Alexander Theuma

Founder and Editor-in-chief

Helping SaaS Founders grow their businesses to $10M+ ARR

I started SaaStock in 2015 with a simple idea: give SaaS founders a real space to connect, learn, and scale faster–together.

Fast forward to today: SaaStock has become the global home for SaaS founders who are serious about growth.

We've hosted thousands of founders, VCs, and execs from Dublin to Austin, from seed stage to unicorn. We’ve built a community that doesn’t just celebrate scale, it shares the hard truths, the breakthroughs, and the lessons you only get by being in the room where it happens.

Before SaaStock, I spent 11 years in sales, getting my hands dirty, chasing targets, closing deals, and learning what real GTM pressure feels like. That experience taught me: there’s no shortcut to growth. You need the right people around you, the right mindset, and a willingness to evolve — especially now, in an AI First world.

Today, I'm focused on three things:

Growing SaaStock across Europe and the US as the leading platform for SaaS founders.

Building a new generation of founder-driven, AI-enabled companies.

Using the SaaS Revolution Show Podcast to tell the real stories — the wins and the war stories — from the frontlines of SaaS.

SaaS is changing fast.

I'm here for the builders who want to change with it and win.

If you're scaling a SaaS company, or investing in one, let's chat.

Founder

Our purpose is to make a real difference to the lives and companies of the SaaS community

Most SaaS companies fail within the first three years due to lack of runway, lack of product market fit and lack of founder experience in managing a business.
SaaStock helps B2B SaaS Founders on the journey to $10mill ARR supercharge their growth by connecting founders with VCs to help extend runway, learn from industry experts and build pipeline.
We do this through or Physical and virtual conferences, our founder membership program, SaaStock local community gatherings and media.
We are the only media and events business that focuses on SaaS founders scaling to $10mill ARR. This focus enables us to provide the highest quality events, content and connections
For founders in this stage of their journey.


It’s a scary, uncertain — and incredibly exciting — moment in SaaS.
Earlier this week, a founder said to me:

“We may be living through the most pivotal 12 months in SaaS history.”

He might be right.

AI isn’t just another feature wave. It’s a platform shift. Business models are changing. GTM motions are evolving. Defensibility is being redefined in real time.

That’s exactly why we’re bringing 50 B2B SaaS leaders together in Austin next week Thursday 25th Feb for SaaStock Local: Austin.

No panels.
No fluff.
No vendor pitches.

Just a curated room of founders and operators having honest, peer-to-peer conversations about:

• How they’re adapting their product strategy
• Where AI is creating real leverage (vs noise)
• What’s changing in GTM and revenue models
• How to stay relevant — and win — through this shift

📍 Austin
📅 Thursday, Feb 25
👥 50 B2B Software leaders
🌮 Tacos, drinks, and high-signal conversation

If you want to be in the room comparing strategies with peers who are building through the AI platform shift — join us.

This will be the AI intelligence room for B2B software leaders in Austin next week.

Link to reg in the comments. See you in Austin

Running the largest 1:1 Meetings event in B2B Software

The B2B software model is being rewritten. Not gradually. Right now.

I've been speaking to SaaS founders across the spectrum lately, and the honest truth? The smartest people in the room are wrestling with the same fears.

Am I still building a product — or just a feature someone else's AI will absorb? Should every workflow become an agent? 
Will my pricing model survive when buyers only want to pay for outcomes? 
Is PLG quietly breaking?

These aren't hypothetical questions. They're keeping founders up at night, and they deserve real answers — not thought leadership, not hot takes, not another webinar.

That's exactly why April 15-16 in Austin matters more than any other two days on your calendar this year.

SaaStock USA is bringing together the B2B software leaders who are already running the experiments — testing AI packaging, rethinking seat vs. usage models, rebuilding GTM around agents, and winning. 

The people who've already paid the tuition of trial and error, so you don't have to.

Two days. Your peers. Structured 1:1 conversations with the founders actually navigating this shift in real time.

