Dimitriy Shatalovich
MDM Recruiting
“A resume speaks one thing, but a person's personality speaks another.”
Dimitriy Shatalovich has been named to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, the annual award recognizing up to 100 leaders in each category of talent acquisition. Honorees are nominated by peers or found by committees that look for excellent work wherever it happens, then chosen for the depth of their craft and their impact on hiring. This is Dimitriy's story.
For roughly 14 years, Dimitriy Shatalovich's work was measured in spans and load paths: bridges, highways, the kind of structures that outlast the people who design them. The turn toward talent began with a stack of resumes on his desk, and with the frustration of watching capable people he had recommended get turned away at the door.
As a project manager, he was the one reading applications and putting names forward. He learned, over years of it, exactly how the process moves and where it stalls. That knowledge became a kind of obligation. When the chance to move into recruiting arrived about eight years ago, it landed in his lap rather than at the end of a plan, and he took it. Today, as Head of Recruitment at MDM Recruiting, he is still doing a version of the same job he started doing informally on job sites: getting the right person through the door.
From Bridges to Resumes
The engineering career did not end badly. It simply stopped feeding him. He grew tired of not seeing his own projects, of work that disappeared into schedules and drawings while the human part of the job, the part he found himself gravitating toward, sat off to the side. Reviewing resumes was technically a small slice of a project manager's week. It turned out to be the slice he cared about most.
What carried over from that period is a stubborn openness about who deserves consideration. Nationality, race, color, whatever visa a candidate happens to be on, including an H-1B, none of it changes the calculation for him. He is candid that placements pay the bills and that the money is welcome, but the underlying motive is simpler. If he can help someone, he helps. If a candidate is not right for his own requirement and he knows the right contacts inside that industry, he makes the connection anyway. It costs him nothing and it occasionally changes a career.
Learning the HR Side
Recruiting he understood. Human resources, as a function, he did not. The person who closed that gap was an HR director at an earlier employer, where he spent a little over two and a half years, and the description he gives is unusually specific: communicative, present, willing to explain rather than delegate. Over that stretch, the director walked him through what HR actually does, how the machinery fits together, and why processes that look like friction from the outside often exist for a reason.
The relationship outlasted the job. When the director eventually left the company, Dimitriy followed not long after, and the two remain in touch years later. He counts it among the most impressionable professional relationships he has had, which is worth noting in an industry where people collect hundreds of contacts and keep almost none of them. The lesson he took was less about HR policy than about management style: someone who is available all the time, for two and a half years, builds a recruiter who can operate on his own.
The Question He Asks Every Resume
Dimitriy's use of AI is neither evangelical nor defensive. It is procedural. He uploads a resume into ChatGPT, OpenAI's tools, or Copilot, and he asks one blunt question: was this written by AI? The answer gives him a baseline before any conversation begins. He also keeps Otter.ai in his stack for the administrative side of the work.
His reasoning is not that AI-generated writing is inherently disqualifying. It is what the result implies about effort. If a candidate would not put the time into describing his own career in his own words, that tells Dimitriy something about how the person approaches things that matter to him. It is one data point, not a verdict, and he is clear about the distinction. What has genuinely changed, he says, is the way he looks at candidates and screens resumes at all. The tooling reordered the front of his process without touching the part he considers the actual job.
Beyond the Fit on Paper
That actual job is the conversation. Dimitriy insists on personal connection with everyone he speaks to, regardless of whether the paperwork suggests a match. Someone can look wrong on a resume and be an excellent fit based on life experience, and he has no way of learning that except by talking. So he talks.
This holds even in the most technical corners of his market. Whether a candidate has spent a career in hardware components, RTL engineering, or ASIC design, whether they sit squarely inside the AI industry, he wants to hear how they see their work and how they see the world. He notes that many of the people he speaks with are from an older generation than his own, and he treats their perspective as an asset rather than a complication. The credentials establish capability. Everything else, he argues, comes out in the exchange.
Depth Over New Doors
At MDM Recruiting, the current priority is not tooling and not volume for its own sake. It is clients: getting more of them through the door, and doing it through connections that are already reliable rather than by chasing unfamiliar ones. He is not looking to replace the systems his team already runs on. He is looking to make what exists produce more.
It is a conservative position in a market full of platforms promising background automation and mass outreach, and it is consistent with everything else about how he works. Reach out to fewer strangers, invest more in the relationships that have already proven themselves, and let the results compound. The advice implicit in his approach is straightforward enough for anyone entering the field: learn the process well enough to advocate inside it, use the tools to buy back time, then spend that time on people. Screening can be delegated to software. Judgment cannot.
The Talent 100 exists to celebrate the people shaping the future of how the world hires, and few embody that better than Dimitriy. We are honored to welcome Dimitriy Shatalovich to the Talent 100, Class of 2026, and grateful for the experience, perspective, and craft they bring to this community. Congratulations, Dimitriy. Welcome to the Talent 100.
About the Talent 100
The Talent 100 is an annual list spotlighting the leaders who push HR and talent acquisition forward, organized by Noon AI. Honorees are selected through peer nominations and independent selection committees. Selection is entirely merit-based, with no fees or pay-to-play requirements.