How Lovable Built a Recruiting Function While Tripling in Size With Ashby

Lovable is a software creation platform that gives people the power to act on the problems closest to them. Increasingly, they’re building more than just websites and internal tools; now, there are entire businesses running on top of the platform. The company has tripled in size in 2026 and is still hiring. Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Operations Lead at Lovable, leads the team responsible for the systems and standards needed to maintain that pace.

Challenge: Building the Recruitment Function Whilst Running It

Lovable’s first recruiter joined just a year ago, and since then the team has had to build up the recruiting function and infrastructure, whilst hiring at full speed.

No shared standards or playbooks for hiring

Before having a recruiting team, various processes and hiring frameworks were created across the business and it meant that we were designing processes from scratch each time, rather than scaling best practices. 

The team needed a standard that could be consistent across multiple teams and regions, but specific enough to Lovable to match the pace of their growth. A standard like this needed to come from evidence about Lovable’s funnel rather than a borrowed template. 

A perfect example of the transition comes from Tim Duong, who leads Engineering, Product, and Design Recruiting at Lovable, and spent 12 years recruiting at Google before joining Lovable. Hear his talk at Ashby One about the pace change between the companies, and how each operates and establishes processes at the speed that fits their business in that moment. 

Manual admin stretched already thin interviewer capacity

Lovable doesn’t have a shortage of applicants, but maintaining interviewer capacity to assess them, whilst the company operates at a high pace, can sometimes be challenging. Our recent Talent Trends report corroborates that this is the new normal for many EMEA recruiting teams: the need to identify qualified candidates from a larger number of applicants, and do so with limited resources. 

"Hiring quality depends on having the right interviewers available — especially as we expand into new locations where we may not have an existing team, and build roles that have never existed here before. The people who can assess these roles are highly specialized and skilled, but they're also very busy running the day-to-day in their roles. Enabling interviewer capacity, and making interviewing efficient without ever compromising on quality, has been a key priority."
— Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Ops Lead at Lovable

With a small interviewer pool, every hour of interviewer time spent on administrative work is an hour subtracted from hiring capacity. At the same time, late candidate feedback delays further interviews and debriefs, which can hold every other search those same interviewers sit on. The stretched capacity highlighted a need for more interviewers as well as processes to enable that feedback loop to happen quickly without adding administrative load. 

Solution: A Single Framework, Automated for Scale

Lovable needed a standardised system the whole company could work from with enough automation for the repeatable work. They implemented Ashby as this system around the same time they hired their first recruiter in 2025. Ashby helped by providing:

• A consistent framework for every hiring team  
• Trustworthy, queryable data to build hiring plans and processes
• Automated rote work to move faster more efficiently
• A tailored system to fit Lovable’s unique hiring needs

A consistent framework for every hiring team

Lovable’s hiring managers hold deep expertise in their markets and stay closely involved in creating the right profiles for their hires. The goal wasn’t to pull the process from them, but instead provide a standardised set of practices with structured interviewing that can help facilitate hiring at pace while maintaining quality. 

“Having a framework that standardizes parts of the process — this is how we score, this is how we run debriefs — has been key to helping us move fast without losing consistency. Within that framework, we also need to ensure that hiring managers still have the flexibility to dig deep into the signals that matter most for their teams, and make sure they're getting the right read on candidates.”
— Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Ops Lead at Lovable

Trustworthy, queryable data to build hiring plans and processes

Consistency of this kind is what makes the hiring process governable. It survives the pace of growth because it’s able to be revised and honed as hires are made. With Ashby Analytics, Isabella’s team watches all the stages within time-to-hire (e.g., time-to-schedule, time-in-process, passthrough rates) for signals that something needs to be updated. 

“We look at time in process to understand how quickly we're moving. Time-to-hire is also important, but process-wise, time-in-process and time-in-stage is helpful to identify bottlenecks within a process. Is this efficient? Do we have enough interviewers? Do we need to do something different?”
— Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Ops Lead at Lovable

With Ashby as a single source of truth for all of this data, the recruitment team can answer questions in the other direction, too. It holds all the historical information for every interview Lovable has run since implementation. 

“It's been really helpful to be able to pull out how we have structured interviews in this type of process before. From Ashby’s AI Assistant, we can get a summary of the type of questions you have asked in previous interviews in this type of role. Then we can take that into the next kickoff and say, ‘Here’s something that we did that was similar, how do you want to tweak it?’ Or, ‘This is something that worked really well. We moved fast. We hired someone great.’”
— Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Ops Lead at Lovable

Automated rote work to move faster more efficiently

At the top of the funnel, Ashby’s AI-Assisted Application Review helps score every application against set criteria. Though the recruitment team still reviews all applications, it helps surface the highest matches first. 

