How Marcus Uses AI to be a 10x Recruiter
Marcus is an independent talent acquisition consultant. He started Dubois Talent Ventures after leading tech recruiting at Reddit and RevenueCat. He now helps lead recruiting efforts at Wise and is an advisor to Rye (E-commerce seed stage startup). Marcus recently made a great hire for Terradot (Climate tech). Sasankh was aggressively searching for a new Tech Lead and Marcus made it happen. This was Terradot’s fourth successful hire on Paraform.
What kept you on the Paraform platform?
My friends suggested that I start my own agency and find my own clients. They referred the platform over. Going through it, there was this realization. Recruiting is a two-sided marketplace.
On the one hand, you’ve got clients. There’s a whole business development workflow there. The goal is to get top-tier ones because, of course, they refer you to more top-tier business.
Then there’s the actual work behind it. The secret sauce of finding the right profiles, calibrating client-candidate fit, pitching, and eventually getting the candidate over.
If you just wanna worry about the recruiting part, the bread and butter, the potatoes of the whole thing, of finding the best candidates and having a best place for them, this makes it easy.
I realized that you can make significant progress in the recruiting industry just by focusing on this second part. You can bootstrap yourself without doing a lot of business development yourself. Paraform gives you direct line access to hiring managers.
I feel like you have your own “recruiting agency in a box” – that’s how I look at it.
How Marcus uses AI tools
When we asked Marcus what his favorite feature was, he pointed to Paraform’s AI that summarizes company information. He uses it to pull relevant facts such as headcount, funding, organizational structure, and benefits. Anything that might be useful to candidates.
I love looking at scorecards after a candidate’s interview… and just having AI summarize it. If I’m onboarded to three companies and I’m doing part-time stuff, I’m not going to remember every intricate detail. Having that access so quickly is a very uniquely helpful feature for recruiters.
Automating that element of background research is a time-saver. And Marcus found another early use case – one that allows him to sustain rapid response times. Generating answers to quick, one-off questions from clients or candidates.
As an experienced headhunter, Marcus can simply vet generated text for accuracy rather than drafting it from scratch each time.
He also mentioned that AI is fairly good at capturing patterns from candidate scorecards. Take a few high-quality applicants, extract common qualities with the AI, and turn it into a persona.
This can accelerate the calibration process with clients.
To summarize, Marcus has proven three early use cases for AI in recruiting workflows:
- Summarizing company information.
- Generating responses to quick questions.
- Recognizing patterns in winning candidate profiles.
How could Paraform improve?
Paraform seems like it would be tough for new recruiters, but it’s great for seasoned consultants. The platform allows you to acquire a toolset and get your own business running quickly. It’s your own agency in a box.
Another challenge can be the short grace period with clients. The companies on here are well-funded and hungry for top-tier talent, fast.
So, you have to treat yourself closer to an executive search agency than a standard talent acquisition outfit.
Overall, what’s your review?
“Paraform is a recruiting agency in a box. If you want to start up your own business, going 0 to 1 is very painful. Because you’re gonna have to go and try to work all these relationships, you’re gonna have to try to hunt down your own recs.”
"If you want to go 0 to 1, build up your own recruiting pipeline and then have the support base in terms of the actual business development done and being able to work for top-tier start-ups and being able to add those to your logos in terms of companies you’ve closed, this makes it easy."
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