Stop hiring reactively
and the wrong people
Hiring is one of the most expensive and risky decisions a CEO makes.
A bad hire in a critical role doesn’t just cost a salary. It costs a year of leadership attention, delayed delivery, and culture you now have to repair. Most hiring problems aren’t a sourcing problem. They’re a systems and ownership problem: unclear success criteria, a reactive process, and no one senior enough to be accountable for the outcome.
We bring the structure, business judgment, and cross-border experience to fix that, whether it’s one critical leadership hire or a distributed team scaling across multiple countries.
Why People Success Team
What a mis-hire actually costs
Ask a CFO what a bad hire costs, and most will say “a few months’ salary.” The real number is higher, and most of it never shows up on a P&L line:
Salary, recruiting fees, onboarding, severance if it doesn’t work out.
The role sits unfilled or underperforming while the business waits.
Hours the CEO, CFO, or COO spends managing the fallout instead of running the business.
One wrong senior hire changes how a team behaves, and that’s far harder to reverse than to prevent.
A visibly bad hire in a leadership or client-facing role shapes how candidates, employees, and clients perceive the business, and that perception is slow and expensive to rebuild.
The problem isn’t talent. It’s systems and structure.
Most companies don’t struggle with talent acquisition because good people are scarce. They struggle because hiring is reactive, under-owned, and disconnected from the business plan.
The difference is business judgment, not just recruiting process
Does this hire move the business forward, not just fill the seat?
Most TA support comes from one of two places: an agency incentivized to close quickly, or a generalist HR hire without the bandwidth to be strategic. Neither is built to answer the question that actually matters: does this hire move the business forward, not just fill the seat?
— Maria Maslarova, Founder & Fractional CPO
I’m Maria Maslarova, founder of People Success Team. Before building this practice, I built and ran hiring functions inside fast-scaling, multi-country businesses, not as an external recruiter working off a job spec, but as the person accountable for the outcome. That’s what lets me evaluate a hire differently: against business impact, not just role fit.
Alorica:Â built the People function while the Bulgarian office scaled from zero to 300+ employees within a year. An employer branding strategy lifted referral hiring to 33%; structured performance processes drove 11% internal promotions.
SpotMe: built structured, automated (via Greenhouse), bias-aware hiring systems for a fully remote, multi-continent organization mid-acquisition and mid-global-scale.
PwC: digitized the CEE Human Capital toolkit (Workday, HireVue) across a Bulgaria/CEE remit.
Fluent in the tools your team already runs:
GreenhouseTaleoJazzHRHireVueBambooHRWorkday
Who this is for
Is this right for you?
Answer honestly.
We’ve made a hiring decision in the last 12 months that we regretted within 90 days.
Our hiring managers are doing recruiting on top of their real job, with no structured process.
We’re hiring in a country or market we don’t fully understand yet.
A single senior or specialist hire, done wrong, would meaningfully set us back.
We don’t have a clear answer for “what does success in this role look like in 6 months?” before we start interviewing.
Two or more checked? Hiring isn’t your bottleneck; process and ownership are. That’s exactly what we fix.
Four steps, start to day one
Discovery and role alignment
We understand your business, culture, team dynamics, and success criteria — not just the job description.
Hiring strategy and search
We design a sourcing and assessment strategy aligned to your goals and market realities.
Candidates assessment
We rigorously assess skills, behaviors, and cultural alignment, not just CVs.
Hiring and onboarding
We guide decision-making, manage offers, and support the candidate experience from first contact to day one.
Flexible models, matched to how you hire
Most requested
Embedded Talent Acquisition
End-to-end recruitment, fully integrated into your business
- Full ownership of the recruitment lifecycle
- Hiring strategy and job design
- Sourcing, assessment, offers
Best for: Ongoing or fast-scaling hiring that wants consistent quality.
Fractional TA leadership
Senior TA leadership without the full-time commitment
- Design, fix, and scale your TA function
- Structure, clarity, accountability
- Strategic direction, not just candidates
Best for: Leadership teams that need strategic direction and long-term capability, not just more candidates.
Partial-cycle support
Targeted expertise exactly where you need it most
We support specific stages of the hiring process:
- Active sourcing and talent mapping
- Candidate screening and shortlisting
- Market and salary benchmarking
Best for: Companies with internal hiring ownership who need expert capacity or market access.
Before you ask
We already use a recruitment agency. Why change?
Agencies are built to close individual roles fast and for a one-off, low-complexity hire, that’s often the right tool. What they’re not built for is owning your hiring process, culture fit, or what happens after someone accepts. If you’re hiring more than a handful of roles a year, or the roles are high-stakes, that gap gets expensive.
Can you work within our existing ATS?
Yes. We can work inside the tools you already run, rather than asking you to adopt something new.
We’re hiring across multiple countries. Does that change the approach?
It should. Talent markets, candidate expectations, and compliance considerations differ by country. That cross-border judgment is core to how we work, not an add-on.
What if we’re not sure which engagement model fits?
Tell us what you’re trying to hire and how often, and we’ll tell you honestly which model fits, including if the answer is a lighter-weight option than what you were expecting to pay for.
Let’s build a hiring process that actually holds up
Get in touch and let’s figure out, honestly, what your hiring actually needs, not what an agency wants to sell you.