Not panels. Not theory. Intelligence you can act on straight away.

The AI platform shift doesn't reward the smartest founders. It rewards the best-informed ones moving fastest. Every month you spend figuring this out alone is a month a competitor spends learning from someone who already solved it.

SaaStock USA 15th and 16th April will be the room where that changes. Austin will become the AI intelligence hub for 2 days.

If you're building B2B software in 2025 and you're not in this room, you're navigating one of the biggest platform shifts in a generation without a map.

See you in Austin. 👇 Drop a comment if you're coming — I want to connect.

B2B marketing is being rewritten in real time. Are you keeping up?

Next week in London, 4th March, SaaStock is bringing together our community for an intimate afternoon with one of the sharpest minds in B2B SaaS marketing — Kady Srinivasan, CMO at Freshworks.

Kady has built and scaled marketing at Dropbox, Klaviyo, and you.com. She's flying in from San Francisco and is giving us her afternoon to dig into something every B2B marketer is grappling with right now:

→ How AI is fundamentally changing B2B buying behaviour
→ What GTM motions actually work in 2026
→ Where most SaaS companies are getting it wrong — and what to do instead

This is an intimate SaaStock community session. Only 25 spots remain.

If you're a founder, CMO, or marketing leader trying to figure out what 'good' looks like in the AI era — this is the room to be in.

Link to grab your spot in the comments

Mina Golesorkhi

Talent Whisperer & Entrepreneur 🚀

Founder of Hi Remi.

hi-remi.ai helps headhunters and recruiters find the right talent for their roles 60% faster.
Built by recruiters, for recruiters.

Join the waitlist → hi-remi.ai

I'm also a fractional COO for headhunting agencies that want to grow their revenue per headcount and become industry leaders. 

Before that, I co-founded pplwise - a RaaS agency for scale-ups in Europe and before that I was the first in-house recruiter at a SaaS startup.

I share what I’ve learned building and leading recruiting teams on LinkedIn.

Managing Partner & Co-Founder

We believe that great people are the key to outstanding accomplishments 🚀

pplwise supports leading rapid growing companies across Europe to manage their growth plans. Our services include Interim Talent Acquisition Management, Consulting and Headhunting specialised on tech scale ups like TIER, Taxfix or IDNow.

Founded in 2022, we have already hired into +20 countries across Europe with a team of +10 talented people. We are at the forefront of revolutionising how companies manage their growth in one of the fastest growing industries.

With our strong held values in commitment, passion and responsibility; 

We do not believe in clients, we believe in partners - we grow together.

As a recruitment leader who has placed 100+ hires in startups, these are my 3 biggest green flags in a candidate interview:

1. The right track record (but not in the way most people think)
I'm not looking for the same job title at a similar company. That's lazy recruiting. What I'm looking for is someone who has operated in an environment with the same dynamics as yours and picked up the skills and experience that will transfer. 

When you truly understand the challenge you need to solve, you can reverse engineer the kind of person who has already solved something similar even if they come from a completely different industry or role. 

That takes more thinking upfront. It's also why the hire works.

2. They identify with the company on a personal level.
Not just "I like your product" - , no something deeper. 
Their communication style fits the organization. 
The mission actually means something to them. 
The vision aligns with where they personally want to go. 
You can feel when someone is genuinely drawn to what you're building versus when they're just looking for their next step. 

3. They want THIS  - not just a job
They don't wait two weeks before making time for the next interview round. They don't tell you they're in three other first rounds and will get back to you once they've seen how those play out. 
They show up committed, responsive, and genuinely excited. 

Think about it like dating, you wouldn't tell your future partner that you're currently exploring other options and will let them know once you've been through all the stages with everyone else, right? ...riiiiiight??

The right candidate acts like they want to be there. Because they do.

