10 years of Gulenko.com Recruitment

10 years of Gulenko.com Recruitment: We placed hundreds of talents into tech jobs in the Zurich region.

In 2015, I landed my first traditional job in Switzerland as a Python engineer at Polynorm—a company that would later become one of my recruitment clients.

I went to every tech conference, meetup, and event in Zurich for months until I found a client. I walked into 20-200-person meetups and asked “Would you pay me if I found you a senior software developer?” I did my first placement after getting my SECO recruitment license.

And that license almost didn’t happen. They initially told me I couldn’t have it because I had no experience in recruitment or HR. But then they looked at my profile, saw I was a software developer, and decided to make an exception. That technical background has been my edge ever since.

For the first two years, I didn’t even have a homepage. I just made a couple of commissions here and there through relationships and reputation. The “system” was: emails, emails, emails, phone calls, personal meetings, emails, phone calls.

By 2017, the side project had proven itself. I went full-time. In 2018, I tried to scale by bringing on freelance recruiters. It didn’t work. The quality standard I demanded for candidate profiles and notes—especially the interview notes—didn’t match what I wanted; obsession with detail seems to be inborn, either people have it, or not.

By late 2019, I wanted to shut the company down. Our applicant tracking system was still just email—too many messages, too many pings, too many questions. The money was good, but the stress was unbearable. Instead of quitting, I improved the system: I adopted tools like Superhuman to get email under control and started hiring seriously. My first key hire was a remote sourcer who barely spoke English but was incredibly good at writing to people on LinkedIn.

In 2021, after looking at dozens of ATSs and CRMs, I decided to do something dumb: develop my own applicant tracking system that integrated our historical email-based workflow. It worked. Finally, we had even better processes.

For nearly ten years, we averaged 2–5 candidate submissions per week. Solid, steady work, but slow. Last week, in the first weeks of January 2026, we did 55 candidate submissions IN ONE WEEK.

This result came from tools I built with AI, specifically for our workflow. The administrative work time from initial candidate call to complete dossier submitted to client is now minutes, before, it was days. Each candidate submission includes: Structured interview notes (tech stack/skills focus, soft skill impressions, motivation, salary expectations, reason to change jobs, elaboration on any oddities). I challenge any recruitment agency to match a turnaround time of minutes for that document package.

Who else is 10 years on the market and saw a major productivity improvement in the last weeks?