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Jiří Landovský has London and Israel on his CV, started out in data automation and systems engineering, but these days his work is all about people. For over a decade he’s been Head of Customer Experience at Recruitis.io, helping companies build recruitment processes that treat candidates the way you’d treat a customer.
Perhaps because he spent a good chunk of his career working with data and for him, data has never been mere abstraction but stories told in numbers he sees candidate experience differently from most. He’s not just interested in whether the system works. He wants to know how the person on the other side of the screen actually feels.
Jiří, your title is “Head of Customer Experience” at an HR tech company. How do you define “the customer” in the context of Recruitis?
It’s not as straightforward as it might seem. Our paying customer is obviously the company using Recruitis ATS. But from day one, we’ve built Recruitis around a core mission: to make recruitment candidate-centric. That flips the whole perspective.
We wanted to help companies improve their CX through our tool and the knowledge we’ve built into it and to keep getting better at that. So in the truest sense of the word, we see the candidate our customer’s customer as the real customer. They’re one step removed from us, and yet their experience is our benchmark for whether we’re doing a good job. When we help a company treat candidates better, both sides win: the candidate and the company. That tension is exactly where our work lives.
Recruitis actively measures candidate experience through NPS. But how is it that most Czech companies still don’t even bother sending a rejection message? Is it laziness, or a systemic problem?
Great question. On one hand, it’s something I genuinely can’t get my head around. It’s been discussed and mocked so many times that it’s still happening is honestly baffling. I can’t imagine a sales team discovering that a certain practice was driving away a large group of quality customers and just carrying on regardless.
It’s a systemic problem, but one with several layers.
The first is purely operational and capacity-related. If a company doesn’t have a recruitment tool that can generate a decent, human-sounding rejection template with a single click, every rejection message means extra manual work. So someone decides to “solve” it by stuffing the following into the very first message a candidate receives after applying that now-legendary line: “If you haven’t heard from us within 14 days, we’ve moved forward with another candidate.”
The second layer is motivation and metrics. Recruiters are typically measured on how many roles they fill and how quickly. Rejected candidates are completely irrelevant to their KPIs. The cost of never getting back to those people isn’t visible and it’s deferred. It shows up later in poor employer branding, lower conversion in future hiring rounds, or in the fact that the frustrated candidate is also your customer. And what doesn’t show up clearly in a report rarely gets prioritised.
But this isn’t just on HR. It goes all the way up to senior leadership those who either don’t see it or choose not to.
That’s exactly why we were one of the very first ATS platforms to implement NPS. For us, measuring candidate experience through NPS makes complete sense. It makes that deferred, invisible cost finally visible and measurable. The moment leadership can see in black and white how much this behaviour is dragging down their score and how they compare to competitors it stops being a “nice to have” and becomes a key metric.
You came into the CX world from systems engineering and data automation. What was the moment you decided people were more interesting than systems?
I’d gently reframe that I came to the conclusion that the most interesting thing is the intersection of people and systems.
Early in my career, I focused purely on the technical solution: efficiency, speed, reliability. But the more contact I had with customers and end users, the more I started to notice the impact on their day-to-day work and the deeper I could go into the nuances of what they actually needed.
The moment that probably shifted things most for me was seeing the difference between two approaches. When a customer says, “I want a button that does XY,” you can just build the button give them the appearance of satisfaction. Or you can ask a set of questions that get to the root of the need: the underlying business case or the pain point they’re trying to solve. You’ll very likely deliver something entirely different from the button they asked for but with far greater satisfaction over the long run, and a much stronger relationship.
That feeling of having a satisfied customer someone whose problem you’ve solved and whose thinking you’ve expanded in the process has always been more rewarding to me than any perfectly functioning data automation system.
With “Personalistika Zet” alongside Štěpán Bartyzel, you regularly discussed modern HR on Radio Zet. What brought you to doing HR education so publicly, and what did it give you personally?
It was really a response to where the market was at the time. When we were starting out with Recruitis ATS, very few people in the Czech Republic even knew what an ATS was and even fewer cared about candidate experience, talent pool building, multiposting, sourcing, or referrals. Unemployment was at a very different level, and companies were essentially in the driving seat: post the job, wait, and pick from the CVs that came in. There was simply no urgency to compete for candidates or think about how they felt.
But we could see from abroad where recruitment was heading that candidates would eventually take control, and that challenges already common elsewhere would arrive here too. We saw it as a competitive advantage. There was just one catch: you can’t sell a solution to someone who’s never heard of the problem. We needed to get these topics into the consciousness of HR professionals first cultivate the conversation and only then offer our tools as the answer. We essentially had to educate the market before it could start demanding what we do. Radio Zet and the meetups we organised gave us the perfect platform for that.