Startup hiring is not like any other hiring. 
Every key role has a tremendous impact on the direction of the company. 
I go to enough conferences to know that the answer to hitting revenue targets, becoming an industry leader, building something that lasts - it always comes back to the same thing: the PEOPLE

Get this right and everything else gets easier.

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 Curious how I approach hiring for key roles in startups? DM me

Mina Gole

Founder of Hi Remi.

hi-remi.ai helps headhunters and recruiters find the right talent for their roles 60% faster.
Built by recruiters, for recruiters.
Join the waitlist → hi-remi.ai

I'm also a fractional COO for headhunting agencies that want to grow their revenue per headcount and become industry leaders. 

Before that, I co-founded pplwise - a RaaS agency for scale-ups in Europe and before pplwise I was the first in-house recruiter at a SaaS startup.

I share what I’ve learned building and leading recruiting teams on LinkedIn.

Throughout my career I have hired  +50 recruiters.
As a freelance recruiter building HR departments from scratch, as a headhunter placing recruitment talent, and as an agency owner hiring my own people. 

And in almost every single interview I ran, I asked the same question:

"What is the most draining part of your job?"

90% said the same thing: Active sourcing

I could see it when they said it, not just frustration, but something closer to resignation. Like they had accepted that this was simply part of the deal. 

That their job, which they chose because they wanted to work with people, shape teams, build something meaningful, had turned into clicking through profile after profile while their actual potential sat there completely unused..

I related to every single one of them, because..honestly.. I felt it too!

What kept bothering me was this: every other department gets modern, intuitive tools that actually move their work forward. 
Finance, marketing, product, sales ..all of them evolved. 

But recruiters were still stuck with overwhelming, buggy, unintuitive systems that made an already draining job even harder. 

There had to be a different way. 

That thought didn't leave me, it just kept coming back louder each time.

So I built Hi Remi

Because I had sat across from enough recruiters to know the problem was real, it was universal, and nobody had actually solved it yet.

If you're a recruiter who recognises this feeling, I'd love to show you what we built: comment below or dm me :)

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 Curious what we built? DM me or check the link in my bio

I wish we wouldn't live in a world where we need "international women's day"

But we do as long as "female-founded" SaaS company are special.

As long as women in leadership are "extraordinary".

As long as "they see someone male in this role, because. xyz... "

As a woman, I don't need any special support neither do I want to be chosen or preferred or considered BECAUSE I am woman.

We did not get here because someone made space for us.

We made the space ourselves.

I have NOT built my career DESPITE I am a woman nor BECAUSE I am a woman.

I was working hard, I was disciplined and developed the skills and traits needed.

And I am not gonna lie, there was people who underestimated me.

Maybe because I am a woman, maybe because I was the youngest in the room.

But there were also people who didn't. 

People who believed in me and people that I believe in too.

People that inspired me with their own path and success. 

Those who make me think: being a woman is not an obstacle - it's just normal. 

Today I want to shoutout to all who make "female leadership" and "being a female founder" less special and just ordinary : 

Alexandra Meyer, ★☆ Sandra Feldmann ☆★, Sonia Uzarewicz, Jessie Schofer, Andreea Lungulescu, Irina Stogova, Ludmila Hess, Valentina Sikelova, Tanja Hagelganz, Angeley Mullins, Julia Huhnholz, 

Feel free to tag whomever inspires you 🤗

Everyone assumes I fell in love with recruitment because I love talking to people.

I'm actually kind of shy.

The truth is, I never really saw myself as a recruiter (not in the traditional sense) 

My first job was inhouse at a startup, and from day one it was clear: 
talent acquisition wasn't a support function. It was how the company was built.

So that's what I learned:
- How you grow a company
- How you set a strategy and actually get people to execute it
- What it takes to be a startUp founder

Also I was always curious about how sales thinks, how marketing thinks, how product thinks, what finance cares about, what keeps a founder up at night.

Every department, every discipline. I got a front row seat to all of it.

Every interview I ever ran was never just about the candidate.

