A comfort he didn't have in a corporate reality
Julien spent a decade inside some of the biggest hiring teams in tech: Facebook, Google, and finally Google DeepMind, where he led global hiring programs built around internships and university partnerships. He left three or four years ago to build something of his own, a freelance recruiting practice alongside a yoga-teaching practice that has grown alongside it.
What he left behind, more than the job itself, was the old way of finding candidates.
Traditional recruitment was very manual, quite stalling. It required heavy screening and depended on passive talent, throwing spaghetti on the wall.
His first experience with TechTree
What held him back, in his own telling, was timing. He signed on during a slow season and treated the whole thing as a deliberate test, of the platform and of himself.
I wanted to have a high level of engagement just so I could really test my resilience, my stamina, but also test the platform and the candidates that were going through.
What he found didn't feel like the usual recruiting-platform pitch.
I liked the genuine conversation. I think either I got an email from you or someone from the team, and it sounded honest. It sounded human. It was not robotic. It was not over-articulated or vaguely AI-ed. So I thought, okay, these are genuine guys.
He went into his first month expecting nothing, which made the volume of candidates arriving on their own, never sourced or referred, all the more convincing.
Less online, more offline
Asked what a typical week with TechTree looks like, Julian starts with hygiene, not sourcing. He checks where his candidates stand, sweeps LinkedIn and his mailbox against open roles, and reviews profiles even when nothing is open yet.
Active sourcing on GitHub and LinkedIn comes last, and it is the part he has leaned into more since he learned the platform. Right now that adds up to roughly two hours of live calls a day, three times a week, plus two to five hours a week on sourcing. That number has grown as his familiarity with the platform, and his name inside it, have both grown.
I'm going less online and more offline, and that's where I see the real potential of TechTree.
A candidate changed his career because of a link
The placement Julien goes to first, when asked to walk through one, is the one where he did the least work. The candidate found the role on his own, applying directly off a link on LinkedIn: no sourcing, no referral.
This is the best example of how your platform works. Very low effort when it comes to finding the candidate, because they found us and they apply directly on the LinkedIn link.
The screening call confirmed it fast: clear, sharp answers, and a candidate who felt more like a peer than a submission.
If we want a robot, we will create it. But if we want a human who is like a perfect bridge, they're harder to find.
Julien recorded the call, generated notes from it, and checked the candidate against the role, same as any careful screener would. The pipeline went quiet for a stretch, in line with the slow season, then moved fast: the candidate accepted the offer sooner than Julien expected. It is the placement that closes the loop on the line that opens this piece, a candidate he never had to chase, hired fast, by people he had barely met.
Using AI instead of letting it use us
What does he make of AI in recruiting? Julian doesn't hedge either way.
I see it as extremely beneficial as long as it's tailored and well harnessed.
Recorded calls reviewed by AI catch technical nuance he would otherwise miss, across roles he cannot personally evaluate. His line is fully automated interviews with no human on the other end, and he already suspects he has screened candidates reading AI-generated answers in real time.
I'm still not keen on AI interviews, and I've seen them growing with other companies. I think this is very dangerous.
It's a phase he expects the whole industry to grow out of, once everyone learns to use AI instead of letting it use them.
Is it worth it?
Asked what he'd tell a person considering TechTree, Julien doesn't hesitate.
Why are they thinking and not trying it? Just give it a try, test it.
His practical habits, offered as his own working style and not a requirement: connect every tool so the system can work at full power, stay visible instead of isolated so people trust your intel, and build some presence outside the platform too, at conferences and in forums, until a niche forms on its own.
You receive what you put in.