But personally, it gave me something I never expected. Beyond meeting a lot of genuinely interesting people from all kinds of fields, it was the very practical realisation that there’s no reason to be afraid of stepping outside your comfort zone into territory you’ve never tried whether that’s hosting a radio show or organising an event. That’s exactly where enormous added value and competitive advantage are created. The key is being willing to claim the position of leader or authority in a space that hasn’t been claimed yet. That space is almost always there someone just has to be the first to step into it.
AI is changing recruitment faster than anything before it. Where do you see the greatest risk that, under the pressure of automation, the human dimension of candidate experience gets lost?
I don’t think recruitment today is dramatically different from how it was a year or two ago which you can’t say about other fields, software development being an obvious example. The real wave of AI in HR is still ahead of us. 🙂
That said, there’s a huge amount of public conversation about AI and HR, and that creates enormous pressure on HR teams inside companies to “do something with AI.” And that’s where I see the first risk. That pressure often leads to rushed decisions deploying AI on processes where, in the best case, it adds minimal value and, in the worst case, actively causes harm.
That’s not me arguing against AI changing HR it should and it will. But it’s worth stepping back and asking: why are we doing this, and how does it help or hurt the CX that the whole thing is ultimately about?
Recruitment brings together two worlds: the “backstage” everything that happens out of the candidate’s sight and the “front stage” what the candidate actually experiences directly. And there’s the second risk. Many companies want to deploy AI primarily on the front stage, typically in direct communication with candidates, while completely ignoring everything happening backstage.
Over time we’ll also see what AI does to the labour market itself unemployment levels, legislation, and so on. And many companies will eventually realise, for example, that an AI tool for tagging candidates by CV becomes worthless when those CVs are themselves AI-generated and tailored to individual job posts and the number of applications per role multiplies tenfold or a hundredfold, as we’re already seeing in the US. By contrast, AI solutions that offer sophisticated sourcing helping companies break free from their dependency on job ads and the flood of irrelevant applications that come with them will create real competitive advantage.
Your profile says what you enjoy most is watching others succeed with your support. How do you know when a customer no longer needs you and is ready to go it alone?
It’s a bit like being a good teacher or a parent. With a slight dose of irony the whole point of my work is ultimately to make myself unnecessary.
You can tell mainly by how the questions change. In the beginning, they’re almost all operational: “How do I set up feature XY?”, “What does this button do?“, “Where do I find the feature you mentioned in the newsletter?” And so on.
When our support has worked, those questions gradually transform. We move from operational to tactical and then strategic conversations about streamlining existing processes, thinking ahead. At that point, the customer isn’t calling me to be rescued. They’re calling to bounce an idea off me, or to talk through a vision for how they want to develop their hiring in the future. That’s a huge shift.
The other reliable signal is when a customer starts teaching their own colleagues when they become an internal ambassador for Recruitis. The moment they’re passing on what we’ve worked through together and building on it, it means they don’t just understand it. They’ve made it their own, enough to explain it in their own words.
So I track one quiet little metric: how long we speak and what we actually talk about. When contact naturally shortens and the topics move from putting out fires to “we’d like to take our use of Recruitis further” I know we’re on the right track.
You’ve lived in both the UK and Israel. What did that breadth of experience give you that you could never have gained inside the Czech HR bubble?
Above all, perspective. When you work abroad for a sustained period, you realise that the way things are done at home how you work, how you communicate with colleagues and customers, how processes run isn’t the only way. And often not the best way either. You stop treating it as a given and start seeing it as one of many possible approaches.
The contrast between the UK and Israel illustrated this beautifully. In Britain, I learnt to read feedback between the lines. People rarely tell you directly that they don’t like something you have to pick up on the fact that a polite “interesting” or “we might consider it” often means the exact opposite. Israel was the complete other end of the spectrum: direct, matter-of-fact, no softening. People say what they think, and you get feedback straight and immediately. After a heated argument over a substantive point in a meeting, the two people involved would grab a coffee in the canteen and chat calmly about how their sons were heading to football practice that afternoon. Both styles have their charm and their challenges and both taught me a great deal.
The second big realisation was this: not everyone thinks the way you do. You have to learn to adapt quickly, read your environment, listen more carefully, and work with feedback whether it’s direct or indirect. And most importantly, stop automatically assuming that what works at home will work the same way somewhere else.
At the same time, I came to understand the flip side: there’s absolutely no reason to feel inferior because of the very Czech tendency towards self-deprecation. If I can generalise for a moment we are exceptionally strong in many areas: education, work ethic, creativity, and the ability to solve problems without a manual. We just rarely admit it, and even more rarely sell it. And that’s a shame, because abroad I saw time and again that what we take for granted, others see as a competitive advantage.
Can you remember a moment when you did something for a client that wasn’t in any manual or process but you just knew it was exactly the right thing to do?
