A very good TA convo with... S3-E2. Bill Hilhorst

A Very Good TA Convo S3-E2 with Bill Hilhorst: Running an In-House Agency and Embracing AI

Episode S3-E2 features Bill Hilhorst, the Head of TA functions for all technical positions at Cognizant in the Benelux, who started his career in a recruitment agency and believes that while AI will automate the transactional aspects of talent acquisition, the human touch remains fundamentally irreplaceable.

The "in-house agency" mentality

Because Cognizant is a massive, multimatrix IT integration company, Bill’s talent acquisition team operates almost exactly like an internal recruitment agency. Vacancies arrive like IT tickets with attached budgets and hiring teams, and the timeline to fill them is incredibly fast. They operate on a "kill or fill" model, prioritizing speed and moving a candidate to an offer within two weeks. To achieve this, they don't over-engineer the process with coding tests; instead, they rely on a single peer-to-peer technical conversation to gauge both technical and commercial fit.

"We do not get months to recruit a person. It's what we say it's kill or fill. So we say we can do it and we will fill it within two weeks to till offer."

Stop over-engineering and skip the standard pitches

When discussing what practices he considers a waste of time, Bill pointed to spending too much time in formal, agendified meetings. He prefers a lean day filled with quick chats or immediate emails over blocking out 30 to 60 minutes for discussions. Similarly, when attending industry events, he ignores standard ATS sales pitches, looking instead for innovative tools with strong business cases that can actually challenge him and make his life easier.

"I prefer to keep my days lean with as much emails as possible which I can act upon quickly or just quick chats... instead of a predefined 30 minutes, 60 minutes agendified test meeting. That's not something I'm really looking forward to."

Building customized AI tools to empower the team

Cognizant has heavily leaned into generative AI, giving all 350,000 associates access to top AI tools so they can experiment and build their own solutions. Bill personally built an AI agent using Copilot called "What would Bill do?" that read through his last five and a half years of emails. When he goes on holiday, his team can ask this agent how to handle escalations, and it will respond with Bill's communication style and advice. Furthermore, his team uses Claude to automatically take any candidate resume in a closed environment and mold it into a standardized Cognizant template, saving massive amounts of manual effort.

"You can ask this agent called 'what would Bill do' with give me some insights and it will go through my email box and will come up back with communication styles... and gives you an advice in my absence how I would have acted."

The massive influx of unqualified candidates

Right now, the biggest challenge Bill's team faces is a massive wave of applicants from around the world applying for roles they have no relevant stack experience for, such as applying for a Java engineer role with zero Java background. Because of this sheer volume, his team is unable to give candidates the proper feedback and communication they deserve. He is hoping his next ATS will provide AI-generated rejection reasoning, though he insists a recruiter must always make the final call.

"I do not want an AI system rejecting people on my behalf. So a human in the loop is still very important to me but eventually when everything is trained and in the right manner I expect that this will happen too."

Guiding candidates through life's biggest stressors

Despite all the automation and speed, Bill firmly believes that changing jobs is one of the top three most stressful events in a person's life, right alongside moving houses and having kids. For candidates who might have been at a single company for 15 years, the process can leave them feeling unrooted. That is why he insists on giving candidates profound context, guidance, and care throughout the entire interview phase.

"Invest in the human part of your job... The transactional part will be taken over by automation but go invest into people skills, communication skills and about taking care of people."

The takeaway

Bill’s approach illustrates the future of talent acquisition: operate with the speed and agility of an agency, while fully integrating AI to wipe out manual, transactional work. Build internal AI tools to standardize processes and answer routine questions, but never use technology to completely replace human judgment. Ultimately, a recruiter's highest value will be in building trust, managing stakeholder expectations, and guiding candidates through the stressful, deeply human experience of changing careers.