Roger Olofsson is MD and Co-Founder of an AI-native recruitment firm Olofsson Consulting (https://olofsson.ai/), having spent ~30 years in tech executive search in Singapore.

in this conversation we cover:

- how Roger ended up settling down in Singapore (from Sweden!)
- the live walkthrough of their matching system which consists of 395K candidates
- how Roger transformed into an ai-native firm, removing soul-draining work
- why the team is shifting back into claude code after building their own software
- new job creation due to ai
- why he is hopeful given uncertainty

hosted by

- Eric Tan https://www.linkedin.com/in/erictisme/

- Yaohong Ch'ng https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaohongchng/

- Our guest: Roger Olofsson, MD and Co-Founder of Olofsson AI (https://olofsson.ai) https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerolofsson/

chapters

0:00 cold open
1:28 agenda
8:33 building an ai-native recruitment firm
10:43 why they went all-in on ai
13:19 live showcase: Olofsson AI's internal recruitment platform
21:33 llms find candidates that were once difficult to search for
26:14 how agents save recruiters from doomscrolling linkedin
30:50 getting a team to adopt ai without fear
34:27 how roger aligns incentives for the long run
39:40 how ai helps them compete with giants
42:58 everyone in the firm uses claude code
46:46 emerging roles and job descriptions with ai
52:09 the newest role: agentic product manager
56:25 optimism despite ai fears
59:57 lightning round
1:05:49 post-credits scene: roger's ceo summarizer

tools mentioned in this episode

- Claude Code (the terminal AI Roger's whole team is trained on): https://claude.com/claude-code
- Exa (agentic web search, the POC they showed): https://exa.ai
- Supabase (where their Postgres database lives): https://supabase.com
- Vercel (where the platform is hosted): https://vercel.com
- GitHub (where their skills live): https://github.com
- Lovable (the coding agent that pulled Roger back into building): https://lovable.dev

books Roger recommends:

- The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz
- Zero to One, Peter Thiel

connect with us
- Substack: https://substack.com/@coderiff?utm_campaign=profile&utm_medium=profile-page

- email: code.riffs.ai@gmail.com

- Superuser HQ (Yaohong's company): https://superuserhq.com/


tools we use

- Buzzsprout (podcast hosting, our referral link): https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=2371679
- Snipd (how we take notes from podcasts): https://get.snipd.com/pAbF/36jzrvki

LEARN ALONG (glossary for the non-techies)

a few terms from this episode, in plain english:

- ai-native: a company designed around ai from the ground up, instead of adding ai tools onto the old way of working.
- ai agent: a program you hand a goal to, that then takes the steps itself (searching, filtering, writing) instead of you doing each one.
- agentic search: a search where an ai agent runs the whole hunt on its own, refining as it goes, then hands you the results.
- skill: a saved set of instructions an ai can reuse, so a task you taught it once runs the same way every time.
- harness: the setup an ai agent runs inside, which decides what tools and data it can touch.
- frontier models: the newest, most capable ai models from the big labs. Roger builds on these instead of training his own.
- fine-tuning: training an existing ai model further on your own data. Roger's team chose not to, betting the frontier models improve faster.
- context engineering: feeding an ai the right background (like 25 years of recruiting judgment) so it makes decisions the way an expert would.
- context window: how much text an ai can hold in its head at once, measured in tokens (chunks of words).
- Postgres: a widely used free database. the filing cabinet where all the candidate records sit.
- POC (proof of concept): a small trial build to test whether an idea works before committing to it.
- agent orchestrator: a new job Roger described, a person who manages and trains a team of ai agents rather than a team of people.

about code riff

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