This might sound like an exaggeration, but that happens almost every day. 🙂
I’ve been lucky, from my very first work experiences, to be around people who shaped customer support culture with genuine care not by following a manual or a call script. I also had the opportunity to work directly and closely with various CTOs and CEOs, which gave me a window into seemingly ordinary support or customer communication situations from their perspective both technical and commercial. I could see the strategic elements that were invisible at my level. And I’m grateful I get to pass that on now.
At Recruitis, it regularly happens that I’m reminded of a similar situation from a previous company and I’m always struck by how practically every one of those past experiences, even from completely different industries, is still actively useful to me today. That’s partly down to the startup culture at Recruitis, which demands a kind of full-stack range. But it’s also, for me personally, confirmation that I’m in the right place.
Your world is full of acronyms and terms that only insiders understand. If you had to explain your job to your grandmother at a family gathering, what’s the one thing you’d most want her to understand?
The first thing I’d want to explain is the concept of customer experience itself. And I think it would actually be easier than it might seem.
I’d remind her of the corner shop from when she was young the one she used to talk about fondly and especially the shopkeeper who knew everyone by name, remembered that she liked a particular chocolate, asked how her grandmother was getting on, and when he ran out of what she came in for, set some aside for her under the counter next time.
My job is essentially about helping companies treat people that way again. Except the shop isn’t round the corner anymore it’s on your phone or your computer.
At that point, she’d probably realise she understands it better than many managers do she just never had a name for it. And that’s exactly the magic of it. At its core, it isn’t a science for a select few insiders. It’s ordinary human decency and attentiveness that we’re trying to scale and measure how well we’re doing.
If you could redesign the entire recruitment process in the Czech Republic from scratch as a systems engineer what would the ideal candidate experience look like in 2030?
The best candidate experience in 2030, for me, would be one the candidate barely notices because they’re not applying for anything. The entire current model of recruitment is built on the premise that you have to find a job and fight for it: write a CV, fill in forms on careers pages and multiple job boards, complete follow-up questionnaires, go through several rounds of interviews, submit a set of tasks, wait for a verdict and sometimes someone gets back to you, sometimes they don’t.
If I were designing this from scratch, I’d start with an uncomfortable truth: today’s recruitment process is fundamentally designed asymmetrically in favour of the company, not for the candidate’s experience.
Now imagine a market where no one writes job ads and no one writes CVs. There’s a single source of truth: one profile that the candidate owns. Something like a “professional citizen identity” a rich record of skills and experience that candidates grant companies access to with a single click. Companies don’t post roles; they reach out to specific people with specific offers.
Selection wouldn’t rely on keywords in a CV or reading between the lines, but on verified skills and demonstrated experience. And crucially, candidates would have full visibility of their status at all times on their own portal, the way you track a delivery from an online shop. I know exactly where I am, which company I’m with, what comes next, when they’ll be in touch, and how and why it turned out the way it did.
In the ideal world of 2030, automation and AI wouldn’t be the bouncer efficiently rejecting candidates based on incomplete and unfiltered CV data which is, ironically, what many companies today are asking for as a key AI feature. Instead, AI would be the backstage assistant I mentioned earlier: searching the market for suitable candidates, mapping and accurately describing team structures and skill sets so companies can find the right additions or replacements, making sure everyone is followed up with promptly and given relevant information.
And here’s the elegant part: most of today’s candidate experience pain points would simply cease to exist because you’ve removed the very process that creates them.
Do you have a CX story that’s stayed with you? A moment when someone genuinely surprised you as a customer and you thought: that’s exactly it.
At its heart it’s a fairly simple story, but it opened my eyes when I was not yet twenty even though I had no idea at the time that what I’d witnessed would one day be called CX. And it happened sometime in the late nineties, when the concept of customer experience in this country simply didn’t exist yet. 🙂
I was sitting in a restaurant, and at the next table was a couple who were clearly unhappy with the food, and with the way the staff had treated them. Eventually they asked to speak to the owner. I was expecting the classic performance: defensive posturing, the “that sort of thing doesn’t happen here” explanation. Instead, the owner calmly heard them out, apologised, and offered them a coffee and a pastry on the house. The couple left smiling.
But the real moment came shortly after, when I overheard a staff member insisting to the owner that what the guests had complained about simply wasn’t true. The owner simply replied, calmly, with something along the lines of: “I know. But they’re leaving happy and that’s what matters.”
The lesson for me then and honestly still now is that arguing about facts is almost always a losing battle, because a customer doesn’t walk away with the minutes of a meeting. They walk away with a feeling. And that owner knew perfectly well that couple would tell the story. Either as “they were difficult and argumentative,” or as “they made a mistake but handled it beautifully.” For the price of two coffees and two pastries, she bought the second version.
At first it seemed like a nice gesture. Today I see it as a beautiful demonstration of something fundamental: the best CX isn’t about being right it’s about how the customer feels after every interaction with us.
