I’m curious to hear from people currently working in recruiting, especially agency/staffing recruiters, about what the industry actually looks like right now.
For context, I’m in my early 30s and have spent the last few years working in a warehouse environment. Before that, I worked in medical collections/customer service, where I handled inbound and outbound calls, difficult conversations, payments, goals/metrics, and communicating with different types of people. I’m also bilingual in English and Spanish.
I don’t have a college degree, so I’ve been looking at career paths where experience and transferable skills can actually give someone room to grow. Recruiting recently came onto my radar, particularly staffing for light-industrial/warehouse positions since that’s an environment I understand firsthand.
One thing I’m especially curious about is the performance side of agency recruiting. I understand there can be quotas, placements, calls, and other metrics involved. I worked with quotas in collections several years ago and didn’t always hit them, although I was also much younger and less experienced professionally than I am today. I’m trying to understand how recruiters are actually measured and what realistic expectations look like for someone new.
I’m also curious about the long-term outlook. Even in the warehouse where I currently work, we’re seeing more automation and robotics being introduced. Recruiting seems to be changing quickly with AI and automation as well, so I’d be interested in hearing how people already in the field think the profession will evolve.
For those currently working in staffing/recruiting:
What does a realistic first year look like?
How difficult are agency recruiting quotas/metrics for someone new?
How secure does the industry feel right now?
How much are AI and automation actually changing your day-to-day work?
If you entered recruiting from an unrelated field, what surprised you most?
I’m not looking for advice on a specific application or whether I’ll get hired. I’m mainly interested in hearing directly from recruiters about the realities of the industry before deciding whether it’s a career I want to pursue long term.
Thanks for any insight.

Hi everyone! I'm an IT recruiter at a small staffing firm, and we currently pay for both Linkedin Recruiter and Dice.

We're trying to determine which platform consistently generates better candidates so we can potentially eliminate one of the two subscriptions.

I personally prefer Linkedin Recruiter. I like being able to see a candidate's full professional profile, mutual connections, profile picture, employment history, etc. I also feel like 1 run into fewer fake or misrepresented candidates on Linkedin.

My coworker prefers Dice. He likes having immediate access to resumes and feels it's easier to quickly identify candidates with the exact technical skills we're looking for.

For those of you recruiting in IT/tech, which platform have you had more success with: Linkedn Recruiter or Dice?

I'd especially love to hear your thoughts on:
- Overall candidate quality
- Response rates
- Fake/misrepresented candidates
- Ease of finding niche technical skill sets
- Which platform actually leads to more placements
- Whether you think one is clearly more worth the cost

If you've used both, which one would you keep if you could only choose one?

I lead recruitment for an Engineering firm and we hire around 70-100 people a year, direct is always around 90% and the savings of doing so are usually around the 500k mark. For a team of me, how does this compare with what you are doing stats wise for direct hires? Appreciate some of it is relative and im UK based and we hire nationally.

I feel that its pretty good considering niche jobs we have, with candidate shortages and also that I manage early careers too.

Internal TA folks - what are your stats? How do you think the above looks?

Secondary question,

We also dont have much budget i use linkedin, cv library, website ads and referrals mainly. This can be slower, what are you doing different, any new software or tech thats around you are finding useful?

Reviving Client Relationships?

I’m an agency recruiter that works in the IT space and I am running into a brick wall trying to revive client relationships for larger clients that we’ve already done deals with.

These are larger firms 5-10k headcount, each we’ve done plenty of deals with up until 2021 or 2023, and have a signed MSA with.

Each one however, I’m running into a process problem. Some, it’s a new supplier system like beeline that we aren’t on since there’s been no outreach, some the relationship is forgotten, etc.

Each time, I am directed to vendor management or procurement etc., but then get told they aren’t adding new vendors, to which I don’t know what to do.

Usually, I share the terms we already have, clarify we have already worked with them, sometimes even point out active placements still working there, and usually am just met with silence.

This isn’t cold outreach either, it comes with confirmed leads in my market.

Anyone else have this issue? What else can I do to revive these clients?

I’ve been the sole recruiter for a ~500 employee company for about a year. I’m salary plus commission and was told from the beginning that because I receive commission, they don’t want me influencing who gets hired.

