Jon Long

From Benelux Tech Desks to In-House Leadership

Long did not leave university intending to become a recruiter. Few people do. What he remembers is sitting down with an agency, hearing the role described for the first time, and recognizing something he could be good at: a combination of sales and the ability to speak to people. He believed he could do it. Soon he was running niche technical recruitment into technology companies across the Benelux region while based in the UK, learning the mechanics of hard to fill hiring in a market where the candidate pool is narrow and the specifications are exacting.

Agency work taught him speed, but it was not where he wanted to stay. Too salesy, in his own assessment. What pulled him in house was a broader interest in what happens after the offer is signed. He developed a genuine passion not just for hiring people but for watching them grow internally, and for the full set of levers that determine whether a hire succeeds: KPIs, process design, employer brand, the way a company presents itself long before a candidate ever speaks to a recruiter. That widening lens carried him from practitioner to leader, and he now operates from New York.

The through line is a refusal to treat recruiting as transactional. Hiring, in his framing, is an ecosystem of factors rather than a series of requisitions, and the leaders who understand that are the ones invited into business conversations rather than briefed after them.

Automation With a Human Signature

Ask Long how the landscape has moved and he is precise about the timeline. The shift has been visible across the last twelve months, he says, and in the last six to three months it has become a race, with everyone reorganizing strategy around AI. Forter had a head start in one respect: the technology was already central to its product and its offering. Turning it inward, across internal processes, has been the major project of the past year.

The question that occupies him now is not whether to automate but where. "How can you integrate it into your process as quickly as possible and making it still the process human," he says, and the combination of the two is what he calls vital. He is candid that this is live work: identifying where automation earns its place, and where the process needs to stay close to the recruiters. The test he applies is the candidate's experience of it. Nobody who moves through a Forter hiring process should feel that every step was machine generated. The goal is hiring that is quicker and more efficient and that still leaves people feeling they were met by a human being.

That balance also shapes what he asks of the time his team reclaims. If agents handle the note taking and the intake logistics, recruiters are expected to reinvest those hours in strategic initiatives and in supporting hiring leaders so they are not distracted. Automation, in his model, is not a headcount argument. It is a reallocation of attention toward the work only people can do.

Dive In, Break a Couple of Things, Then Show the Math

His advice to peers heading further into 2026 is unambiguous: embrace it. Waiting is the expensive option. "The longer you wait, the harder it gets," he says. "You just have to dive in, you have to break a couple of things and recognize where it's going to be of most importance."

The second half of that advice is where he becomes most exacting. Deployment is the easy story to tell. The leaders who will hold credibility, he argues, are those who can trace a specific tool or agent to a specific return and then showcase that return to leadership in terms the business already cares about. Enthusiasm buys a pilot. Evidence buys a mandate.

The Manager Who Always Raises the Bar

Asked who has shaped him, Long goes first and emphatically to his current manager, Lauren, who brought him into Forter after a mutual friend connected them. What distinguishes her, in his account, is that she sees recruitment in the right way: as a partnership with the business, with recruitment goals deliberately tied to business initiatives rather than running parallel to them. She pushes constantly on the idea that recruiters must think like strategic partners, a mindset he credits with uplevelling how the team built its recruitment brand internally at Forter.

She is also, he notes, relentless about the next horizon. No matter how many times he has hit his goals, the conversation turns to how the team can do better, beat those goals, serve clients better, take it to the next level. What keeps that demanding standard from feeling punitive is the other half of her leadership: a heavy emphasis on recognition and on the human side of the people who report to her. She is now leading Forter's AI transformation, and Long describes her as a massive part of the push behind it.

Leaders He Watches

Long is generous about talent professionals he considers ahead of the curve. He points to Byron Kendall, now at MrBeast, as someone innovating with AI to an extreme level, moving from one top company to the next, and whose thinking on integration he calls incredibly impressive.

Closer to home, he singles out Tal Assayag, a colleague at Forter, as a sensational leader helping grow the engineering function. Her particular strength, in his view, is out of market thinking combined with a rare fluency in narrative: she understands how to take data and turn it into a story, then use that story to shape strategy. It is a skill set that mirrors his own conviction that numbers only matter once someone can explain what they mean.