"Whether a job has AI criteria switched on or not isn't something we've had to think about measuring before, but it feels important now — especially since it's directly tied to how well AI Talent Rediscovery works. I want to make sure we're using it properly, so we can spot top matches and move them through the process quickly."
— Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Ops Lead at Lovable

At the bottom of the funnel, AI Notetaker transcribes interviews and helps draft feedback, helping improve interview scorecard response rate from around 80% without Notetaker to 93.3% with it. In addition, the team built an agent that books a 15-minute feedback hold on an interviewer’s diary after each interview, codifying time for them to focus on the task, ensuring a faster feedback loop. 

“I asked Ashby’s AI Assistant, and around 70% of interview feedback now comes in 24 hours. We try to have debriefs ASAP after the final interview, often on the same day. That means the interviewers need to submit their feedback quickly before the debrief.”
— Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Ops Lead at Lovable

A tailored system to fit Lovable’s unique hiring needs

More than AI features, Lovable has been able to leverage their own product to customise automations for their team. Because Lovable lets the people closest to the problem build software, the recruiting team does not have to wait for a roadmap to close a gap it can see. They can leverage Ashby’s APIs and MCP to build connections with these new tools. 

“We launched our headcount planning tool a couple of months ago, which connects HiBob, our HRIS, and Ashby. If there are new roles added to our headcount, then a new opening is automatically created in Ashby. We can then action it and make sure a recruiter is assigned. Headcount planning and the flow to recruitment has been a complex problem to solve at every company I’ve worked at. Being able to build a bridging tool with Lovable and connect it to Ashby has been a game-changer for us when minimizing admin. ”
— Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Ops Lead at Lovable

A recruiting team that builds its own tooling is a reasonable definition of a mature function, and it is only possible when the underlying system is consistent enough to build against and open enough to read from. The team that a year ago had no recruiters now sets the standard that Lovable's hiring managers work inside.

Impact: More Time to Improve Candidate Experience

Recruitment at Lovable has gone from something each hiring manager did privately to a system the rest of the company relies on, and the clearest measure of that shift is where the recruitment team's hours go now. They go to the part of hiring that does not automate: candidate experience.

Recruiters run sourcing sessions with hiring managers, interviewers, and employees across the company, working through internal networks for the senior profiles that will not arrive through the careers page. Most Lovable candidates come on site at some point, and many travel to Stockholm to do it. The coordination team builds each visiting candidate a page with their flights, hotel, schedule, office details, and Stockholm recommendations (including a warning that the office is shoeless and that fun socks are advisable).

"We can now spend more of our time on candidate experience, making sure people feel that Lovable feeling right from the start. We want people to walk away from an interview, whether they get the offer or not, feeling like they understood something real about Lovable, what we're building, how we think, what it actually feels like to be here. That's where the human touch matters most — when people want to connect with a person, ask real questions, and get a real sense of the team and the culture. Because AI and automation can handle so much of the admin and the tricky parts of the process, we're freed up to spend our time where it counts, when we meet talent and get to show them who we really are."
— Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Ops Lead at Lovable

Partnering on product as an extension of each other’s teams

Lovable's position is unusual enough that some of what the team needs does not exist yet, which has made the relationship with Ashby's product team a working one rather than a support one. Isabella has met Ashby's product managers directly and Lovable has acted as a design partner on a few new features.

"Hiring is the top priority for Lovable right now, which means our needs are always evolving and we need to move fast. Having a vendor who can adapt alongside us and truly understands our business is incredibly valuable. It feels like we're genuinely building together, solving problems that help us hire faster and with higher quality, with a partner we can stay close to the product with and have real impact on."
— Isabella Karlström, Recruitment Ops Lead at Lovable

Lovable built a recruiting function and a hiring standard at the same time as it tripled in size, using one system consistent enough for every team to work inside and open enough for its own recruiters to build on. So far, the team has been able to:

• Triple company headcount in 2026 while standing up the recruiting team itself
• Replace per-manager processes with one scoring, debrief, and interview framework, revised from Lovable's own funnel data rather than a borrowed playbook
• Get around 70% of interview feedback submitted within 24 hours, making same-day debriefs the norm
• Build a headcount planning tool that opens roles in Ashby automatically from approved headcount in HiBob
• Run talent mapping, interview kickoffs, and debrief packets on Ashby data through tools built in Lovable

Ready to build a hiring process that keeps up with hypergrowth? Request a demo today.