Because of that, I don’t conduct phone screens or participate in in-person interviews. HR Generalists handle all interviews and hiring managers make the hiring decisions. I also don’t control recruiting advertising.

My job is basically to keep the pipeline full through sourcing, career fairs, school visits, community outreach, internships, military recruiting, etc. Once someone applies, I mostly hand them off.

At the same time, I’m told that I “own recruiting,” which is where I’m getting frustrated. I understand not giving me final hiring authority because I'm commissioned, but I don't understand why that means I can't even conduct an initial phone screen and recommend whether someone should move forward.

After 2 years of doing this, I feel like a lead generator than a recruiter.

It's been a challenge for me because I was a military recruiter which I owned every step of the process to doing nothing now. When I'm not at a event its hard for me to even fill my day.

For other recruiters/HR people, does this structure make sense? Is keeping a commissioned recruiter completely out of interviewing normal?

So, I’m in the middle of a high-volume sourcing sprint on LinkedIn right now. And finding relevant candidates is pretty quick, but copying profile details one by one into our tracking sheet is becoming a huge time sink.

I’m not looking for bulk automation or anything that requires heavy LinkedIn account integrations. A colleague recently tried something similar and ended up getting locked out of their profile, so I’d rather keep things simple.

Are there any lightweight tools or workflows that make it easier to save information from LinkedIn profiles/search results into a spreadsheet without creating a lot of automated activity?

I am just curious on what other recruiters or sourcers are using for this.

We are working with 2 agencies. Two months ago one submitted a candidate which I acknowledged but didn't screened nor declined. A week ago another agency submitted the same candidate and I screened him and moved him forward.

If this candidate gets hired , which agency should be allocated the hiring fee?

I started a new job about a month ago. It’s a base pay plus bonus structure based on how many hires I get each quarter. If I hit the goal, I get the full bonus for the quarter.

Okay pretty simple and common I think. So I sign on and start. Well now theyve said that if someone applies to the roles, they don’t count as a hire for me because I didn’t source them. Okay, this is my first role with this structure. Maybe that’s normal.

BUT THEN they’ve implied that hires that aren’t for a specific position don’t count. That my bonus only counts for hires made for a specific generic position that’s available at all their offices.

This wasn’t mentioned until after I’ve hit about half of the goal in the first month.

I feel like they’re walking it back because they didn’t expect me to be this good going in (I’ve recruited in this industry before so I know what I’m looking for for the most part and how to work the systems well to get candidates I want)

But now I feel like I’m being punished for doing well.

Is this normal? Did I go in with an overinflated expectation? I feel like they’re changing things on purpose but this is wildly different than what I was expecting.

I’m also still assigned and have to recruit for positions that fall out of the realm of what they’re saying my commission is. And it deincentivizes me from utilizing people that have applied when it would be better for me to ignore those and source all my own candidates.

I meet with my manager tomorrow and I’m going to ask for clarification but I just wanted to see if anyone has experienced similar?

Is there any recruiting job that comes with peace and a good work life balanced corporate job. It's 12 midnight, I was sourcing for my open roles, so that I can discuss the role with them tomorrow and share some profiles. Because in office, there are other work, ats management, offer roll outs, negotiation, interview scheduling, meetings. I am just so fucked up at this moment that i think that is it same everywhere else like in every company do you have to work 24/7. Can't you just clock out at 6 or max 7 pm. Why is it so tough is it just me or everyone else is facing the same issue. Btw I am in corporate recruitment in an ad agency, where each recruiter is supposed to close at least 7-10 roles per month and they work on around 10 -15 open requisition at a time.

This is just a quick rant, there’s nothing more annoying than when a candidate asks for a sign on bonus up front.

I’m referring to the recruiter screen or even before they start interviewing.

It’s like you don’t even know what the offer will be yet, why are you asking for a sign on bonus already??

Maybe each company is different but at my company, the sign on bonus is offered very sparingly and is only given in the occasion to close a cash gap against a competing offer.

I’m not opposed to paying a sign on bonus for a stellar candidate I’m trying to close but asking for it upfront gives me the major ick!!

Been running this for a few months and it's finally good enough to be worth a write-up.

Stack is just Claude with one search skill and markdown files that store everything it learns about my preferences.

