Jesenka Golos is Rethinking Quebec Recruitment With CHOZYN

Jesenka Golos describes herself as a ‘mompreneur’. It’s a title she once brushed aside, but becoming a mother while building companies forced a clarity she didn't expect: "My motivation sharpened when I had this kid," she says of her son Jakob. "He's my life and whom I do this for."

"I am unconventional in the way that I educate my son, run my businesses, and live life," she says. "I don't necessarily believe that I need to cater to what society says is cool. I just create my own cool, I guess."

Long before she launched her first business, Golos learned what happens when systems fail. She learned those hard lessons during her early years in contact centres and a pivotal acquisition in 2018, when she bought her former employer out of bankruptcy while three months pregnant.

"One morning I thought, 'Why don't I buy this business?' And once the idea landed, I couldn't let it go."

By August of that year, Golos had purchased the company and rebuilt it as PragmaCX, a customer experience firm that now operates around the clock from its Mont-Royal offices. When Quebec faces a crisis—floods, power outages—Pragma gets the call to spin up teams of 100, 200, even 300 people overnight. It was that emergency work, and the revolving door of candidates that traditional recruiters kept sending, that would eventually push Golos toward her next company.

Quebec's Hiring System is Broken, and She Wants to Fix It

Choosing differently

The problem with traditional recruiters, Golos found, was that nobody was going deeper. "They were just giving us cookie-cutter candidates they thought fit the mould, without ever looking beyond the job description," she says.

Where Pragma was born from a crisis, the launch of CHOZYN in March 2025 was deliberate. Golos built a team of six before signing a single client, testing her hiring philosophy on her own people first. Every original hire is still there.

That philosophy centres on gut feeling over credentials. She recently ran an informal survey of 125 recruiters and found 90 per cent said they hire based on what's on paper. "And I'm completely floored," she says. "Just because you have three years less experience than what the client requested, it doesn't mean you're not ahead of the game."

But what distinguishes CHOZYN is how the entire journey is designed for sourced candidates. Before credentials, her team asks: Who will this person work with? What does the team dynamic look like? How does the company onboard new hires?

"If our clients don't have that, either we choose not to work with them or we accompany them so that they can extend that to the new hires," Golos says. "We're bettering the experience for the new hires as much as we're hiring better candidates for our clients."

"Even if we don't have a client for them, we'll recommend other opportunities," she adds. "We just want to help people get into the right positions."

The same thinking applies to technology. A decade ago, someone told her robots would replace call centres within years. She stayed in the industry because she didn't believe it. “Technology doesn’t replace judgment or empathy. It should support it,” she says. At CHOZYN, her team reviews every CV that comes in (all 150, for example, if that's what the role attracts) rather than letting algorithms filter down to 20.

"I still believe that the system that's filtering people based on keywords is going to make me miss out on the perfect candidate."

Building under pressure

Golos didn't have a roadmap for any of this. "I have no entrepreneurs in my family," she says.

Her parents immigrated to Quebec when she was eight, and the message was clear: get a diploma, follow the traditional path. She started working retail at 13 and was managing people before she finished high school. She finished law school knowing she'd never practise, then pursued advanced studies in international law. When she returned to Montreal, she fell back into the familiarity of contact centres.

A year after buying Pragma, with a newborn at home, she rebuilt her days around 5 a.m. wake-ups and rigid checklists. “When everybody was waking up, I was already ahead of the game,” she says. “It wasn’t about working more, it was about thinking clearly before the noise started.” That discipline became the foundation both for surviving the early years of Pragma and building what came next.

She's quick to dispel the glamour of her wins. "A lot of people tell me, 'Oh, you're so lucky in life.' But what is that perspective based on? You don't deal with the pressure of pay being every two weeks and having that cash flow available or an emergency or a client that pulls a plug."

And she's quick to deflect credit. "My success is not built on who I am," she says. "It's built on the brilliant people I surround myself with."

The right people

CHOZYN operates on a flat-fee model, independent of salary, saving companies over 35% per hire and directly challenging the industry’s 20 to 30 per cent commission structure. Percentage-based recruiting incentivizes speed and higher salaries; flat-fee recruiting prioritizes fit and retention. The company also commits to filling roles within 45 days. "We get a lot of talk from clients going, 'Okay, but what's the catch?'" Golos says. "And our contract's like three pages long."

The pitch sounds clean, and Golos isn't naive about the skepticism it receives. "People need to believe that recruitment can be done differently," she says. "We're not asking for much. Just come to us with whatever you're looking for. We won't charge you if we don't find the person, but you will see how we work differently. You will live it."

Quebec currently has roughly 94,000 unfilled positions, according to recent labour market data. On one side, employers can't find people. On the other, candidates apply to dozens of jobs and never hear back. The system, by most accounts, is broken.

Golos is betting that doing things differently—no risk, no catch, and no percentage—might be how Quebec finally starts hiring humans instead of resumes.