Quentin Cloarec, Co-founder & CEO at Trees Engineering, on Why the Future of Talent Doesn't Need Staffing Firms

Every service industry is about to be rebuilt on top of AI, and staffing is first in line. The traditional agency model was built on recruiters reading resumes and playing a numbers game. That entire premise is now optional, and the incumbents have the most to lose by admitting it. Quentin Cloarec has been AI-native since 2021. From Kuala Lumpur, he built Trees Engineering into a talent platform placing specialized engineers on billion-dollar energy, renewables, and data-center projects, and he is now rebuilding the whole company on an AI agent that pre-qualifies candidates on WhatsApp, sources from its own live database, and matches on capability instead of keywords. We're building Human Cloud to do the same thing from the company side, so businesses can find and deploy the right flexible talent solution in minutes instead of months. In this episode, Quentin Cloarec shares: Why the traditional staffing world can't adopt AI even though it should, and how the innovator's dilemma keeps them reading CVs while the market moves How AI interviews 100 candidates for roughly 10 cents each, turning sourcing from a cost center into a live, always-on database Why the "match" was never the hard part, and the real value is the managed service, the relationship, and the vetting The bold prediction that recruiters become community managers, paid to build relationships while AI does the mundane work Why the winners will be specialized talent platforms that "destroy their industry to reinvent it," building the human infrastructure layer, exactly the problem Human Cloud and Trees are solving from opposite ends of the market Quentin Cloarec is a French energy engineer who spent his career in the manpower industry before founding Trees Engineering, and is now launching TreesOS to help recruitment companies rebuild their processes on top of AI. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. About Human Cloud: We help companies find and deploy the right flexible talent solutions in minutes instead of months. We automate discovery, compliance, and orchestration across 1,000+ workforce platforms, so business teams move fast, procurement teams stay in control, and rogue contractor spend turns into a strategic advantage.