Recruitment & Staffing Solutions

There is a number that every recruitment agency owner knows but rarely says out loud: the percentage of their recruiters’ time actually spent recruiting.

Industry surveys put it between 30% and 50%. The rest — the majority of a recruiter’s working week — goes to scheduling interviews, formatting CVs, chasing timesheets, updating the ATS, sending status emails to clients, writing job descriptions, coordinating reference checks, and a dozen other tasks that require no recruiting skill whatsoever.

An 8-desk agency with recruiters billing $350,000 each has $2.8 million in annual revenue. If those recruiters spend 55% of their time on admin, that means $1.54 million worth of recruiter capacity is being burned on tasks a system could handle. Not better technology for sourcing. Not AI-powered candidate matching. Basic operational plumbing: sending the right email at the right time, updating the right field in the right system, reminding the right person about the right deadline.

The technology exists to fix this. Your ATS has automation features you’ve never configured. Your email client can do far more than you’re asking it to. The problem isn’t a lack of tools — the average recruiter already uses eight or more. The problem is that nobody has connected them. Your ATS doesn’t talk to your calendar. Your calendar doesn’t trigger your follow-up emails. Your follow-up emails don’t update your pipeline. So your recruiters become human middleware — copying data between systems, remembering what happens next, and hoping nothing falls through the cracks.

Meanwhile, the agency across town that figured this out three months ago is responding to candidate applications in 60 seconds instead of 6 hours. They’re confirming interviews before your recruiter has finished checking availability. They’re sending client shortlists while your team is still formatting CVs. In recruitment, speed is everything. Not because faster is better in the abstract — but because top candidates are gone in 10 days. Every hour of admin delay is an hour your competitor uses to make the placement you were working on.

The articles in this section break down the specific operational problems that eat recruiter time, cost agencies placements, and create the feast-or-famine revenue cycle that every agency owner dreads. Each one examines the real workflow — not the idealised version in your ATS vendor’s marketing, but the messy reality of what actually happens between job order and placement — and shows where automation closes the gaps your current tools leave open.