The AI Recruitment Race: A Belgian Challenger Enters the American Market
The recruitment software sector is undergoing a quiet but significant shift, driven by the rapid integration of artificial intelligence. In a bid to capture a share of the lucrative American market, Spott—a Belgian developer of an AI-native applicant tracking system (ATS) and client relationship management (CRM) platform—has appointed Tycho De Saeytyd to lead its expansion into the United States.
Mr De Saeytyd, a former McKinsey consultant who recently led projects in generative and agentic AI, will relocate to New York City later this year to establish the company’s first overseas office. For Spott, the hire signals a maturation from a product-focused European startup to a global competitor attempting to challenge entrenched industry incumbents.
From advisory to execution
The transition reflects a broader trend of strategy consultants migrating to operational roles within the technology sector. After years of advising corporate boards on AI implementation, the appeal of building a venture from within proved a strong draw.
“If you spend enough time around the theory and advising of clients, at a certain moment, it starts to gnaw at you to start doing it yourself,” Mr De Saeytyd noted of his departure from McKinsey. He pointed to Spott’s centralised engineering culture in Belgium—where developers and commercial teams share a single office—as a critical factor in maintaining a tight, responsive loop between client feedback and software deployment.
Divergent market dynamics
Spott’s transatlantic move is prompted by an organic influx of referrals from American recruitment agencies and by their American investors and advisors, like Y Combinator. However, the commercial landscape in the US contrasts sharply with Europe.
European firms typically favour immediate, long-term annual software subscriptions. American recruitment agencies, conversely, demonstrate a higher appetite for testing new technologies on short-term trials, often running multiple systems in parallel to assess their efficacy. While this creates a fragmented and highly competitive environment, it also lowers the barrier to entry for emerging market participants willing to be tested against their peers.
Challenging the incumbents
The primary hurdle for Spott in the United States will be establishing brand recognition. The American recruitment technology market is heavily dominated by legacy incumbents such as Bullhorn, Atlas, and Loxo, which remain the default options in software procurement discussions.
Spott’s strategic proposition rests on its underlying architecture. Many established ATS platforms were built over a decade ago and are currently retrofitting AI features onto older codebases. Spott, by contrast, operates an "AI-native" system built from the ground up to automate execution, rather than simply acting as a database for tracking recruiter activity.
Whether this architectural distinction is enough to dislodge established players remains to be seen. However, Mr De Saeytyd argues that the operational efficiencies of an integrated, AI-first platform are becoming increasingly difficult for legacy systems to match.
The path forward
To capitalise on its initial traction, Spott intends to execute a highly structured commercial rollout. Mr De Saeytyd’s immediate priority upon arriving in New York will be assembling a local sales apparatus, with a target headcount of approximately ten staff by the end of the year.
Crucially, product development and engineering will remain anchored in Belgium. This ensures the core platform remains stable while the US arm focuses strictly on market penetration and gathering region-specific feature requests—particularly around varying privacy standards and AI usage behaviours.
As artificial intelligence shifts from a novel differentiator to a baseline industry expectation, the success of companies like Spott will depend less on the novelty of their technology and more on their capacity for sustained commercial execution—a mandate that now rests firmly with Mr De Saeytyd.