I'm Thuan. Over the last twenty years, my work took me from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to the oil fields of Qatar, and later to Houston and Paris. Along the way I did many different things — field engineering, leading teams, rebuilding a global training program, and eventually designing and shipping a digital tool that more than a thousand experts now use in their daily work. If there's a thread through all of it, it's this: I like building things that genuinely work, and I care about helping the people around me do their best.
When I set out to find my next role, I experienced hiring from the other side — as a candidate. It was humbling. I uploaded my CV to a well-known platform and got back a single match, with no explanation of why. I later learned that a recruiter spends, on average, about seven seconds looking at a CV. It struck me how much of a person — their story, their judgment, how they think — never really gets seen.
That didn't sit right with me, because my whole career taught me the opposite: people do their best work when they feel respected, supported, and in control of what they do. Yet hiring tends to take exactly that away, at the moment it matters most.
So I began building DirectHire — the same instinct that once had me building tools for field experts: put something good in the hands of the people doing the work. Instead of a CV, you have a real conversation. The AI clears the noise and the obvious mismatches, then steps back — you stay in control, and you connect directly with the person on the other side. It isn't really a new idea. In many ways it's just hiring the way it used to be, before so many layers came in between.
I've come to believe something simple: people are the core of every success. No strategy or process delivers without the right people behind it. So hiring shouldn't be an afterthought — it should be a manager's first priority. The best leaders choose their team with care and build it from day one. That belief is the reason DirectHire exists, and the reason I'll keep building it.