Episode #9
Inside an AI-native recruitment firm's stack | Roger Olofsson (Co-Founder of Olofsson Consulting)
Roger Olofsson is MD and Co-Founder of an AI-native recruitment firm Olofsson Consulting (https://olofsson.ai/), having spent ~30 years in tech executive search in Singapore. in this conversation we cover: - how Roger ended up settling down in Singapore (from Sweden!) - the live walkthrough of their matching system which consists of 395K candidates - how Roger transformed into an ai-native firm, removing soul-draining work - why the team is shifting back into claude code after building their own software - new job creation due to ai - why he is hopeful given uncertainty hosted by - Eric Tan https://www.linkedin.com/in/erictisme/ - Yaohong Ch'ng https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaohongchng/ - Our guest: Roger Olofsson, MD and Co-Founder of Olofsson AI (https://olofsson.ai) https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerolofsson/ chapters 0:00 cold open 1:28 agenda 8:33 building an ai-native recruitment firm 10:43 why they went all-in on ai 13:19 live showcase: Olofsson AI's internal recruitment platform 21:33 llms find candidates that were once difficult to search for 26:14 how agents save recruiters from doomscrolling linkedin 30:50 getting a team to adopt ai without fear 34:27 how roger aligns incentives for the long run 39:40 how ai helps them compete with giants 42:58 everyone in the firm uses claude code 46:46 emerging roles and job descriptions with ai 52:09 the newest role: agentic product manager 56:25 optimism despite ai fears 59:57 lightning round 1:05:49 post-credits scene: roger's ceo summarizer tools mentioned in this episode - Claude Code (the terminal AI Roger's whole team is trained on): https://claude.com/claude-code - Exa (agentic web search, the POC they showed): https://exa.ai - Supabase (where their Postgres database lives): https://supabase.com - Vercel (where the platform is hosted): https://vercel.com - GitHub (where their skills live): https://github.com - Lovable (the coding agent that pulled Roger back into building): https://lovable.dev books Roger recommends: - The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz - Zero to One, Peter Thiel connect with us - Substack: https://substack.com/@coderiff?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page - email: code.riffs.ai@gmail.com - Superuser HQ (Yaohong's company): https://superuserhq.com/ tools we use - Buzzsprout (podcast hosting, our referral link): https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=2371679 - Snipd (how we take notes from podcasts): https://get.snipd.com/pAbF/36jzrvki LEARN ALONG (glossary for the non-techies) a few terms from this episode, in plain english: - ai-native: a company designed around ai from the ground up, instead of adding ai tools onto the old way of working. - ai agent: a program you hand a goal to, that then takes the steps itself (searching, filtering, writing) instead of you doing each one. - agentic search: a search where an ai agent runs the whole hunt on its own, refining as it goes, then hands you the results. - skill: a saved set of instructions an ai can reuse, so a task you taught it once runs the same way every time. - harness: the setup an ai agent runs inside, which decides what tools and data it can touch. - frontier models: the newest, most capable ai models from the big labs. Roger builds on these instead of training his own. - fine-tuning: training an existing ai model further on your own data. Roger's team chose not to, betting the frontier models improve faster. - context engineering: feeding an ai the right background (like 25 years of recruiting judgment) so it makes decisions the way an expert would. - context window: how much text an ai can hold in its head at once, measured in tokens (chunks of words). - Postgres: a widely used free database. the filing cabinet where all the candidate records sit. - POC (proof of concept): a small trial build to test whether an idea works before committing to it. - agent orchestrator: a new job Roger described, a person who manages and trains a team of ai agents rather than a team of people. about code riff Code Riff - interviews with leading minds / practitioners in AI so you can flourish and have fun with ai - youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CodeRiffAI - spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/53wI41qQXVTiydVjN7i4uB
