Krisztina Veres

Hungary, Vancouver, and the Decision to Build

Veres was born and raised in Hungary and spent her early career in insurance, which is what carried her to Canada in the first place. The transfer was internal, the industry familiar, the trajectory set. Then came a recruiter she describes as phenomenal and genuinely impressive, and the possibility of a different profession suddenly looked less like a gamble and more like an obvious next move. She left insurance behind and started over on an agency desk in Vancouver.

Two years of learning the craft later, she decided she would rather own the model than inherit one. Veres Career Consulting launched in 2017, deliberately narrow at first: insurance recruitment, the market she understood better than any other. Growth changed the shape of the business. The firm expanded into the United States, widened its specialty into financial services, and then Veres pushed into startup hiring, a sector that now supplies both clients and her interim leadership work. The specialization never disappeared. It simply stopped being the whole company.

What American Tech Stacks Taught Her

Because she learned the trade in Canada, Veres had an unusual vantage point on technology adoption. When she began working with American clients, the gap was, in her word, mind-blowing. She is not describing anything exotic. Calendly. Grammarly. Applicant tracking systems built for the American market. None of it was even AI, and yet it was tooling her side of the border did not have.

She has watched plenty of recruiters flinch at the same tools. The old advice, that a slump means going back to basics and playing the numbers game, still holds in her view. But she is unwilling to accept how much of the day disappears into administration and tedious tasks that software handles cleanly. Her sharpest frustration involves recruiters who are genuinely excellent at the human parts of the job, earning buy-in from candidates and clients, coaching people to perform in interviews, and who then lose deals because submissions go out slowly. Her own note taker drafts them at the drop of a hat. When those recruiters insist they can write it better themselves, her answer is blunt: no, you can't. Freed from transcribing every word, she can focus on her questions instead of her paperwork, which matters most in the moments when a candidate or a business owner is so compelling that note taking would break the conversation.

Automation extends past submissions to follow-ups, and that is where she sees the real leakage. Talent acquisition is a numbers game, and recruiters who let follow-ups slip lose excellent people and excellent opportunities. She is equally candid about the friction: AI pre-screening saves time and lets more candidates get properly assessed, but some candidates resist it because they want to speak to a human being rather than type responses into a form. Her read is that the objection is about the interface, not the intelligence. Give people tools that let them speak instead of type, she argues, and adoption follows.

Stop Ghosting

Asked for a single piece of advice for other talent leaders heading into next year, Veres does not hesitate. Stop ghosting. Then use technology so that you cannot.

The pattern she describes runs in every direction. Candidates go quiet when they lose interest or accept another offer or hit a personal situation. Recruiters go quiet when the day gets away from them. The result is recruiters sitting alone on interview calls and candidates parked in a Google Meet waiting room wondering whether anyone is coming. She has sympathy for the pace, noting that in 2026 everyone is go, go, go. She has none for the outcome. Cancellations can be automated, reschedules can be automated, and a two-line message costs almost nothing. Use your technology and communicate with these people, she says, because they deserve better.