The AI Reality Check
Kovasys uses AI to sort candidates, then writes client emails by hand
Alex Kovalenko is the lead IT recruiter at Kovasys IT Recruitment, a Toronto firm he started 20 years ago after working as a tech developer. The company places people in cloud, DevOps, data and AI, cybersecurity and ERP roles, and its point of difference is simple: each position gets personal attention instead of being treated like a numbers game.
Kovasys has handed AI the early candidate screening and newsletter drafting, but not the client relationship. The more interesting shift is that prospects now arrive already informed, often after checking ChatGPT or Claude, which makes the firm’s own blog and newsletter more important than before.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I am in IT Recruitment. Prior to IT recruiting, I have been working as a tech developer. That was one of the main reasons why I decided to establish my own recruitment company called Kovasys 20 years ago. I noticed that there was an excessive number of staffing agencies that hire people just based on numbers and did not care about the technology they would work with. I manage Kovasys to make sure that each position gets personal attention. Kovasys provides Corp-to-Corp and permanent positions for the following technology sectors: Cloud, DevOps, Data & AI, Cybersecurity, and ERP.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
The majority of our clients and referrals are existing clients and contacts. In addition, we get clients from old clients and candidates’ referals. On top of that , we get more work coming in organically through our newsletter and LinkedIn.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We leave it to AI to evaluate the candidates based on their job description. The evaluation includes everything from the must-haves to the nice-to-haves as well as the years of experience before we even give a call to any of them. This saves us hours of work every week. Moreover, we use AI for helping to compile the Kovasys newsletter every month. Our effort to use AI for writing the emails to our new clients did not go very far, as we came back to writing the emails ourselves.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
What I noticed is that clients and candidates do more research (now than before) even before calling us. Some of them now check from ChatGPT or Claude what the 10 best IT recruitment agencies are in Toronto, and since we rank on the list, they get in touch with us. They always know beforehand what areas of expertise we are in even before talking to us. We spent a lot of time building our blog content on our website and newsletter, and now it is beginning to work for us.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Make sure that your content ranks well by the search engine and AI technologies. Ensure to maintain the human interaction with your clients rather than completely leaving everything to the AI. The whole concept of running Kovasys is based on trust and real human interactions. Let AI do the sorting and paperwork faster but handle the rest yourself.
Thank you to Alex Kovalenko and the team at Kovasys IT Recruitment for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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