Gonçalo Sequeira
Founder of Hiire on recruiting in the AI age, LinkedIn noise and the future.
He spent over a decade inside some of Europe’s most ambitious tech companies, became a tech recruiter who could read seniority at a glance, then walked away to build his own thing. We talked about what happens when AI rewrites hiring faster than anyone can keep up.
Gonçalo spent more than ten years inside companies like Mercedes-Benz and Feedzai, learning the craft of tech recruiting from the inside. Four years ago he left to start his own company. Now he helps companies hire better, and does it from wherever in the world he happens to be.
His job, put simply, is to know who businesses should hire. Which makes the moment we are living in awkward for someone like him, because the honest answer to that question right now is that nobody is sure. I wanted to know what it looks like to be the person companies turn to for that answer, at the exact point the ground stopped holding still.
So what made you drop everything and start something of your own?
He was generous about the question and then very plain about the truth behind it. “At the time, to be very honest, it was a personal issue that I was facing. Plus, I was a bit tired of doing the same thing over and over again.”
He had been a team leader before, was offered the same path again, and felt the loop closing. So he jumped. Not, by his own admission, with a map. “I just decided I will start my own company and see how it goes from there. Without a proper plan, let’s say, but with a lot of ambition in mind and a lot of eagerness to do something different. And that’s what we have been doing in the last four years.”
Do you miss being an employee rather than a founder?
The thought visits him, he admits, mostly when he is tired and the money is short. “Sometimes I think it will be nice to come back to corporate. But then I think, I need to have a boss. I need to have someone tell me what to do. I need to go to an office. So yeah, I’m much better in this position.”
He is careful not to make it a sermon about corporate life. “Corporate has a lot of space for a lot of good people. It’s just not for my mentality and for what I want to do with my life.”
Do companies actually know what they need to hire right now?
This is his home turf, so I expected a confident yes, but he gave me the opposite: “To be honest, most of them don’t. Before, the positions were very straight, the seniorities were really easy to measure. Right now it’s way more difficult, and companies are adapting every week, every month, regarding not only the skills they need but how they assess those skills.”
Then the part I did not expect a recruiter to say out loud. “Whoever tells you for sure they know what they’re doing is lying to you in your face, because so many things are going on right now that it’s impossible.” He puts himself inside that uncertainty rather than above it. “We are doing that discovery with them.”
Is this the worst time to break into tech?
His answer was split down the middle. “Most of the jobs are being taken by AI. Not all of them, but imagine 50% of the jobs for junior positions. And you have more people trying to get those positions.” More graduates, more bootcamps, fewer junior roles to land in. “So I think it’s probably the worst time for you to get in the job market.”
And then the other half of the sentence. “But if you are in the job market, and if you have AI skills, and you like to adapt and learn new stuff, it’s a very exciting time to be in the market.” It depends entirely on where you are standing. “If you are starting, I think it’s very bad. If you already have a good positioning, you can leverage it very easily to make great results.”
Is this just another hype cycle?
That was my framing going in, that we have seen this film before (even though I don’t believe it is). He pushed back, gently. “We said the same thing about Web3. So it’s something that will stay, will shape us. And to be honest, everyone forgot about NFTs and moved on to the new thing that is AI.”
But he thinks the comparison breaks in one specific place, and it happens to be the place that matters to people like him. “AI is doing stuff that is much easier for non-technical people to do, like myself. I’m building apps very easily, even though they don’t work at scale, they can work for me. While in Web3, you needed to be a technical person to take advantage of it.” He landed it with a line I enjoyed. “AI can be used by a Web1 person, if you want to call it that way.”
The speed is the part he keeps feeling in his own week. He was a heavy ChatGPT subscriber last year, then noticed the results slipping for what he needed, and switched to Claude. “It’s giving me better results than before and I can create stuff much faster.” Tools rising and falling every month is, he says, the tech world’s old habit of adapting fast, turned up a few notches. “AI just put this on a higher level.”
If everyone is a creator now, does LinkedIn still work?
He is a Top Voice on LinkedIn, so I assumed he would defend the feed. Instead he described its limits with a number. “On LinkedIn I’m reaching out to 100 people, maybe I receive 5 to 10 answers if I’m lucky. In an event I reach out to 10 people and I go from there with maybe 4 meetings. So it takes more time, but it’s more effective.”
The cause, he reckons, is that the feed has filled with sameness. “Everyone is a creator, an influencer, everyone is creating content and we are copying each other. You see a post, let’s do the same. So it’s hard to differentiate yourself.” The rooms, meanwhile, have filled back up. “Before you had a drop-out of 50 to 60% of attendees. Now maybe 20 or 30. People are eager to make connections and to get to know people.” A room of 50 or 100, he points out, is a place where being recognisable actually pays off. You saw someone on LinkedIn, you half know what they do, you walk over and introduce yourself.
Where is all of this going?
This is becoming my favourite question, because nobody knows the answer and everyone’s guess is different. He kept it at human scale. The administrative weight is lifting, he says, the SOPs that used to eat a day now take an hour or two, and what that frees up is the part of the work he likes. “We always had 20 to 40% of tasks that we didn’t like.”
So where it is going, for him, is simpler than the headlines. “It’s just people doing more of what they like to do, making sure they do stuff that actually fills them and gives them energy, instead of doing stuff that draws their energy.” The irony he has noticed is that this does not mean working less. “They ended up working more time, because they are enjoying what they are doing.”