From agency to in-house: a completely different game

Ashna spent 10 years in banking before making a career switch into recruitment, starting at Randstad. The jump from agency to corporate recruiting at AkzoNobel almost nine years ago changed how she thinks about the function entirely. "In a recruitment agency you get an assignment and you need to find the people. That's it." In-house? You need to understand how the company makes money. What the priorities are. What's shifting in the business. "You don't need to only be a recruiter. You need to be a trusted advisor."

Growing into leadership, one region at a time

Ashna didn't land a leadership title overnight. She started as a TA partner, then gradually took on employer branding, candidate experience, process improvement, and partnerships with hiring leaders. First she led TA for one region, then expanded to the next. Now she's responsible for the Netherlands HQ, the DACH region (Austria, Germany, Switzerland), and the Nordics (Sweden, Denmark, Finland), with a team of six recruiters. That slow, deliberate growth is part of what makes her perspective grounded. She's done the work at every level.

The real problem: decisions, not sourcing

When asked what belief she holds that most recruitment people would disagree with, Ashna didn't hesitate:

"Most hiring is not a sourcing problem. It's a decision-making problem."

TA teams spend enormous amounts of time finding better candidates and doing more outreach, while the actual bottleneck sits upstream. Role clarity isn't there. Alignment on priorities hasn't happened. A strong candidate gets rejected not because they weren't good enough, but because stakeholders weren't aligned on what "good" looks like in the first place.

Her argument is simple: if certain decisions are made upfront, you get faster hiring, better decision-making, and TA can spend more time on advisory, candidate experience, and business impact.

Challenge the role before you fill it

Ashna pushes her team and hiring managers to question every vacancy before jumping into sourcing. Is this the same role you need to replace? Has the department changed? Do you need the same capabilities and experience, or should something be added or removed?

"It's not necessarily the previous person. It can be absolutely a fresh persona."

This kind of thinking saves time down the line and leads to better hires. But it requires recruiters who are confident enough to challenge a hiring manager rather than just taking the brief and running with it.

The perfect process: fewer steps, better decisions

When Ashna describes her ideal hiring process for a manager-level role, it starts well before any candidate is sourced. First comes the collaboration meeting (the intake), where the recruiter and hiring manager align on the real need. Not just the job description, but questions like: why is this vacancy open? Is it a replacement or a new role? What was missing from the previous person? What's the team structure? What attraction strategy makes sense: social media campaign, LinkedIn sourcing, or an agency for niche roles?

Then timelines. "It's not only the recruiter who's responsible for filling a vacancy. The hiring leader is also responsible to commit."

Shortlist? Three to five candidates shown to the hiring manager. Two, sometimes three, move to final stage. Clean. Efficient.

Silver medalists matter

What happens with the candidates who were strong but didn't get the offer? Ashna's team maintains a talent pipeline and tries to keep those people engaged through job alerts and occasional check-ins. "It doesn't mean that if you didn't get the job that you are not a good fit for our company." She acknowledges this is an area they want to invest more in, but the intent is there: don't lose great people just because the timing wasn't right.

The resume doesn't say everything

When asked about the one hire that taught her the most, Ashna pointed to a universal recruiter experience: the candidate who looks wrong on paper but surprises you in conversation. "Sometimes you need to see the person behind the resume." A candidate who wouldn't pass an initial screening based on surface-level criteria can turn out to be an excellent hire, if you give them the chance to show up.

With AI-generated resumes making this even harder to navigate, Ashna says they're experimenting with internal AI tools for screening and comparison, but on a limited scale. "It still needs a human eye."

Scaling isn't just adding headcount

One thing Ashna sees TA leaders getting wrong: assuming that scaling means hiring more recruiters. She disagrees.

"Scale also comes from having a more efficient process. Fewer interviews. Fewer stakeholders involved."

If a step in the process doesn't add value to the decision-making, it shouldn't be there. TA should focus on advisory, candidate experience, and business impact, not on managing a bloated interview loop that creates noise instead of clarity.

More interviews don't reduce bias

Her BS take on a widely held practice: the belief that adding more interviews reduces bias. "Actually, it usually creates noise. If a certain step in the recruitment process doesn't add value for the decision-making, then it shouldn't have been there in the first place."

TA is a cost center. And that's fine.

Ashna doesn't pretend otherwise. TA is a cost center, technically. But she believes TA proves its strategic value by reducing time to hire, finding the most efficient sources, and adding real talent to the organization. Recruiters are also ambassadors: they talk to future leaders, sell the company, and shape how the market sees the brand. If she were the CEO? Recruitment is "not a department that I would say let's cut it there."

She also makes a point often missed: recruiters aren't just important for external hires. Internal mobility, helping existing talent grow further inside the company, is equally part of TA's value.

The future: AI handles admin, humans handle humans

Ashna sees AI playing a bigger role in screening, scheduling, and sourcing. Admin work can already be done by AI. But the human element stays. "You still need to touch base with the human behind the resume."

Her conclusion aligns with what we keep hearing from the best TA leaders: the function is moving toward advisory whether people like it or not. Recruiters who can't operate at that level will find their work automated. The ones who understand the business, challenge assumptions, and focus on decision quality over sourcing volume will thrive.

"TA people won't have a choice. They must be an adviser. They must go to the strategic level."

Will TA merge with HR?

Depends on company size. In smaller companies, yes, a combined HR and TA business partner role can work. In large corporates like AkzoNobel? TA is too specialized. Sourcing, assessments, candidate discussions, these require dedicated expertise that you can't bolt onto an HRBP's already full plate.

Advice for young recruiters

Ashna's message to anyone starting out: don't just learn recruitment. Understand the company. Know how it makes money. Know its priorities. Build partnerships with business leaders. Make a business impact. "Then you will become an advisor, stay relevant, and not only a recruiter."

And one more thing she carries with her: "You never fail. You always learn."

The takeaway

Ashna's philosophy cuts through a lot of the noise in the TA community right now. While everyone debates which sourcing tool or AI platform to use, she's pointing at something more fundamental: the quality of decisions made before a single candidate is contacted. Fix the alignment, challenge the brief, simplify the process, and the right people will follow. That's not a tool problem. That's a leadership problem. And it's the kind of thinking that turns TA from a cost center into a strategic function.