It was about the company they came from. What they built there. 
How they solved problems I hadn't seen before. 
What their industry did differently. 

I was collecting knowledge. 

Every conversation was a masterclass in something.

That curiosity never left.

Today I'm a tech startup founder and I still do exactly the same thing, just on my own terms now. 

Every person I talk to teaches me something about how other companies operate, what they're building, where they're going.

Recruitment gave me the best education I never paid for (just with my low-a** salary the first years 😂 )

If you're in this industry and you're only here for the people side, you're missing out on the best parts of it!

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 If you're curious how recruiters automate sourcing without losing quality, DM me

Our newest recruiter made 2 hires in her first 30 days 🥳 🥳

Lately, I am quite busy with onboardings, and here's what it looks like onboarding high performers: 

We don't hire for industry experience.

Instead, we hire for track record, work ethic, and intelligence and we build everything else deliberately.

Here's what that looks like:

In Month 1–3 they learn
- How ecommerce and SaaS businesses actually work
- How to run kick-offs as a consultant, not an order-taker
- How to screen for track record
- How to write InMails with narratives that convert

& the first hires start coming in.

In Month 3–6 they develop real market insight: 
- They understand the business behind the role
- They get their own clients and learn how to lead those relationships

At this time they do 2 hires per month on average. 

From Month 6+ they do 3 hires a month, consistently: 
- Clients request them by name.
- They consult hiring managers, challenge briefs, and influence decisions. 
- They know exactly which candidate fits and can defend why.

This is what happens when you give people the right environment to grow.

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 Curious how we train recruiters to perform at this level? DM me

As a recruitment leader who has trained and lead +20 recruiters, THIS is the reason why I DON'T track KPIS:

Early in my career I had to report 50 new candidates per role per week.
Some weeks I'd find 30. Sometimes 40. 
And then I'd spend another two hours screening just to hit the number or worse, I'd start pulling in candidates I knew weren't right just to get the task done and move on. 

That was nonsense. I knew it was nonsense while I was doing it.

The number wasn't measuring performance. 

It was measuring activity. 

And honestly, I don't think want to be measured by being busy or logging activities. 

Here's what I track with my recruiters instead:
1. How fast did you get candidates in front of the hiring manager?
2. What's your conversion rate at each stage ?
3.  How many candidates did it take to make the hire? 

The lower that number, the better the recruiter.

Some of my recruiters close a role having reached out to 30 people total. 

They do one or two focused sourcing sessions, find the right people, and then shift their energy to managing the candidates and the stakeholder through the process. 

Now THAT's the version of this job I want to see!!

When someone on my team is struggling, I don't tell them to source more. 

I look at 
- who they actually reached out to
- what the response rate looks like
- what feedback came back from the client 
- and where in the process things are breaking down

THEN and ONLY THEN we work on the root cause together : the understanding of the role, the sourcing strategy, the outreach, the stakeholder communication.
You fix the thinking, the numbers fix themselves.

Chasing volume just teaches recruiters to compromise on quality to hit a target. 

And a hire made just to close the role is never actually a good hire.

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 Curious how I structure recruitment teams that work on quality instead of volume? DM me

As a recruitment leader who has trained and led 20+ recruiters, these are the 3 biggest mindset shifts that separate good recruiters from extraordinary ones:

1. Stop serving, start consulting!
Most recruiters come in with the same default: the client asks & I deliver

Take the requirement, run the search, ship the candidates, hope one gets approved. 

That's a service provider mindset. 

And it will keep you average forever. 

The shift is this: you are not there to fulfill a request!!
You are there to help them achieve a goal. 
Those are two completely different jobs. 

One of them makes you replaceable, the other makes you indispensable.

2. Take a moment to think before you run
Good recruiters are capable. They can find candidates, they can manage stakeholders, they know the process. 
What holds them back is that they take the requirement at face value and go. 

They never stop to ask: is this actually right? Is what the hiring manager is asking for really what will solve the problem? 

