"I Hate AI": Karim Gharsallah on Why a Tool Is Not a Strategy

In this episode of the Leaders in Talent podcast, Adriaan Kolff sits down with Karim Gharsallah, Head of Talent Acquisition at BDR Thermea, the 7,000-person European manufacturer of boilers and heat pumps. Karim opened their prep call with three words: "Adriaan, I hate AI." The nuance is what makes this episode. Karim does not hate the technology, he hates what it is doing to how we communicate: every LinkedIn post with the same structure, personality fading out, and companies believing a tool will fix problems they have not defined. His line for it: a tool is not a strategy. Meanwhile he uses Claude every day, for the deep work of building the business case for a centralized TA function and for structured interview guides, and BDR Thermea's policy has just moved from "no AI" to public-information-only. He walks through the Recruitment Blueprint he is building: why companies that start by hiring recruiters end up with inconsistent processes, unclear ownership and agencies everywhere; taking ten steps back to define what recruitment should be; governance and hiring guides first; a baseline across seven countries; intelligent alignment instead of centralization for its own sake; the Ulrich model; and a flexible mix of roughly 60-70% in-house with RPOs and agencies for the rest. Karim and Adriaan also get into the move from scale-ups (VanMoof, and Recruitee where he was Global Head of TA) to a 7,000-person corporate: decision speed, pacing yourself, and why every company thinks it is uniquely complicated while having exactly the same hiring problems. Timecodes 01:09 Welcome and Karim's background 02:54 "Adriaan, I hate AI": the nuance behind it 04:39 Where Karim actually uses AI, and why he switched to Claude 05:22 BDR Thermea's AI policy: from "no AI" to public-information-only 06:38 AI use cases for a head of TA 07:46 Karim turns the table: AI fatigue 09:41 How Matchr is doubling down on AI 10:40 Rebuilding a website with AI instead of a 20,000 euro project 12:49 The Recruitment Blueprint: take ten steps back 14:21 BDR Thermea: 7,000 people, decentralized by acquisition 16:50 Centralize or not: intelligent alignment 18:30 The Ulrich model and building the baseline 20:57 "Every company thinks they're uniquely complicated" 21:49 From scale-up to corporate: the speed of decisions 23:24 AI principles before AI tools 25:26 Where to follow Karim ___________________________ Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/matchr/ Get in touch with us: https://www.matchr.io/who-we-are/contact/ ___________________________ Connect with Karim Gharsallah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karimgharsallah/ Connect with Adriaan Kolff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adriaankolff/ ___________________________ RSS feed: https://media.rss.com/leaders-in-talent/feed.xml