Jeremy Langevin’s audition was a night of karaoke. Some neighbors heard him sing and invited him into a band for a wife’s 40th birthday party. He couldn’t read music. He couldn’t play an instrument. He accepted anyway. Over roughly three years, the band went from a party of 20-30 people to some gigs of 200-300. A modest musical career, perhaps, but a rather persuasive advertisement for saying yes.
There is an appealing hiring problem inside that story. A candidate has an incomplete set of conventional qualifications. Someone spots a useful ability. An invitation follows. Langevin, now cofounder and CEO of Horizontal Talent, has spent much of his public working life asking how companies recognize what people can contribute.
Three backgrounds, one business
Horizontal’s beginnings involved people from different companies serving the same customer. Sabin Ephrem brought technical expertise; Chris Staley brought another part of the digital project. Langevin knew them through the staffing business where he worked. The attraction was a company that could bring strategy, user experience and technical execution together. He joined in 2006, three years after Horizontal began.
That sequence matters. Langevin arrived with an established staffing perspective, adding to an existing combination of disciplines. It gives the partnership a more interesting shape than a neat founding-day photograph would suggest. The business grew by putting different kinds of experience in the same conversation.
In 2017, Langevin, Ephrem and Staley were named finalists for EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year award in the Upper Midwest. The announcement recognized the three partners together. Their company combined digital marketing and technology projects with strategic staffing, serving Fortune 500 businesses. The recognition belonged to that shared enterprise.
Today, Langevin leads Horizontal Talent, while Horizontal Digital is its companion business. Talent’s offices span the United States, India, Malaysia and Australia. Its specialties include IT, marketing and creative work, and business strategy. A company built around connecting disciplines now also has to connect different labor markets.
United States · India · Malaysia · Australia
The résumé leaves things out
In July 2022, Langevin published a complaint about one of recruiting’s most durable objects: the résumé. His opening description was dry enough to sting: The resume is a static snapshot of the past.
A career squeezed onto a page or two could tell an employer where someone had worked. It offered much less help with character, collaboration or how that person might behave when a deadline became inconvenient.
His proposed improvements were more personal: short video introductions, recommendations from colleagues and managers, and evidence of continued learning. He encouraged candidates to describe their strengths, goals and interests. A hobby could help reveal someone who remained invisible behind a list of previous employers.
The article was very much of its time, discussing the LinkedIn features then available. Its underlying concern travels better than any particular button in an app. Hiring involves deciding what counts as evidence. Langevin wanted employers to see enough of a person to make a better judgment, and candidates to have more ways to be understood.
The order book changes its mind
That argument appeared during a period when the staffing market was changing sharply. Horizontal Talent’s requests to fill positions had risen 78% in 2021. In the second half of 2022, requests fell 38%. They dropped another 52% in 2023, when the company also went through two rounds of layoffs.
I started getting nervous,
Langevin said. The plainness of the admission is useful. A business that helps other companies hire is exposed to decisions made elsewhere: a delayed project, a smaller budget, an executive deciding to wait. The enthusiasm of one year can become a much quieter telephone the next.
Langevin pointed to inflation concerns, interest rates and companies reassessing how many people they needed. The downturn belongs in his story because it gives his later optimism some resistance. He has had to lead through demand moving abruptly in the wrong direction.
Give the software a useful job
By October 2024, he was discussing the industry’s direction on LinkedIn’s State of Staffing webinar alongside economist Kory Kantenga and staffing leaders Matthew Franklin and Jonathan Reynolds. His concern extended beyond the economic cycle. Staffing firms faced competition from freelance platforms and consultancies, while platforms were adding services of their own.
The boundaries were becoming less comfortable. Langevin argued for developing technology, widening service offerings and responding to demand for offshore and nearshore delivery. His view of AI fitted that broader adjustment: automate repetitive work so recruiters could spend more time on the conversations where their judgment mattered.
It is a consequential ambition for someone running a relationship business. Faster administration creates an opening; a recruiter still has to use it well. The software can help organize the work. Someone must still understand why a candidate might accept an offer, hesitate or walk away.
His willingness to move is longstanding. In a Bullhorn customer account, Langevin described an industry that had already traveled a considerable distance from career fairs and faxed résumés. He preferred taking risks with new approaches to being overtaken by competitors. That preference has an obvious cost: trying something exposes you to the possibility that it will disappoint. Waiting has costs of its own.
Launch Point, his podcast, gives those ideas room to become specific. In its inaugural 2025 conversation, he spoke with Rachel Enstrom, a Horizontal colleague responsible for marketing, product and technology. Their AI examples were recognizably ordinary: finding candidates, scheduling and improving job matches. An impressive demonstration is pleasant. An appointment that gets arranged properly is useful.
Enstrom described evaluating tools against existing systems, selecting a small group for pilots and inviting recruiters and account managers into testing. Their measures included candidate satisfaction, employee adoption and business impact. This is the unglamorous middle of technological change, where a promising idea meets the people expected to use it on Tuesday morning.
“The resume is a static snapshot of the past.”Jeremy Langevin, July 2022
The people who have to use it
The next Launch Point conversation turned to organizational change with Orlando Gafford. Langevin’s account emphasized a familiar difficulty: leaders can spend a great deal of time planning a system and rather less time considering how the change will land with employees. People want to know what will happen to their own work.
Gafford’s advice included involving people early, speaking honestly about uneven effects across departments and recognizing that adoption takes deliberate leadership. Langevin drew attention to the range of reactions a change can produce. Some people welcome it. Others resist. Both groups still need an explanation.
This gives his enthusiasm for new tools a practical complication. A leader may be ready to move before the team is. Getting everyone into the same meeting does not mean everyone has reached the same conclusion.
In July 2025, he explored another obstacle with contingent workforce specialist Mickey Pelletier: the industry’s fondness for making itself sound complicated. Their conversation covered jargon, clear explanations and the value of a recognizable human voice. Pelletier described using memes to make workforce concepts easier to grasp. Procurement, it seems, can survive a joke.
They also considered what happens when AI helps everyone produce similar language. A supplier still needs to sound like someone a client would choose to work with. Langevin’s interest in authenticity connects with his earlier objections to the résumé. In both cases, the standard format can make distinct people appear strangely interchangeable.
By the 2025 SIA CWS Summit, the podcast’s field of view included workforce leaders from Netflix, PayPal, Lyft, Salesforce and TD. Langevin’s conversations covered how to combine permanent employees, contractors and other kinds of talent around the skills a business needs. They also returned to simplifying processes and keeping human judgment in decisions involving AI.
The names are recognizable; the questions are fairly workaday. Who needs to be involved? How quickly can a program respond? What does a hiring manager actually need? The interest lies in how much coordination sits behind an apparently simple request for another person to join a team.
What to do with the time saved
In March 2026, Langevin described asking Horizontal employees which parts of their work they enjoyed and which drained their energy. The company was exploring how AI could take on repetitive tasks, leaving room for work that offered more challenge and meaning. That is an aspiration with a concrete starting point: ask the people doing the job.
His interests extend beyond recruiting machinery. He became executive sponsor of Horizontal’s environmental sustainability committee, launched in July 2024 with members from both Talent and Digital. And his listening list has included Simon Sinek’s A Bit of Optimism, TED Talks Daily and Think Fast, Talk Smart. Communication and an appetite for possibility make regular appearances.
The karaoke story remains an apt way into this working life, provided it stays a small story. A neighbor heard something worth encouraging. Langevin accepted an unfamiliar role. For a few years, the arrangement worked. His present responsibilities are considerably larger, but the question of what people might do with an opportunity still earns its place at the microphone.