What do you see as the biggest challenge for 2026?
The gap between AI adoption and human process design. Across the industry — and across the customers we work with at Workable — there’s enormous energy going into AI-powered sourcing, screening, and scheduling. But the fundamental bottleneck in most hiring processes isn’t finding candidates. It’s the human coordination layer: the moment the recruiter hands off to a hiring manager.
You can have the most sophisticated tech stack in the world, but if your hiring manager doesn’t engage with the process — doesn’t review CVs on time, gives vague feedback, changes the brief halfway through — speed and quality both suffer. In 2026, the biggest challenge is making sure our investment in tools is matched by an equal investment in the human behaviours that make those tools effective.
Where do recruitment organisations need to improve on the corporate side?
Hiring manager enablement and accountability. Most organisations have spent years investing in recruiter tools, processes, and training. Very few have invested the same energy in preparing managers to be good hiring partners.
What does that look like in practice? It means giving managers structured interview kits so they know what to assess and how to score it. It means setting clear SLAs for CV review and feedback. It means making hiring performance visible — not just to TA, but to the business. The organisations that do this well treat hiring as a shared responsibility, not a service that TA delivers to the business. That shift in mindset is the single biggest lever most corporate TA functions haven’t pulled yet.
What should recruiters focus on in 2026?
Building internal influence. The recruiter role is shifting from executor to consultant, and the best recruiters in 2026 will be the ones who can manage upwards — advising hiring managers, setting expectations, and positioning themselves as strategic partners rather than coordinators.
That requires a different skill set than traditional recruiting: the ability to use data to make a case, to push back constructively when a brief isn’t realistic, and to run the hiring process rather than simply respond to it. Recruiters who develop that internal credibility will be far more effective — and far more resilient — regardless of what the AI landscape looks like.
If you could give one piece of advice to the industry, what would it be?
Measure what actually matters. Most TA teams are still primarily measured on time-to-fill and offer acceptance rate. Neither of those metrics captures the quality of the hiring partnership — how well the recruiter and hiring manager worked together, whether the process was consistent, whether the right person was hired for the right reasons.
If you start measuring recruiter-manager collaboration — response times, interview completion rates, scorecard quality, feedback consistency — two things happen. First, you surface problems you didn’t know you had. Second, you create accountability on both sides of the partnership. The metrics you choose signal what you value. Choose better metrics.
What would be the one lesson you would share from 2025 based on your professional activities?
The companies that scaled hiring well in 2025 weren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated technology. They were the ones with the clearest internal processes and the strongest alignment between TA and the business. Technology accelerates what’s already working — it doesn’t fix broken collaboration.
We saw this pattern repeatedly across the CEE market: organisations investing in new tools but seeing limited returns because the underlying partnership between recruiters and hiring managers was fragile. The lesson is that process and relationship come before technology. Get those right first, and the tools pay for themselves.
Thank you for the answers Nikitas Marinos, the Regional Sales Director, EMEA & APAC at Workable!