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Catch of the Day: Zack Tsirtos of Bullhorn

  • Ben Fielding
  • 3 days ago
  • 5 min read

Why Every Recruiter's About to Get a Personal Assistant



Holly Langley sits down with Zack Tsirtos, Account Executive at Bullhorn, for episode 4 of Catch of the Day. Fish and chips on the table, they get into what Bullhorn's AI tools actually look like in a recruiter's day-to-day, why agencies are about to become data businesses whether they like it or not, and Zack's slightly alarming hobby involving fermented water.



Short on time? There's also a bite-size cut of the episode.


Quick Bite

  • Global Chat plugs ChatGPT directly into your Bullhorn environment, with full access to your database and IP, not just a generic AI bolted on the side

  • Zack's own PA (yes, a human one, called Abby) plus AI tools have made him roughly three times more productive, freeing up 10 to 20 hours a week

  • Zack thinks agency headcounts will shrink but get sharper: fewer generalists, more people who own a genuinely niche patch of data and expertise

  • His one piece of advice for every agency right now: be pragmatic with AI, don't buy shiny tools, work out where time is actually being wasted first

  • Personal fun fact: Zack's current hobby is brewing kefir water in his kitchen, which his brother-in-law says "made him want to be sick"

  • Also on the agenda: Holly and Zack's shared, deeply questionable enthusiasm for skydiving and paragliding as future bucket list items


Meet the Guest

Zack Tsirtos is an Account Executive at Bullhorn, where he's spent the last five and a half years after starting out in recruitment almost by chance, a chat at a party led to his first role at Montage, working the German contract tech market with no German and no recruitment experience. From there he moved into education recruitment before Bullhorn came calling. As a former recruiter who's used the platform from the desk side as well as sold it, Zack's conversation is grounded in what agencies are actually trying to do with their tech, not just what the product roadmap says.

Find Zack on LinkedIn.


Global Chat Is Basically a Personal Assistant for Your Whole Database

Zack's favourite part of the current Bullhorn ecosystem is Global Chat, which he describes as plugging ChatGPT into the front page of your Bullhorn instance, but with access to your entire database, your data set, and your IP. The use case shifts depending on who's asking. A director might ask who the top performers on a team are and get an instant analysis of what they're doing differently, no report-building required. A consultant might ask who they spoke to last week and forgot to follow up with, or get help researching net new business.


The example Zack gave is the one worth remembering: a test run flagged that a recruiter needed to call a specific candidate that day, because he'd said he would, hadn't been able to reach him the week before while he was away, and today was the sweet spot, not so soon after his return that it looked too keen. That's not a generic nudge. That's context pulled straight from the CRM and turned into a genuinely useful prompt.


For agencies still treating their CRM as a system of record rather than a source of intelligence, this is the gap Zack's pointing at. The data's already there. The question is whether anything is actually using it.


Every Recruiter Is About to Have a PA, Whether They Meant To or Not

Zack's honest about how much this has changed his own week. Between his human PA, Abby, and the AI tools he uses day to day, he reckons he's three times more productive, and estimates his PA alone saves him 10 to 20 hours a week. The point, as he put it, is getting AI to do the busy work, the admin, the grind, not the actual job. What that frees up is time for the parts of the role that were the reason people got into sales or recruitment in the first place: picking up the phone, building relationships, getting in front of clients.


This matters for agency owners for a simple reason: if your consultants are still spending hours crafting emails and chasing admin, that's not a resourcing problem you fix by hiring more people. It's a tooling problem.


Smaller Headcounts, Sharper Niches, and Becoming a Data Business

Asked what recruitment looks like in a few years, Zack didn't hedge. AI becomes as invisible and standard as cloud CRM did, embedded into every workflow until nobody thinks twice about it. Agencies will likely need fewer people, but the people they do have will be far more effective, with information at their fingertips instead of buried in a database somewhere.


The niche point is the sharper one. Zack's view is that broad, generalist coverage won't cut it once AI is table stakes. Being AI-enabled and covering "Germany" isn't a real edge. Covering something genuinely narrow, like SAP recruitment in Germany specifically, and having your AI prompts, content, training and enrichment all built around that one area, is what turns an agency into what he calls a data business: one that collects and structures intellectual property, then uses AI to get value out of it at a scale no amount of headcount could match.


For agencies still deciding where to specialise, this is a useful reframe. The value isn't just in the niche. It's in what your data and your systems know about that niche that a generalist competitor's can't replicate.


The Advice That Actually Matters: Fix Candidate Feedback

When asked for one piece of advice, Zack didn't reach for anything flashy. He pointed at candidate experience, specifically the number of agencies still sending CVs out, running interviews, and then going silent for months. His suggestion is to use AI, screening agents, notetakers, call summarisation, to close that loop properly: give candidates real feedback, coach the ones who aren't right for a role, and use call analysis to show consultants where they could have done better.


His broader point on AI adoption generally: don't buy technology because a demo looked cool. Work out pragmatically where time is genuinely being wasted, then plug something in to fix that specific thing. It's a plain, unglamorous answer, and it's exactly the kind of thing that gets skipped when agencies are chasing whatever's newest.


The Human Bit: Fermented Water and a Six-Litre Batch of Fig Gin

Away from the CRM talk, Zack's hobbies took a turn nobody was expecting. He brews kefir water, a fermented drink he flavours with mojito or orange, which by his own admission has had "mixed reactions" (his brother-in-law's review: it made him want to be sick). He's also mid-harvest on a fig tree that produces around 200 figs a year, which has previously gone into fig and blue cheese tarts, fig chutney, and one ill-fated batch of homemade fig leaf gin that put him off gin for two years. He sails small vintage RS-design boats out of his local yacht club, plays off an 18 handicap in golf, and swears by a shakti mat, essentially a bed of plastic spikes, for better sleep. On the bucket list: a skydive, ideally somewhere sunny and unfamiliar enough to make it properly terrifying.


Zack rated the fish and chips 8.5 out of 10, but gave the overall hangout a perfect 10.


Watch the Episode / Links


The Takeaway

Zack's clearest point in this episode is the one about data quality being the foundation everything else sits on. Global Chat, AI-driven feedback loops, becoming a genuinely niche data business, none of it works if the underlying data in your Bullhorn instance isn't trustworthy in the first place. If you're not confident your database would hold up to the kind of scrutiny Zack's describing, that's exactly what a RE:STACK Bullhorn Audit is built to find and fix. Get in touch: https://www.restack.uk/contactrestack

 
 
 

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