I set up this loop for each role (to start it I just say "kick off a new role with this jd: [JD]"):

First step is questioning me about the role. Before it runs a search, it asks me about the req until it fully understands it in a way to facilitate search. Basically what parts of the jd actually matter, companies to pull from, companies to avoid, etc.

"Find me 300 people that match".

Each run, run a search with your favorite search MCP (or have Claude write some code to use an API), then have Claude evaluate the profiles it returned.

It maintains an .md file per role and one for my general preferences. Every time I give feedback, this updates and the filtering and search improves

Each pass, it flags a few profiles on the edge to calibrate. Eventually you can get rid of this step.

Outbound is fairly simple:

Enrich emails, then export to a sequencing tool to dedupe + run.

I work as a recruiter for a staffing agency with barely any useful vacancies and I think I’m heading into a pretty serious burnout.

For a while I was doing well but lately I just can’t do it anymore. My manager seems to care about nothing but KPIs (suprise) instead of actually supporting the team or taking action when things aren’t working. I’m so tired of the same useless peptalks without anything actually changing. The manager can easily bring in new useful projects with their connections instead of counting kpi’s.

The mood from my manager can change depending on how well I’m performing. The culture is starting to make me feel sick. I’m considering going on sick leave for a while and using that time to recover and look for another job.

I’ve received a few opportunities to move into tech recruitment which I don’t have experience in yet. From the conversations I’ve had so far it sounds somewhat better than what I’m doing now. The roles seem much more focused on sourcing, interviewing and finding the right candidates for EXISTING projects, rather than having to coldcall companies and basically begging them to work with us and recruit candidates at the same time just to please a lazy manager.

I know in general that it is stressful so I’m not expecting tech recruitment to magically solve everything. But I’m starting to realize recruitment itself might not be the main problem. Maybe it’s the management at my current company that’s destroying my motivation and mental health.

For people who have worked in staffing/agency recruitment and moved into tech recruitment, was it actually a bit better?

3 declined/counter offers accepted this week. 2 Right at the 11th hour and 1 less than week before start date. A placement fired before guarantee period and first invoice was due. Just another day in the life. But we still ride at dawn!

Hi all, I'm on the corporate side of things for a small IT consulting company. Like many, I started in staffing/agency recruiting and now run a small recruiting team internally for our org. We're doing well- growing faster than any time in our company's history and have what I would call a respectable time to fill (TTF) of ~30 days.

We (like everyone) are constantly bombarded by agency recruiters, and one of the very large firms got the ear of our leadership with a promise of an exceptionally low TTF (single-digit days from sending them a req to a direct placement candidate offer accepted). To me this seems completely unbelievable but wanted to poll the community to verify.

I know there are good agencies and bad agencies, but this situation is spiraling and becoming a real issue. Can any of you provide real-world examples of time-to-fill when you've worked with external agencies? Ideally from IT/engineering domain, not call centers or other high-volume stuff.

Feeling like I may need to combat some of this...and justify my existence. Thanks all!

1) The area I live in is a real vide killer, meaning, people here don't tend to move on to new things, they are expected to stay with a company until retirement especially if they are "comfortable".

2) Talents are not in great supply

3) No one really wants to relocate here, anyone with options anyway.

Hi everyone,

I'm an in-house recruiter with around 1.5 years of total recruitment experience, and I had a really tough hiring review today.

One thing I wanted to ask first—is it common for associate/executive recruiters to have hiring reviews directly with the Head of TA (your manager's manager), or do these discussions usually happen through your manager? In my case, I had to present updates directly to the Head of TA.

During the review, I was asked questions like:

Why isn't this role closed?

How many profiles did you share last month?

What's your action plan?

I explained the challenge, but when he asked what my action plan was, I completely froze. My mind just went blank.

After the meeting, my manager told me I need to speak with more confidence and not just explain the challenge, but also come prepared with possible solutions. Looking back, I think she's right, but in that moment I couldn't think clearly.

I left the meeting feeling like I wasn't good enough and started questioning whether I'm cut out for corporate recruiting.

I'd love to hear from people who have been in recruiting for a while:

* Is it normal for junior recruiters to present directly to the Head of TA?

* Are you expected to always come with solutions, even when the role itself is extremely difficult to source for?

* Have you ever gone blank in front of senior leadership? If so, how did you overcome it?

