About — PABC Consulting

I came to hiring the wrong way around.

Most consultants in the "AI for hiring" space come from one of two places. Either they spent a decade in recruitment and recently discovered ChatGPT, or they're tech people who looked at the hiring market and decided to sell into it. Both produce predictable advice, because both have only seen the problem from one side.

I came up differently.

The first five years of my career were inside enterprise banking systems. Citibank, then Credit Suisse, then a project for a UK bank, then a factoring system rebuild for an Italian institution. The job was always some version of the same thing: a business had a process that worked in theory and broke in practice. I documented how it actually worked, found where the breaks were, and designed the system, or the rebuild, that fixed it. Salesforce implementations. Collibra data governance. eSignature integrations. SWIFT connectivity. Process flow definitions that had to survive contact with three teams in two countries.

It was unglamorous work, and it was the best training I could have had for what came next.

In 2022 I moved into recruitment operations. From the inside. I built a country branch from zero: no office, no team, no clients, no processes. By the time I handed it over, it had three recruiters, a major enterprise client (34 hires placed across two years, 60+ hiring managers I knew personally), and the full operational scaffolding (commercial model, recruitment process, tech stack, account management) running under it.

In 2025 I did it again at multi-country scale. Nearshore operation across Portugal and Poland, serving clients in seven countries from New York to Stuttgart. Twenty consultants placed in the first year. Same playbook, bigger surface.

In parallel, I started building the AI workflows that the operation runs on. Not buying them. Building them. JD automation, profile validators, CV quality checks, AI interview agents, candidate-job auto-matching. The first AI agents introduced into my company's operations. Tools that are now in production, used by real recruiters, placing real candidates.

That's the combination. Five years of systems work, four years of recruitment operations, three years of shipping AI inside it.

Most consultants pick one of those three. I had to do all of them, in that order, to land where I am now.

Four things I think most consultants in this space get wrong.

AI doesn't fix broken operations. It accelerates them.

The hiring teams that get the most out of AI are the ones that already had a working operation. The teams that adopt AI to fix their mess just produce the mess faster, at higher cost, with more candidates damaged along the way. Foundation first, automation second. Always.

Most "AI in hiring" pitches solve a problem that doesn't exist.

Vendors are selling tools that look impressive in demos. The harder question, "where in your actual funnel does this create leverage, and how do you measure whether it worked", is the one nobody wants to answer. Mostly because most of them haven't shipped a workflow that ran for more than a week.

The bottleneck is rarely sourcing. It's almost always decision-making.

Companies obsess over candidate volume when their real problem is that hiring managers can't make decisions, scorecards aren't calibrated, and offers go out three weeks late. More candidates won't fix that. Better decision infrastructure will.

Consultants who haven't built something they had to maintain on Monday are dangerous.

Strategy without operational reality is just a slide deck. I've sat through the Monday morning where the workflow you proudly deployed on Friday turns out to be quietly producing garbage. That experience is where the real lessons live, and most consultants in this space have never had it.

A few things I'm not.

I'm not a recruiter for hire.

I won't run your hiring for you. I'll redesign how you run it. If you need someone in the seat actually placing candidates, that's a different person.

I'm not a developer.

I design and orchestrate AI workflows, and I've built working prototypes myself using tools like Lovable, n8n, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Bullhorn's Amplify. For production-grade software engineering, I work alongside developers. I won't pretend to be one.

I'm not a generalist consultant.

My work is recruitment and the systems around it. That includes the commercial side of recruitment businesses (BD pipelines, sales process, outreach automation, marketing for agencies and employer brands) when it touches the operating model. If your problem is finance, accounting, or anything genuinely outside the orbit of hiring and the businesses that do it, I'm the wrong call.

I'm not cheap, and I'm not expensive.

I charge fair day rates for senior advisory work. No tiered packages, no engagement minimums, no upsell. If price is the deciding factor for you, we're probably not the right fit on either side.

The background facts, in case you need them.

CurrentLeading multi-country nearshore recruitment delivery in IT staffing (active role, not the source of PABC's work)

PreviouslyBuilt and led a country branch in recruitment operations (2022 to 2025)

Before thatBackground in business analysis at Citibank, Credit Suisse, Q2, and BFF (2014 to 2022)

EducationMaster's in Quantitative Finance, Warsaw University (all subjects completed). Bachelor's in Economics, ISEG Lisbon.

LanguagesPortuguese (native), English (C1), French (A2, in classes), Polish (A2, in classes)

BasedPortuguese, based in Warsaw, working across Europe and beyond

Why I built PABC.

PABC is the practice I built to do this work independently. Outside of any agency, any employer, any consultancy bureaucracy. The reason is simple: the best advisory work in this space requires honesty that's hard to deliver when you're inside a firm that needs to sell you a six-figure engagement.

I want to be able to tell a recruitment agency owner "you don't need a tool, you need to document your interview process" and walk away with a one-day engagement, not pressure them into a six-month transformation. I want to tell a head of TA "your AI strategy is fine, your hiring manager training is broken, here's what to do about it" without an account manager pushing me to upsell. And I want to do that work without overhead, without process, and without the corporate layers that turn three-day decisions into three-week ones.

PABC is small on purpose. It's me, working directly with clients who want a senior operator's eyes on their operation. That's the entire product.

I'm Paulo. I build hiring operations and the AI that runs inside them.