Offices:
United Kingdom
81 Judes Road
Egham TW20 ODF
Latvia:
Tech Recruitment Ltd.
no. 40203237813,
Zalites Str. 50, LV-2111
Filling roles is easy to mistake for success. But Dana, CEO of Tech Recruitment, has seen enough hiring processes up close to know the difference between a team that's recruiting and a team that's firefighting with extra steps.
That's why she sat down with Jānis Dubinskis, the expert of HR softwares and Country Manager Latvia at Teamdash.
Together they got into the real mechanics of what makes hiring work and what breaks it, even when the headcount numbers look fine.
The key metrics to watch, according to Jānis, are time-to-hire compared to industry benchmarks and the true cost of hiring, not just salaries, but ad spend, recruiter hours, and everything in between. If either figure is too high, inefficiency is almost certainly the cause.
But the numbers that most leaders overlook are the ones that reveal the candidate experience: candidate NPS, offer acceptance rates, and how often candidates withdraw from the process themselves.
"If candidates frequently drop out, something in the experience or alignment is likely broken and worth investigating," Jānis explains.
These are the warning signs that are easiest to ignore.
What worked for 20 hires a year breaks at 40. The manual approach that once felt manageable becomes a bottleneck when the volume of applications, roles, and stakeholders multiplies.
"In many cases, it's not just about adding tools like an ATS," Jānis says. "It's about upgrading both the tools and the way people operate – ownership, aligned expectations, and treating hiring as a process, not just a task."
Hiring at scale is a fundamentally different game. It requires clarity on who does what and when, not just an HR business partner who could previously handle everything alone.
Mostly a process problem, but the truth is that blaming people is easier.
When the same hiring mistakes repeat across different teams and different roles, the common thread is rarely an individual.
It's usually unclear evaluation criteria, inconsistent decision-making, rushed timelines, or communication that falls apart between stages.
"People operate inside the system," Jānis says. "If the system is messy, the outcomes will be messy too."
Fixing a broken system requires admitting the system was the problem, which is not always the most comfortable conversation to have.
Hiring managers want flexibility and that's not unreasonable. The problem is that flexibility without structure quickly becomes chaos, and chaos slows everything down.
Jānis's take is direct: be flexible on how you assess, but not on what you assess.
The foundation has to come first – structured evaluation, defined stages, agreed decision rules. Once that's in place, managers can adapt their style, their questions, their approach. But the criteria and the process stay consistent.
"Structure first, flexibility second," he says. "In that order, both things work. In reverse, neither does."
Using any data at all is already a step ahead of most companies. But the metrics that get tracked most often (CV volume, number of interviews, pipeline size) tend to measure activity, not insight.
The metrics that actually change behavior are the ones that reveal where value is being lost:
"The real question is: where are we losing good people and why?" Jānis says. "Counting CVs may look impressive, but it often just creates a false sense of control."
Most leaders assume that fixing the process will introduce new delays. In practice, the opposite is true.
What slows hiring down is lack of clarity. Unclear criteria lead to back-and-forth decisions. Missing timelines create delays between stages. Manual follow-ups and scattered communication eat hours that could have been spent on conversations that actually matter.
What speeds things up? Clear expectations from the start, defined decision timelines, and one place where everything is visible and structured.
None of Teamdash's clients have replaced their recruiters after implementing a recruitment system. What changed was how their time was spent.
In one case, a recruiter who couldn't imagine how her interview scheduling could ever become more efficient was initially resistant, but open to trying. Now she's the one speaking publicly about how much time and stress it saved her.
Another client, from the food production industry, initially questioned whether investing in a recruitment system was worth it. They're now speaking on stage about how indispensable it has become.
"What they all had in common was this: they were willing to let go of the belief that this is just how we've always done it,” Jānis explains. "Very often, the uncomfortable part isn't the change itself. It's admitting that the old way is no longer serving you."
The idea that more manual work equals more care.
It's a deeply held belief and it's costing companies good candidates. Manual tasks like CV screening or repetitive candidate emails don't make a process more human. They just consume the time that could be spent on the conversations that actually are human.
"Automation doesn't remove the human element," Jānis says. "It creates space for it — for better conversations, more meaningful candidate interactions, more thoughtful decisions, and sometimes just allowing candidates to hear from you at all."
Look at the companies with the strongest candidate experience and employer brand, globally and in Latvia. Most of them actively use technology. And most of them aren't even tech companies.
The ones struggling are still operating the way they did years ago: heavily manual, reactive, and resistant to change.
"Leaders don't need to automate everything overnight," Jānis says. "But they do need to start asking: where are we wasting human time on tasks technology could handle better?"
Hiring has always been about people. The best processes don't change that. When the admin is handled, the coordination is automated, and the structure is in place, recruiters and hiring managers get to do what actually matters: make good decisions about people, and give every candidate the experience they deserve.