The extraordinary recruiter pushes back when something doesn't add up. 
They challenge the brief, not to be difficult, but because they understand the business well enough to know when the requirement is wrong. 
That's what expertise looks like in action.

3. Lead the process, don't follow it
Both you and the hiring manager want the same thing : the right person in the role, right?? 
 
So act like it!

Manage the expectations. Set the pace. 
Find the solution that actually works for both sides instead of just executing what you were told. 

When a recruiter truly internalizes that they co-own the outcome, everything changes: the conversations get sharper, the candidates get better, the hires stick.

The best recruiters I have ever worked with didn't wait to be told what to do. They walked in knowing what needed to happen and made it happen.
That's the difference.

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 Curious how I train recruiters to think like consultants? DM me

Someone put me in a podcast next to recruiters making 500k+ a year 👀 👀 

Yep you heard right! :D 

I got to be a guest on TopBillers Toolkit  with Sam and Ben Miller a podcast that interviews recruiters making 500k+ a year!

We talked about how I doubled start to finish's revenue in two years without growing the headcount.

If you are curious how to up-level your recruitment team, you should check out the pod yourself! ;) 

Link in the comments ⬇️ 

🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights

Sorry but I don't need the hire - they do!

It took me a while to figure this out, but once I did, everything changed.

If they don't close this role, they don't hit their revenue goals. 
They don't ship the product. 
They don't reach the next funding stage. 
They don't become the industry leader they're trying to be. 

The pressure of this hire is not on me. It's on them. 

My job is to help them get there BUUUT only if they let me.

And here's the other thing I had to learn the hard way. 

I don't negotiate the salary. The market does. The candidate does. 

I just read the room and tell them what's real. 

When a hiring manager tries to get the best person in the market on terms that don't work in the market, that's not a recruitment problem. 

That's just ....delulu 

So here's how I work now.
I get a proper intake - the full picture, the context, the mission, what success actually looks like in this role. 

I get fast feedback on candidates, not silence. 

And they move fast when the right person is in front of them, because good candidates don't wait.

That's it. Those are my terms.

If a hiring manager ghosts me, doesn't give feedback, or keeps burning candidates with conditions the market won't accept - that's not on me (sorry not sorry)

I was ready to help, I knew how to get there. 

But I can't want the hire more than they do.

The moment I stopped running after people and started showing up as a partner who brings real expertise to the table, everything shifted.
 
My work got valued. My time got valued. And the hires got better.

I don't make the market, I just know how to navigate it.

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 Want to work with a recruiter who actually consults instead of just delivers? DM me

My recruiters regularly make a hire by reaching out to 26 to 30 people

Time to hire: 10 to 29 days

Not because they got lucky. 

Because they did something most recruiters never do: They got narrow first

Most recruiters think volume is the answer, reach out to 100 people, maybe 200. 

Spray the market and hope someone sticks. 
And I get it, it feels productive. It feels like you're doing the work. But what you're actually doing is proving that you don't really know who you're looking for.
Because if you knew, you wouldn't need 200 people.

Here's what actually happened in those 26 to 30 outreach cases:
The recruiter spent real time upfront understanding what mattered. 
Not just the job description, but the 
- track record 
- environment the person came from
- the company vibe

The things that actually predict whether someone will work out. 
Then they communicated that back to the hiring manager, closely, constantly: Debriefs, check ins, full alignment at every stage.

The result: out of 2 to 3 submitted candidates, one made it to offer and hire

Just because the process was so well managed that there was no room for a wrong fit to sneak through.

Most recruiters who reach out to 200 people do it because they're not sure. 
They're hedging. And that uncertainty shows up everywhere: in the outreach, in the screening, in the candidates they submit. 

So here is what you gonna do next;
1. Narrow down first
2. Find the people who actually fit
3. Put your effort into those 30 people 
4. make every single touchpoint count

You might not even need to open it up after that.

