Reyhan Khan

Early life and education

Reyhan Khan is from Rawalpindi. He is an engineer who went to a university in Islamabad. [1]

Career

Khan worked as an engineer at Islamabad International Airport. He spent about four years at one company, starting in transcription. His goal was to move to a more client-facing department. He moved to customer success and spent a year there before COVID hit. Khan concluded that any corporate job he took would be repetitive, and he started freelancing on the side. [1]

Khan later worked as an assistant to several different people over a journey of about one and a half to two years. He says he started out as a copywriter because he knew English. He realised he was doing small tasks when he should have been closing sales. He says his value to clients was to give back their time by systemising the operations they ran themselves. He has run his own business for about a year and a half, and before that was a coach. [1]

Recruiter GTM

Khan is the founder of Recruiter GTM. He describes most of the roughly 250 people he has helped as operations integrators. He says he has placed people from the Philippines, India and South Africa, and that he has a team of about five people. He says most businesses he works with are not very big. [1]

Khan says his community includes 95 recruiters. He also says he has built courses and a community. He says a post he scheduled overnight got about 400 views. [1]

Views on recruitment

Khan estimates that about 80% of the industry trusts boutique recruiters because of their networks. He says recruitment had a massive dip in 2024 and mid-2025. He says the recruitment market has picked up again since the start of 2026. [1]

Views on AI and systems

Khan says getting value from AI is all about systems, which you cannot avoid. He argues that a business run on WhatsApp, Google Sheets and the owner's daily mood cannot work as a system. He says work has to be built as a repeatable, automatable structure, with intelligence deployed on top. He says the value of AI is intelligence layered on top of automation, and that most of the market lags either on signal capture or on automation. [1]

Khan says no AI agent can yet take a request such as hiring a plumber in Boston, and that businesses still need a human in the loop. He says he does not want to automate everything, only the right amount of work. He says work that once took about five hours now only needs review of the final outcome. He says he can build the AI intelligence layer in a day, but aligning a client's data and processes takes about two months. [1]

Views on work and skills

Khan says authenticity is valued more than anything else in the world today. He says the biggest skill people need right now is mindfulness. He advises niching into one industry, which he says would be much better. He says he looks for adaptability, proactiveness and curiosity when assessing people. [1]

Portugal

Khan moved to Lisbon, Portugal. He says he went to Portugal under the D8 visa route and received Portuguese residency without leaving his US job. He says Portugal grants residency for two years first, then three. He says that two years later he did not have to show that he still worked for the company. [1]

Khan says the world is becoming more hostile to immigrants. He says applying from Pakistan to go to Europe can take six months to a year. [1]

Personal life

Khan says his wife is from Islamabad. He says he comes to Pakistan for two to three months. [1]

Timeline

2024

Khan says recruitment had a massive dip in 2024 and mid-2025.[1]

2026

Khan says the recruitment market has picked up again since the start of the year.[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Reyhan Khan on remote work, AI systems and building a life abroad . Thought Behind Things , 2026-10-14.