Most agency founders hit the same wall: brilliant recruiters buried in admin, CRMs nobody updates, and fragmented tools that cost a fortune but don't talk to each other. Farid El Machaoud hit that wall in 2016 - and decided to build his way out.

Nearly a decade later, his answer is Wiggli: an AI-native hiring platform that combines sourcing, ATS, VMS, freelance marketplace, and real-time labour market intelligence in one modular ecosystem. But the bigger story isn't the tech. It's what Farid learned about survival whilst building it - and what that means for every agency trying to navigate 2025 and beyond.

Why Recruitment Automation Beats Manual Processes

Farid is blunt about what separates survivors from casualties over the next 18 months. After running a 600-person staffing business across seven countries and watching competitors struggle through 2024's slowdown, he's seen the pattern clearly:

Manual processes aren't a cost issue anymore - they're a competitive disadvantage. Agency size won't save you. In fact, having 400 recruiters becomes a liability if your team is still manually coding candidates and chasing timesheets. The winners will be those who invest aggressively in the right tools and strip out every piece of low-value admin work.

Sales Skills vs HR Skills in Modern Recruitment

Recruitment has always been a sales job: influencing clients, persuading candidates, opening doors. Agencies with sales-oriented consultants are still placing in tough markets. Those without are blaming "the economy". When Farid looks at his own team's performance, the split is clear: recruiters who treat this as a strategic sales role are thriving; everyone else is struggling.

Why Small Recruitment Agencies Beat Industry Giants

Mid-sized firms have a genuine advantage right now. Whilst global giants spend years unwinding legacy systems and navigating internal politics, a 50-person agency can rewire its entire tech stack in three months. That window won't stay open forever. By 2027, the fast movers will have compounded their lead.

"In 2017, when I told people we were building an AI-driven hiring ecosystem, they looked at me like I was mad. Now everyone's scrambling to build what we've been testing for eight years."

From Gentis to Wiggli

Farid didn't start out as a tech founder. He "rolled into recruitment by accident" in 2007, joining a Brussels staffing firm and immediately catching the bug. Four years later, he co-founded Gentis with three partners, determined to do recruitment differently: putting candidates first, even before the market fully shifted from client-driven to talent-driven.

That focus worked. Gentis scaled to around 400 consultants and 600 people across Belgium, France, Canada, Morocco, Dubai, and Luxembourg. But success brought new problems. Candidate data was coded manually. Timesheets from multiple client VMS systems had to be consolidated by hand. Freelancer invoicing, margin tracking, candidate updates - it all piled up. Farid went looking for a tool that could handle the load. He found nothing that worked.

So in 2016, he hired an external consultancy to build one. Cost: €150,000. Result: nothing usable. The entire project was scrapped.

That failure changed everything. Farid realised the only way forward was to bring development in-house, hire people who truly understood recruitment, and build the platform themselves. What started as "maybe four or five developers, done in a year" turned into a team of more than 30, still building nearly a decade later.

Inside Wiggli

Wiggli began as an internal freelancer marketplace for Gentis, but it quickly expanded: VMS functionality, timesheet automation, candidate portals, job board, and eventually a full ATS. Long before "AI-native" became a buzzword, Farid's team was working with machine learning and algorithms to remove repetitive work and help recruiters focus on relationships, not data entry.

The breakthrough came from structuring everything around three pillars:

Companies: (who's hiring, which roles, which managers),

Live Jobs: (real-time openings published directly by employers, cutting through the noise of job boards), and

Candidates: (not just CVs, but intent signals showing who's genuinely open to move). Wiggli "Intelligence" now provides compliant GDPR access to more than 850 million enriched profiles, powering searches based on what candidates want, not just keyword matching.

Crucially, Wiggli isn't "just another ATS". Traditional applicant tracking systems are built to manage inbound applications. Wiggli is a hiring system that combines reactive applicants with proactive sourcing, vendor management, freelancer workflows, and employer branding - all modular, so teams can adopt only what they need.

Who's using it
Boston Scientific has run all global freelancer management through Wiggli since 2018. But the platform also serves 50-person consultancies who just need intelligent sourcing and a proper ATS. The common thread? Teams tired of stitching together five tools that don't talk to each other.

