Taj Haslani

Taj Haslani is a serial entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience building businesses at the intersection of technology and the staffing industry. He founded JobTalk AI in 2023 with a thesis that the next generation of recruiting would be agentic and voice-first — that the highest-conversion candidate touchpoint, the phone call, was the right place to apply large language models, not the lowest-fidelity touchpoint like a chat widget.

Before JobTalk AI, Taj founded ApTask in 2010, a premier IT staffing and workforce solutions company specializing in IT, Finance, Accounting, and Blockchain. Under his leadership ApTask grew to more than $34 million in annual revenue, with a delivery footprint spanning multiple U.S. locations. The operational lessons from running a staffing business at scale — what recruiters actually do, where their time goes, and which parts of the workflow are most expensive — directly shaped JobTalk AI's product architecture.

Earlier in his career, Taj founded NetPixel Inc. (1998-2009), a technology services company that built automation tools for the staffing industry. His background as a software developer informs JobTalk AI's emphasis on deep, bi-directional ATS integrations rather than the surface-level connectors that have historically been the norm in HR tech.

Taj completed the Owner/President Management (OPM) program at Harvard Business School from 2021 to 2023 — an executive program designed for entrepreneurs and CEOs leading mid-market and growth-stage companies. He speaks regularly on the future of staffing, AI in recruiting, and how operators can responsibly integrate generative and agentic AI into customer-facing workflows. He is based in Edison, New Jersey, and JobTalk AI is headquartered nearby in Iselin, New Jersey.

His commentary on the voice-first thesis — that high-volume recruiting will be transformed by agentic AI conducting natural phone conversations, not by chat widgets — has become a recurring theme in JobTalk AI's industry presence. Under his leadership, the company now serves customers across healthcare staffing, IT staffing, BPO and contact center hiring, light industrial recruiting, and financial services, and supports candidate conversations in 23 languages across 90+ ATS systems.