recruiting the people AI screens out. And three live events I hope to see you at.

— Jeroen

RECRUITMENT TECH TALKS — WEBINAR RECAP

800,000 AI-led interviews later, the recruiter’s job description is changing

800,000 candidate interviews in 18 months, none of them conducted by a human. That’s the dataset Paul Lagrange has built at Omogen — and it points the opposite way to the “AI will eat recruitment” headlines. The more you industrialise pre-qualification, the more the recruiter’s job becomes about things software cannot do.

That was the throughline of the second French edition of Recruitment Tech Talks, hosted by Talent Business Club with Paul Lagrange (co-founder Omogen) alongside David Kieffer (co-founder of Achil).

Three numbers stuck:

• Only 1–5% of candidates in a typical job-board batch actually match the criteria.

• Around 150,000 profiles sit dormant in the average ATS.

• And just 11% of organisations have generative AI properly running.

AGENCY SPOTLIGHT

“I know how it shouldn’t be done” — and that was enough to start

Fabrice Poppe spent fifteen years inside Belgian IT hitting invisible ceilings he could never explain. The burnout that followed gave him a year to think. His conclusion: he didn’t know how to recruit, but he knew exactly how it shouldn’t be done. That was enough.

Together with co-founder Joris Van Hoye, he built The Bee Academy in Ghent: an IT consultancy that takes candidates with a distance to the labour market onto its own payroll, coaches them actively, and absorbs the administrative burden most agencies push back to the client. More than twenty consultants are now active across telcom, automotive, petrochemicals, healthcare, and maritime logistics.

In November they won the DEI Award at the 2025 Talent Business Awards, and used the recognition as a credibility springboard with clients, candidates, and future partners alike.

TALENT BUSINESS AWARDS

Five days left to enter your submission

Submissions for the 2026 Talent Business Awards close on Sunday 17 May. If your agency had a standout year — innovation, client impact, growth, leadership, DEI — this is the room where an independent jury decides whether your story belongs in front of the rest of the industry.

COMING UP

LIVESTREAM — 19 MAY

A 45-minute live panel in Dutch for owners, MDs, and BD leaders at staffing and recruitment agencies. The format is deliberately unpolished — no pitches, no slides full of frameworks, just three speakers swapping what actually works (and what doesn’t) when you knock on a new door in 2026.

On the panel: Delfine Van Boxlaer, HR leader at Smappee with twenty years on both sides of the agency relationship; Tanguy Pensaert, who built Pensaert & Partners, Kwery, Faktor and Travo and won Talent Business Leader of the Year at the 2025 Awards; and Tim Dhondt, founder of Goodshift, bringing a modern GTM playbook to the recruitment sector.

Tuesday 19 May, 11:00–11:45 CET. Free.

EXECUTIVE DINNER — 28 MAY, ANTWERP

After the last edition at Wintercircus in Ghent — ten staffing and recruitment executives around one table, in conversation with Spott on whether the AI recruiter is already here — the next Talent Business Club executive dinner lands in Antwerp on Thursday 28 May, co-hosted with Saply.

Thursday 28 May, Antwerp. By invitation only, with limited seats.

AFTERWORK — 2 JUNE, PARIS

On Tuesday 2 June, Talent Business Club brings recruitment and staffing leaders together in Paris around a topic that’s still costing agencies real money: time-to-hire. Three operators share what they actually changed to compress theirs, followed by some drinks to continue the conversation. In partnership with Omogen, HireSweet, and Beeple.

Thanks for reading Talent Business Insights. Hit reply and tell us — what topics should we cover next? What's keeping you up at night? Your answers shape future editions.

P.S. Know an agency that deserves recognition? Share the Talent Business Awards entry kit with them. Submissions close Sunday 17 May.