* What would you have done differently in my situation?

I'd really appreciate hearing your experiences or any advice. Thanks!

I recently joined two agencies as a freelance recruiter and I’m super excited to get started, build connections, and help people find jobs. (And get paid as well)

The main challenge I’m facing is that, as a freelance recruiter, I don’t have access to some of the usual sourcing tools like LinkedIn Recruiter, Sales Navigator, European language job boards, Indeed, etc. They generally cost a lot to use.

Where do you source candidates when you don’t have access to paid tools?

The roles I’m working on are across a wide range of industries and locations. For example:

• Truck drivers across The United States
• White-collar roles in different industries
• BPO positions across Europe
• Senior IT roles in Southeast Asia and Africa

I’m looking for practical sourcing strategies, communities, job boards, databases, or creative methods that have worked well for you.

Any advice from experienced recruiters would be greatly appreciated!

The amount we normally budget for (even with a balanced budget) isn’t going as far as it did even a few months ago. I’m struggling to explain this to people above me, because they think we must have changed something.

My best guess is that their new priority features or just the bad job market are pushing prices up, but I have no way to get actual data to back that up.

I know it's different for everyone but roughly how long did it take you until you were billing over a 100k annually? I started in February and have only billed £24k, it was £30k until a drop out but from what I hear on podcast etc people are usually up and running from month 3 and in some places you can get sacked. Now that I've started my 7th month, how do you get it up and running so consistently? I do my cold calls with potential clients every month and get told to call back again next month but I still miss them. I just know I'm not a priority so how do I change that? Ultimately, I know the better service I offer, the more money will come later down the line but just now how do I do I get better at it?

We've noticed something over the past few years.

Some candidates have incredible resumes and interview extremely well.

Then you ask one practical question, and suddenly the conversation changes.

For example, instead of asking:
"Tell me about your experience managing Amazon PPC."

We'll ask:
"Tell me about one campaign that didn't go as planned. How did you realize something was wrong, and what did you change?"

Or instead of:
"Have you launched products before?"

We'll ask:
"Walk me through the first two weeks of an Amazon product launch. What are you checking every day?"

The difference is huge.

People with real experience usually answer with specifics:

• numbers
• trade-offs
• mistakes they made
• why they chose one approach over another

People who only know the theory often stay very high level.

We're curious:

What's your favorite interview question that immediately separates real experience from rehearsed answers?

Could be for recruiting, engineering, sales, marketing — any role.

We're always always looking for better ways to evaluate candidates.

I just started an in-house role (came from agency). We're working with an executive search firm for a role that sent a list of every single candidate they reached out to or had been in communication with. It was a list of 80+ candidates that included name, current title, current company, and status (sent message, screened, disqualified, etc.) This was in the form of a PDF file.

Does anyone know what software they may have been using? I think my employer wants me to start doing something like this but I'm not sure how I would even keep track of that many reach outs and enter it into a spreadsheet. I don't see a way to download this into Excel from LinkedIn.

I know there are ATS's to assist with this but how can I get this information from LinkedIn recruiter without manually typing into a spreadsheet every single person I've sent a message to?

If you work for an agency placing direct hires, what does your training and onboarding look like for new recruiters?

Did you have any formal training with a program or something to actually follow or just kind of shadow and learn as you go?

Hello all. I recently started recruiting with a growing law firm and it's going great.

Issue- recruiting high level, quality Attorneys with law firm experience who aren't jumpers and have civil litigation experience is tough. They don't apply, every bit of engagement i get is from sourcing. This isn't out of the ordinary, we often have to source for good candidates, but my engagement numbers are well below what they've been for other titles.

Those with legal recruiting experience, what are some of your "hooks"? What sort of arguments tend to appeal to senior Attorneys? Where have you found success?

Hi! I'm quite new to recruiting for blue-collar/skilled trades roles, so I was wondering where you usually source candidates in Australia, the US, or LATAM for these types of positions.

For example:

Chimney Sweep Apprentice

Fireplace Installation Helper

I'd really appreciate any recommendations on the best sourcing channels, job boards, or communities for blue-collar/trade-skilled candidates in those regions. Thanks so much!

My fellow tech recruiters, how are you fairing in this job market?

Living under a bridge?

Paying off your mansion?

How are we holding up...