Career Journeys in Talent Acquisition: Egle Barkauskaite

Thanks for reading! This series is designed to shine a spotlight on Talent Acquisition professionals and highlight their career journeys and learnings so far. Today, we're joined by Egle Barkauskaite. If you'd like to be next, please reach out to a TTC Community Manager.

Introduce yourself in one sentence:

Hi, name is Egle (pronounced eg-lay)! I am a Talent Acquisition professional with a track record of building hiring functions from the ground up at digital health scale-ups, currently open to my next TA Partner opportunity.

Can you walk us through the key milestones in your career in the talent acquisition space? What were some pivotal moments or decisions that shaped your journey?

I started out in agency recruitment, which was a brilliant but brutal education. You learn fast when your livelihood depends on it. Moving in-house was the shift that changed everything for me. At Instant Impact, I got my first taste of embedded recruitment, working across multiple clients at different growth stages, and I realised that the part I loved most was the strategic side: understanding a business well enough to challenge it.

At Numan I've been able to go deeper than ever before! Owning end-to-end recruitment across clinical, commercial and operations functions, building process from scratch, and working directly with founders and senior leadership. A pivotal moment was building a self-service role request system in Notion from the ground up. Nobody asked me to do it. I just saw a gap and fixed it. That's the kind of work that reminds me why I got into this.

In this rapidly evolving industry, what strategies or practices have you adopted to continuously enhance your skills and stay ahead of the curve? Do you have any resources or learning methods you'd recommend to others?

I learn most from the hiring managers and candidates I work with. If you approach every brief as an opportunity to understand a new function properly, you end up with a really broad knowledge base over time. Beyond that, I stay close to TA communities, read widely about the industries I hire into, and I've been deliberately building my skills around data and AI tools, not to replace thinking, but to sharpen it. The recruiters who will thrive are the ones who use these tools to do better work, not to do less of it.

What has been the most challenging aspect of your career in talent acquisition, especially when you were actively seeking work? How did you overcome it, and what advice would you offer to others facing similar hurdles?

Building credibility has been the hardest part, and I'll be honest that being a woman in a room full of senior stakeholders has made that harder at times. When you're hiring at CEO or founder level, you have to work harder to be taken seriously. I learned early to back everything with data: market benchmarks, pipeline conversion rates, time-to-hire analysis. An opinion is easy to dismiss, but evidence is harder to argue with.

There's also a structural challenge in TA that doesn't get talked about enough: the function is critical when things go wrong, invisible when things go right, and easily scapegoated when a hire doesn't work out. You have to advocate for the value of what you do constantly, and not everyone is wired for that. I am, but it took time to get there.

The job search has been its own version of that challenge. The market right now is really competitive, and sitting on the other side of a process you know intimately is a strange experience. It's taught me a lot about what good candidate experience feels like in practice.

The recruiting world can be fast-paced and demanding. How do you strike a balance between your professional commitments and personal life? Are there specific routines or rituals you follow?

I don't work past my contracted hours. Using AI to handle time-consuming admin has freed up enough space in my day to give proper attention to the things that actually need a human brain, so by the end of the day the work is done and the laptop goes away.

I think a lot of people in recruitment forget that we're not curing cancer. If something feels urgent at 6pm, it can almost certainly wait until 9am and nothing will have burned down. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and the industry has a habit of rewarding people who are always on rather than people who do good work within sensible limits. I've never subscribed to that.

Outside of work I lift weights, read, and hike. I have a solid group of friends and family, which means there are always plans and people to look forward to. That structure matters more than people admit, having a life you're genuinely invested in outside work makes it a lot easier to switch off when the day ends.

As someone involved in talent acquisition, you've likely witnessed various technology and trend shifts. Which technologies or trends do you believe have had the most significant impact on the industry, and how have they influenced your role?

AI has obviously been the big one, and I think the industry is still figuring out what it means for us. My view is that the tools are only as good as the thinking behind them. I've built AI-assisted workflows into my process at Numan: screening support, sourcing automation, intake documentation, but the judgement calls still sit with me. What I've found is that AI is brilliant at removing low-value admin and terrible at replacing a real human assessment. The recruiters who treat it as a replacement for thinking are going to struggle. The ones who use it to free up time for better thinking will have an edge.

The other shift that I think is under appreciated is the data piece. Recruitment has historically been quite anecdotal. The best TA teams run on solid metrics: pipeline conversion, source quality, time-to-hire, offer acceptance rates, and use that data to have credible conversations with the business.

For those entering the talent acquisition space or those looking to pivot within it, what's the one piece of practical advice you'd give to help them thrive, especially if they are actively job-seeking?

Be curious above everything else! The best thing about this job is that every brief is an invitation to understand something new, like a new function, a new market, a new type of person. Take it seriously. Talk to your hiring managers properly, ask them lots of questions, and do the same with your candidates. They are the experts in their fields and you can learn an enormous amount if you really listen.

Don't outsource your thinking to AI!! Use it, absolutely, but know what you're using it for. And join a TA community early; the collective knowledge in those spaces is very useful, and the industry is smaller than it looks.