Pricing that makes sense
Unlike traditional VMS providers who take a percentage of contractor spend, Wiggli charges fixed subscription fees to both clients and suppliers. Farid's logic is simple: "Why should I give up one per cent just because I'm using a platform? The platform provides access and orchestration - it shouldn't tax the value suppliers create on every placement."

What AI-Native Recruiting Means

For years, Farid struggled to explain what his team was building. Talking about algorithms and machine learning made clients' eyes glaze over. Then ChatGPT arrived - and suddenly everyone understood.

"ChatGPT was a boost for us. Now we don't have to explain what AI does. And we're watching companies scramble to build in two years what we've been refining for eight."

The advantage isn't just technical - it's structural. Wiggli's data is already vectorised, its workflows are already automated, and its building blocks are already in place. Whilst competitors retrofit AI onto legacy platforms, Wiggli simply plugs newer language models into an ecosystem designed for them from the start.

The recent website relaunch isn't a rebrand or a pivot. It's Wiggli "opening the garage door" after years of quiet building, finally making the full ecosystem visible to the wider market.

Common Technology Mistakes Recruitment Agency Leaders Make

Asked what he's learned on the journey from recruiter to tech CEO, Farid sums it up in three words: patience, listening, and instinct.

Plans rarely unfold as designed, so resilience matters more than the plan itself. Market shifts - like the challenges many agencies faced in 2024 - can be anticipated if leaders listen closely to what C-level clients are actually planning, not just what they're saying today. And whilst feedback from different stakeholders can be overwhelming, at some point founders must trust their own experience and make clear choices instead of trying to please everyone.

The hardest lesson? Knowing when not to listen. "There's a lot of fluff in client conversations," Farid says. "But if you listen carefully, what most clients want is simple: efficiency. They want their people doing what only humans can do - building relationships, influencing decisions - not typing data into systems that are outdated three months later."

One big internal shift was reorganising the product roadmap by persona rather than trying to build one generic platform. Instead of a "one size fits all" approach, Wiggli now develops specific journeys for enterprise buyers, recruitment agencies, in-house TA teams, and candidates - which has accelerated adoption and kept the product grounded in real-world workflows.

AI-Powered Recruitment Agencies: The Jack & Jill Disruption

Farid points to fully AI-operated agencies like Jack & Jill in the UK, which recently raised $20 million and positions itself at fees as low as 10 per cent, as early signs of where competition is heading. These aren't traditional staffing firms adding AI features. They're tech companies that happen to place people, built from the ground up with automation at the core.

The threat isn't just lower fees - it's speed and data advantage. AI-native agencies can respond faster, source deeper, and operate with a fraction of the overhead. For traditional agencies still running on spreadsheets and legacy ATS platforms, the gap will widen quickly.

But Farid also sees opportunity. Smaller agencies that move now can leapfrog the giants. "You don't need 1,000 recruiters. You need 50 smart, sales-driven consultants armed with the right tools. That beats a bloated team drowning in admin every single time."

Recruitment AI Adoption Timeline: 2026-2027 Tipping Point

Wiggli continues to build: sharpening its intelligence layer, and preparing a new vertical set to launch in early 2026 that addresses long-standing frustrations on both the employer and candidate side of job boards. Farid also hints at a funding round in Q1 2026, though details remain under wraps for now.

The bigger question isn't what Wiggli does next. It's what agency leaders do with the 18 months ahead. Farid is certain 2027 will mark a tipping point: the year AI adoption in recruitment moves from "early adopters" to "table stakes". By then, the agencies that waited will find themselves years behind competitors who moved faster, hired leaner, and rebuilt their operating models around intelligence and automation instead of headcount.

The question for agency leaders isn't whether AI will reshape recruitment - it's whether they'll lead the change or get left behind. Farid spent eight years building in silence whilst others raised millions and made noise. The next 18 months will show which agencies were paying attention.

The shift to AI-native recruitment is not a future trend, but a present reality, with 2027 marked as the critical tipping point for agencies who must rebuild their operating model around intelligence and automation to avoid being left behind. You’ve seen how Wiggli’s Farid El Machaoud built for this future over the past decade; now, arm yourself with the continuous, expert-level insights and tactical advice you need to build a leaner, smarter, and more profitable agency by subscribing to our Talent Business Insights newsletter today.