Overview
I spent 15 years running Gentis, before succeeding an exit in April 2026 to PE Axcel.
Gentis, a recruitment group I founded and scaled to €60M across four continents. Along the way I learned an uncomfortable truth: agencies don't underperform because recruiters don't work hard enough.
They underperform because their tooling is fragmented. ATS & CRM here, spreadsheets there, scrolling to find jobs, scrolling to find candidates, timesheets somewhere else, invoicing in a fourth system. Margin leaks at every step. So in 2017 we started building Wiggli internally, as the operational infrastructure Gentis actually needed. Today it's the platform I wish I'd had on day one, now available to recruitment agencies, staffing suppliers, executive search firms and consultancies. What Wiggli is: → A recruiter-first ATS/CRM built around deal flow and revenue, with signals helping you which companies to target, which candidates to reach out to. Business protection that makes sure you are on top of backdoors. Millions of candidates enriched and up to date. Pipeline, candidates, clients and placements in one motion. → Full back-office: Terms and conditions, missions, contracts, timesheets and invoicing connected end to end. Contractor delivery without friction. Cash collected faster. → AI-native from the ground up, not bolted on. The Wiggli Orchestrator automates sourcing, opportunity spotting and the admin layer so recruiters spend their hours on candidates and clients, the only two things that generate NFI. The goal is simple: place faster, operate leaner, protect margins. As CEO and CPO, I apply one filter to every feature we ship. It must increase placement velocity, lift recruiter productivity, or accelerate cash collection. If it does none of the three, it doesn't get built. Wiggli is not another sourcing tool or a point solution. It's the operating system for firms that measure what actually matters: revenue per head. NFI per consultant. Built by recruiters for recruiters
Career history
In the news
- Recruitment is a people business. Recruitment agencies are businesses. Stop confusing the two. I keep hearing the same argument: “Recruitment will always be about people. AI can't replace relationships, trust or human judgement.” I agree. But I think we're having the wrong conversation. I've spent most of my career building recruitment businesses. And here's something I learned along the way. Recruiters spend an extraordinary amount of time NOT recruiting. Researching companies. Finding candidates. Updating databases.
- My prediction: in the very near future, we’ll all want one interface to run our businesses. This morning in the RecWired Growth community, some of the best recruitment founders in the UK have been sharing how they’re using AI to improve their workflows and daily routines. Everything from morning briefs to evening debriefs that flag missed messages and outstanding actions. I’m already trying to work through ChatGPT, using my voice to understand what’s happening and decide what to do next. I have Claude too, so don’t judge. My world
- Un consultant gagne plusieurs heures par semaine grâce à l’IA. Qu’est-ce que cela change à la fin de l’année dans les comptes du cabinet ? C’est autour de cette question que nous nous sommes retrouvés hier soir au Tout-Paris, au Cheval Blanc, avec talent Business Club et Wiggli . Dix dirigeants autour de la table, avec une forte présence de cabinets de chasse et d’executive search. Et cela donne une autre dimension à la discussion. Dans la chasse, produire plus vite une liste de noms ne suffit pas. La valeur se joue dans la
- Wat kost één plaatsing je vandaag echt, en wat heeft AI aan dat getal veranderd?”Het bleef even stil aan tafel. Elf zaakvoerders en managing directors van Belgische recruitmentbureaus. Iedereen bezig met AI. Niemand met een sluitend antwoord op die vraag.Gisteren brachten we met Wiggli en Talent Business Club die mensen samen rond een diner in Gent. En dan gebeurt er iets interessants. De pitch valt weg. Je hoort hoe collega’s écht met AI werken. Wat lukt, wat tegenvalt en waar ze geld aan hebben uitgegeven dat voorlopig
- How many outbound calls did you actually make today? Not emails sent. Calls. The average is four. 9:00 inbox triage. 9:35 updating the ATS from yesterday. 10:25 writing search strings. 11:10 rescheduling an interview. 11:40 reformatting a CV. 12:00 lunch — and you haven't spoken to a single person. The other version of that morning: the sourcing ran overnight, the screening is done, and at 9:15 you're on the phone. Same eight hours. Four calls, or eleven. Save this. Compare it to your Monday.
- Your candidates aren't in one channel. So why is your sequence? Email day one. Message day three. WhatsApp day five. Email day eight. One sequence builder, three channels. And whichever channel they reply on, it lands on the candidate record - visible to the whole team, not stuck on someone's phone. Multi-channel lifts reply rates 30–60% against single-channel. Same list. Same copy. Same recruiter. Swipe for the build. Then run one this week. See it live → wiggli.io
- Before you sign off on that headcount: do you need more recruiters, or more hours from the ones you have? Four more recruiters is roughly €300k loaded - plus onboarding, plus ramp, plus nine months before the fourth one is billing at target. Or: give the six you have four hours a day back. That's 24 hours a day returned to the team you already trained and already trust. Three extra recruiters' worth of hours. Without three extra recruiters. Swipe for the comparison. Save it for the next budget conversation.
- Contract and perm are about to become one business. Most agencies are still built for two. Firms still run them as two separate businesses, that is different teams, different systems, sometimes different P&Ls ... why you ask? Because that's how it's always been done. But underneath, placement is one supply problem. Contract and perm are just two commercial wrappers on the same thing: getting the right person into the right seat. The agencies still treating them as two businesses are about to get undercut by the ones who treat them as
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