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights
 💬 Curious how my team runs recruitment processes that close in under 30 days? DM me

Just onboarded a new client hiring in construction.

Site managers, project managers, construction lead etc. 

Highly specialised profiles with very specific industry requirements. 

The kind of search where finding 20 qualified candidates takes 3 hours of manual, repetitive sourcing work.

👉 Every. Single. Time.

In his first week with Hi Remi he spend 30 minutes on reviewing candidates for the same result - but 6x faster

Instead of scrolling through 400-500 profiles, he let Remi shortlist them. 

At the end, he goes through 40 profiles, and reaches out to half of them.

Honestly? 

This is my favourite part of building this product. 

Seeing recruiters open it for the first time and realising how much time they've been leaving on the table.

And we haven't even released our newest features yet 👀 

🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 Curious what Hi Remi could do for your sourcing? DM me

I’m so tired of this idea that you have to work hard to make money.

I don’t believe it.

Life is short.

You should enjoy EVERY minute of it. 

Instead of hitting 6 coffees straight just to hit daily quotas we should ask ourselves: "How can I built systems that work for me"

You don't have to screen thousands of candidates per day. 

You don't have to interview 6 candidates per day. 

You don't have to spend weekends building your pipelines, 
...or your evenings writing summaries, uploading profiles. 

Automate what's repetitive. 

Optimize your systems on quality and efficiency. 

Be more picky & spend less time on candidates that won't fit and more time on what actually has leverage. 

Spend more time on what brings you joy in life. 

I PROMISE you will be much happier and even more successful. 

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights
💬 If you’re curious how recruiters automate sourcing without losing quality, DM me

There is one thing I will never do as a recruiter.

I will never sell you a junior for a senior role.

Not because I can't find someone. Not because your budget doesn't stretch. Not because the market is tough right now. I won't do it because I know what it actually costs you and you're not doing the math.

When you hire a junior into a role that needs a senior, you're not saving money. You're buying yourself a year. Minimum. 
A year of onboarding. 
A year of training. 
A year of mistakes that need to be caught, corrected, coached through. 

And that's IF you have someone inside with the knowledge to do the catching, the correcting, the coaching.

Most startups don't.

So now you have a junior learning on the job, reporting to someone who doesn't know the job either, in a role that was supposed to move the needle on a key company milestone. Congratulations. 

You saved on the salary. 

You lost on everything else.

The roles where I see this go wrong the most: first recruiter, first performance marketer, first product manager, head of sales. 

These aren't roles where you can afford the learning curve. 

These roles DEFINE the direction of an entire department. 

One wrong hire here doesn't set you back months. 

It sets you back years.

Here's what I do instead.
If I can't find the right person at your conditions.

I go after the condition: Office policy, comp structure, title, scope

I will fight to get the right expertise into your company before I ever put a junior in front of you as a solution.

There is one exception. 

Sometimes the expertise simply doesn't exist yet in the market; 

the role is too new, too niche, nobody has done exactly this before.

In that case, yes. 

You hire for intelligence. 

You hire someone who can grow into it. BUT you plan for it. 

You resource it. You don't pretend it's the same as hiring a senior who already knows what they're doing.

The compromise I'll never make is skill set for convenience.

The budget problem is a real problem. 

It deserves a real solution not a junior or ex-consultant wrapped in a role where they own a responsibility they have never had before.

I onboarded +10 new recruiters onto Hi Remi in the last two weeks & here is what I learned.

The biggest misconception coming in: they think it's a sourcing tool

It's not!

Hi Remi is an AI auto-screening tool. That distinction sounds small. It isn't.

Sourcing tools help you find candidates. Hi Remi helps you decide which ones are worth your time. 

Recruiters still control their Sales Navigator or Recruiter search. 

They still define their sourcing strategy. 

But instead of spending two hours manually screening 300 profiles, Hi Remi shortlists them in under 30 minutes based on criteria they set themselves.

The ones who got it immediately? They treated it like briefing a colleague!

