Rethinking Recruiting: How TREC Careers is disrupting the skilled talent market with direct sales and aiFind.
When recruiting feels broken, it’s rarely the market — it’s the model
Skills shortages, ghosting, declining response rates, and ever-longer hiring processes have become everyday reality for many recruiters. Job ads keep getting more expensive, active sourcing feels increasingly random, and even well-matched candidates often drop out before a first conversation ever happens.
The real issue isn’t the market — it’s the recruiting model behind it.
TREC Careers recognized this early on and developed an approach that deliberately breaks with traditional headhunting logic.
We don’t work for employers — we work for candidates.
Stefan Thome, Managing Director of TREC Careers
This shift in perspective isn’t a marketing slogan. It’s the foundation of a system that consistently thinks about recruiting from the candidate’s point of view. Instead of promoting open roles and waiting for responses, TREC Careers systematically builds relationships with candidates — long before they are actively looking for a new job.
Recruiting where trust already exists
The most unconventional part of this model is the use of direct sales in recruiting. Rather than relying on job ads, LinkedIn messages, or classic active sourcing, candidates are reached through personal referrals within existing networks.
People recommend TREC Careers because they understand the value: professional career placement without application stress.
This allows the company to access a group that is notoriously hard to reach for recruiters — skilled professionals who are generally satisfied, but open to change under the right conditions. The decisive factor here is not reach, but relevance. Direct sales enables conversations on equal footing, long before traditional recruiting channels would even come into play.
The résumé as the biggest bottleneck in recruiting
A key success factor of this approach is the radically low barrier to entry. Candidates don’t need a résumé, references, or a profile photo. Instead, the process starts with an AI-powered career check that takes just a few minutes.
If you ask ten people on the street whether they have their résumé on their phone, nine will say no.
With this statement, Stefan Thome highlights a structural flaw in recruiting. This is exactly where many processes lose potentially suitable candidates — not because of missing qualifications, but because of unnecessary bureaucracy. TREC Careers removes this barrier entirely, unlocking access to a much larger and previously unreachable talent pool.
Matching without gut feeling — skills first
TREC Careers also takes a fundamentally different approach to candidate evaluation. While traditional recruiting often allows photos, personal impressions, or formalities to influence decisions early on, the company relies on standardized, anonymized skill cards.
These focus exclusively on relevant criteria such as:
- Qualifications
- Experience
- Clear framework conditions like location, willingness to commute, or availability
Personal sympathy and subjective impressions play no role in the initial step.
At the beginning, the human element should be removed from recruiting — and matching should be purely skills-based.
Soft skills and team fit only come into play later, in direct conversations with the actual decision-makers — exactly where they can be assessed meaningfully. The result: fairer decisions, less bias, and significantly faster processes.
Why this model doesn’t scale with traditional tools
As the candidate pool grew, it quickly became clear that this direct sales-driven model couldn’t be supported by conventional recruiting tools. Direct sales requires managing many parallel contacts, high speed, clearly defined processes, and real-time transparency. Individual tools or rigid CRM systems reach their limits very quickly.
We didn’t need a collection of tools — we needed a platform.
What was required was a solution that doesn’t just manage data, but actively supports and scales with the business model.
AiFind: flexibility beats standardization
With aiFind, TREC Careers found exactly that foundation. What mattered most wasn’t the sheer number of features, but the platform’s ability to flexibly map a non-standard recruiting model.
The AI-powered career checks are seamlessly integrated, all candidate data is centrally available, and insights can be analyzed in real time.
For recruiters, this means:
- Less manual work
- Full transparency across the entire process
- Well-founded decisions based on up-to-date data
At the same time, aiFind enables continuous process evolution through flexible tags and customizable workflows — without having to rebuild everything from scratch.
Large systems work — but usually only within fixed tracks. AiFind gives us the flexibility we need to consistently pursue our own path.
Building better recruiting instead of making it louder — what recruiters can learn
TREC Careers demonstrates that recruiting doesn’t have to become more complex, slower, or more expensive. When processes are consistently designed from the candidate’s perspective, entry barriers are radically reduced, and technology is used as an enabler rather than a mere administrative tool, models emerge that deliver measurably better results.
AiFind provides the technological foundation for this — not as a rigid CRM or another management tool, but as a platform for recruiting beyond job ads.
All candidate information is central, up to date, and immediately usable — from first contact to successful match. Instead of maintaining data, recruiters can actually work with it. Instead of bypassing processes, those processes become simpler.
For teams, this means fewer manual handovers, clear transparency across all contacts, and the freedom to map their own workflows rather than adapt to rigid systems. AiFind makes visible what is often lost in recruiting: relationships, potential, and solid decision-making foundations.
The key takeaway for recruiters: stop searching for the next new method and start questioning your own model. Because sustainable recruiting success doesn’t begin with tools — it begins with mindset, structure, and the willingness to rethink recruiting altogether.