Spott hires former Top McKinsey consultant Tycho De Saeytyd to lead US expansion
Spott has hired Tycho De Saeytyd to lead its expansion into the United States, marking a key career move for the former McKinsey consultant and an important next step for the Belgian company as it scales its AI-native ATS and CRM platform internationally.
De Saeytyd joins Spott after four years at McKinsey, where he worked across banking, telecom, and technology projects in 24 countries. In a recent LinkedIn post announcing his departure, he reflected on everything from Fortune 500 boardrooms to building new ventures from scratch, and described the past four years as feeling like “a lifetime”.
At Spott, he will now lead the company’s US expansion, with New York City set to become the base for its first American office. The goal is to build a local team of around 10 people by the end of the year.
The move matters because the US remains the largest recruitment market in the world, and because Spott is entering it at a time when the sector is moving quickly toward automation-first, AI-native platforms.
From McKinsey to Spott
De Saeytyd spent the past four years at McKinsey working on strategic and operational challenges across multiple industries that are increasingly converging around technology, data, and digitisation.
In his farewell post, he wrote that the thing he would miss most was “walking into a problem so big and messy that nobody quite knows how to solve it yet”. That appetite for ambiguity and building appears closely aligned with Spott’s current phase.
The move is a shift from advising large organisations from the outside to helping build a company from within, at a moment when the recruitment software market is being reshaped by AI.
Leading Spott’s US expansion
At Spott, De Saeytyd will be responsible for launching and scaling the company’s US operations. The company plans to open its first office in New York City, with the ambition of growing a local team to around 10 people by the end of the year.
That makes his role about more than geography alone. He is not just joining a growth story, but taking responsibility for helping Spott establish itself in the most important recruitment market globally.
For a company like Spott, success in the US would be a major milestone. It is the market where demand is largest, competition is fiercest, and where proving product-market fit can have outsized strategic value.
Building an AI-native recruitment system
Spott positions itself as an AI-native ATS and CRM, built to go beyond traditional systems that mainly track data and store activity.
Instead, the company is building software around execution: automating workflows, unifying candidate, client, and job data, and reducing the amount of manual work required from recruiters and hiring teams.
That is a meaningful distinction in a market where many vendors are still trying to add AI features onto legacy products. Spott is betting that the next generation of recruitment platforms will be designed with AI as the operating layer from the start.
De Saeytyd’s background in complex problem-solving and cross-market execution is likely to be particularly relevant as the company tries to translate that product vision into international growth.
A broader shift in talent and technology
His move also reflects a wider trend, with more top-tier consulting and strategy talent leaving advisory roles for ambitious startup and scale-up opportunities, especially in AI.
For De Saeytyd, the attraction appears clear: moving from strategy into execution, and from client work into company-building. For Spott, the hire adds senior firepower at a moment where the company wants to move quickly in a market that is evolving fast.
The combination of his profile, the New York launch, and the plan to build out a first US team suggests that Spott sees a real window to establish itself early in the next phase of recruitment software.
What comes next
Spott is expected to continue investing in both product and team as it builds out its US presence. The New York office is intended as the starting point for that next chapter, with De Saeytyd leading the push on the ground.
The move is significant not just because of who he is or where he is going, but because of what it says about Spott’s ambitions. Opening in the US, hiring senior talent, and building toward a local team of around 10 people by year-end signals a company preparing for a much bigger stage.
As AI-native platforms move from differentiation to expectation, the companies that matter most will likely be the ones that can pair product ambition with commercial execution. Spott is betting that its next phase starts in New York.