They gave context, they explained what they were actually looking for, not just keywords. 

They wrote screening criteria the way they would explain a role to another recruiter sitting next to them. And the output was sharp.

The ones who struggled? They typed in keywords the same way they use every other tool on the market. And then wondered why the quality wasn't there.

Every other tool is built to fuzzy match keywords. 

Hi Remi is built to understand the bigger picture: the company, the mission, the specific context behind what a good candidate actually looks like for THIS role. 

But it can only work with what you give it. 

If you don't communicate the context, it can't screen for it.

The shift I want every new user to make is this:
Stop thinking like a sourcer and start thinking like a project manager:

1. Create a guided prompt to set up your screening criteria
2. Set up your search in LinkedIn
3. Use AI to shortlist your search results 
4. Review the candidates
5. Then focus your energy on the outreach, the relationship, the stuff that actually needs a human.

That's where the leverage is.

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 Building Hi Remi in public. Curious what we're working on? DM me

Unpopular opinion coming!

AI agents can now find candidates, write outreach, and schedule interviews at the same quality level as 70% of recruiters on the market today.

L.E.T. T.H.A.T S.I.N.K. I.N.

That means that if you are one of those recruiters, who take a job description, fuzzy match it against profiles, send a bulk outreaches and hope one sticks..
You are now competing with a piece of software that does the exact same thing for a FRACTION of your fee. 

Instead of 10 to 20k, the client pays 1 to 6k. 

And they get roughly the same result.

AI headhunting platforms are already popping up. This is not a future problem. This is happening now.

So the question is not whether the market will change. It will. 

The question is which side of that change you end up on.

The recruiters who will not be replaced are the ones who were never really doing that job in the first place. 

The ones who consult, who understand the business, who manage stakeholders, who know how to get a hiring manager to see qualities in a candidate they wouldn't have seen on their own. 
The ones who act as partners, not service providers shipping CVs in bulk and hoping one gets approved.

And the ones who use AI to kill the admin while they focus on everything that actually requires a human -> those recruiters work like they're on steroids. 

They do more, faster, at a higher level.

Either you become extraordinary, or you get replaced by something that does the mediocre version of your job cheaper. There is no middle ground anymore.

♻️ Repost if this resonates with you 
🔔 Follow Mina Gole for recruitment insights 
💬 Thinking about how to future-proof your recruitment practice? DM me

PLEASE prepare your candidates for assessments!!!!

I cannot say this enough.

And while you're at it — S.T.O.P. testing people on things that have nothing to do with the role. 
If you are hiring an accountant, testing them on mathematics is not an assessment. It's a waste of everyone's time.

I see it constantly! 

Strong candidates sitting through hours of irrelevant tests, with zero context on what's coming, what's being evaluated, or how to prepare. 

And then companies wonder why their best candidates drop out of the process.

Before any assessment, tell them three things:
- What you are looking for
- What the scope of the assessment will cover
- How they can prepare

That's it. That's the whole briefing. & the best thing? it only takes 15 minutes.

Here's what I know from running hundreds of hiring processes: 

Good candidates perform even better when they are properly prepared. 

They show up focused, they deliver at their actual level, and they walk away excited about the next step.

Candidates who don't fit won't suddenly become the right hire just because you gave them a heads up. 

They'll still not fit — you'll just find out faster and more fairly.

The only thing you achieve by throwing unprepared candidates into a surprise assessment is burning the good ones.

They have jobs. They have lives. 

They carved out time for your process because they were genuinely interested. The least you can do is set them up to show you what they're actually capable of.
So PLEAASEE: 
Prepare your candidates. E.v.e.r.y. s.i.n.g.l.e. time.

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As a recruitment leader who has trained, and led +20 recruiters, here are the 3 biggest mistakes in sending InMails:

1. You're promoting a role, not reaching out to a person
An InMail should feel like this: a human looked at your profile, decided you were the right fit, and personally wrote to you. That's the promise of the format. 
The moment it reads like a copy-paste job ad, that promise is broken and the candidate is gone.

