No I was wrong the hotkeys do not work. When trying to recruit i need to click both my liberal and the target before choosing issues.
In the normal game you use 1-6 for squad and a-f for encounter.
Also in the original you do not need to specify what squad member if there is only one in the squad.
This makes it pretty much unplayable for me, recruiting is simply too tedious, specially without external mouse.
I love LCS but will stick to ascii version for now.