2. You're talking about the company - not about THEM
Nobody wakes up thinking about your company's story or vision. 
They wake up thinking about their own. 

What they want to build. Where they want to go. What kind of challenge would actually get them out of bed for something new. 

Your InMail has to meet them there. Make them the hero of the story. The role is the mission. They're the one who gets to decide if it's worth taking on.

3. You're writing for everyone, which means you're writing for no one
Think about who you're actually reaching out to. How do they think. What do they care about. How do they communicate. 

A message to a performance marketer should not sound like a message to a CFO. Write in their language, not yours.

InMails are expensive. I mean like.. REALLY expensive!
They're not a volume game.

One precise, well-written InMail to the right person will outperform fifty generic ones every single time. 
I've seen passive candidates, not looking, not open to anything, respond because the message actually spoke to something real.

Quality wins. Every time.

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Something that genuinely frustrates me about this industry.

A lot of hiring managers still see recruitment as an admin function. 

Someone who posts jobs, screens CVs, books interviews, fills slots. 

Hit the KPI, close the role, move on. 

They think they can put pressure on us, set the KPIs, and at some point a candidate will land that ticks enough boxes.

Some treat us like a human agent or bot that executes on their prompt.

And that frustrates me. 

Because they have no idea what they're sitting next to.
Think about what recruiters actually do..

We talk to hundreds of candidates a year. 

Each one works somewhere else, builds something different, solves problems in ways your company hasn't thought of yet. 

Every 30-minute interview is a window into another company, another market, another way of operating. 

The knowledge we accumulate is extraordinary. And most companies never tap into it.

We don't just think in candidates. We think in conversions, in market signals, in what it actually takes to build a team that gets the job done.

But you only get access to that if you treat us like partners.

The best hiring manager relationships I've had were never about me delivering to their brief. 

It was us solving the problem together. 

Their department needs someone, yes. 

But the question we're answering together is: who does this company actually need, and how do we get them. 

That's a different conversation.

To be fair: trust has to be earned. I know that.

You earn it by showing up with insight, not just CVs. 
By thinking FOR the hiring manager, not just executing what they ask. 
By consulting them on what's actually possible in the market, not just shipping candidates and hoping one gets approved.

Once you have that trust, everything changes. You're not a support function anymore. 

You're the person they call when something important needs to happen.

That's the version of this job worth doing.

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As a founder building a recruitment tool from inside the industry, these are my 3 biggest predictions for how recruitment changes in 2026.

1. AI headhunters will flood the market (and candidates will be more annoyed than ever)
AI agents can already source candidates, write outreach and build entire pipelines automatically...at scale. 

Which means candidates are about to get hit with more generic, AI-generated messages than ever before.

The irony? This is a massive opportunity for recruiters who do it right. 
When everyone sends the same templated sequence, a message that feels genuinely human stands out more than it ever has. Personalization wins. Personal brand wins. Being an actual human being wins.

2. The pricing model of recruitment is about to be challenged
Platforms are emerging where companies publish a job description and get back a sourced pipeline built by AI agents or international sourcers who have never spoken to the client, never understood the culture, never consulted on what the role actually needs.

It will be cheaper. The quality will reflect that. The agencies that survive will be the ones who can prove what a real consultant actually brings because the commodity version of this job is about to get very cheap.

3. Companies will have to completely rethink how they assess candidates
Take home tests are already being completed with AI. 
Yes, even live interviews are being supported by real-time transcription tools that feed candidates answers on the spot. 
The old models are breaking down and what replaces them is behavioral based interviewing:
Real examples, real follow up, going deeper until you understand not just what someone did but how they actually think. 
You can't fake your way through a well constructed behavioral interview. 
That's exactly the point.

The recruiters and companies who adapt now will be in a completely different position in 12 months. 
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The Battle

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Alexander Theuma's LinkedIn Performance

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