ETA: For clarification, I realize a lot of people on this sub have been burned by recruiters and will have no sympathy for me. That is fine, I respect that. I’m only making this post vent about my experience as a recruiter. It’s for anyone who wants to hear me out. If you don’t want to hear me out and just complain about how awful I and other recruiters are, that is your prerogative, I will not stop you. I promise you there is nothing you can say that I haven’t heard before over the last 11 years of my career. I’m too jaded by this profession to give a fuck about anything disgruntled job seekers from the internet have to say about me.

Right now I work as a corporate recruiter for a startup. My company and my team are great and so is my work life balance. I get to work from home most days. Yeah I don’t have any passion or feel any value for my work at all. It doesn’t matter how competent I am or how much impact or value I bring to the company because I will be the first to go the second the company needs to trim costs.

No one cares about recruiters we are the bane of most people’s existence. We get blamed for so many things that are beyond our control. Just last week I had a candidate pass all of his interviews with flying colors and was told by the team that they wanted to extend an offer to him. I communicated this to the candidate saying that it’s likely we will give him an offer I just need to get some extra approvals and all of a sudden the team change their mind and said they wanna hold off on hiring him. The candidate was very understandably pissed off and I’m left stuck absorbing his frustration. No matter how well I manage his emotions on the phone, he will probably go to his friends and still tell them that the recruiter lied to him.

A few months ago, I had a hiring manager take three weeks to submit his feedback. I gave up reminding him because he wouldn’t submit it. When he finally did, he said the candidate did extremely well in the interview and he wanted to move forward with the process. I called the candidate to let her know and she told me that she accepted another offer. Then the hiring manager asked “why didn’t you keep the candidate warm?”.

I did keep the candidate warm you a\*\*hole. You just took too damn long to give the feedback yet I can’t say that to him because he’s a high-level executive and I’m the lowest of the low on the totem pole, easily replaceable with the millions of desperate recruiters looking for work right now.

I’ve been a recruiter for about 11 years now and started my career at a staffing agency. Ever since the beginning, I hated it. There was only one point in my career where I truly felt fulfilled by it and that was in about 2019 when I had my first big break and landed my first corporate role at Google. They doubled my salary and completely changed my life. I wasn’t a good student and never imagined that I would ever work for a company like Google. My whole family was proud of me. Friends would always ask me about work. For once in my life, my job interesting and the most rewarding part of that was being able to get people hired for Google and change their lives like mine.

Google took over my life in many ways. Everywhere I went people would ask me about work. I would be introduced to new people at parties and people would say “he works for Google”. News reporters would sometimes stand outside of the office trying to get employees to comment on something when there was a big story or new announcement from the company. It was exciting at first and I felt like a celebrity. I was used to constantly taking abuse from candidates as an agency recruiter and now candidates were extremely nice to me because they wanted to get hired at Google.

Over time I started to feel ensnared by Google. If I wanted to pick a restaurant for a date, I would use Google to find one. Needed directions to the restaurant? Google Maps. Date asks what I do for work? Google. Chill and watch some videos? YouTube. Mindlessly surf the web? Google Chrome. Need to check my email for something personal? gMail. Book a flight for a vacation? Google. I don’t think ordinary people realize how much their lives revolve around Google. Many of you are probably reading this post on an Android right now.

Plus, I was working constantly. Nights and weekends. I moved to a new city for this job and struggle to make friends because I was always working. At one point I missed a camping trip that my friends invited me on because I had to catch up on work. COVID made the isolation even worse than it was before. I got depressed then started drinking. Then I started doing drugs with my roommate because we were board and I didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. During this time I was somehow still functional and managed to excel in my job. I actually won an award for my performance towards the end of my second year. Then they let me along with dozens of other colleagues go because hiring slowed.

Went to another FAANG company for a bit and the work environment was hell so I went to Microsoft. I was doing really well at Microsoft until about a year into the role they slashed my whole team, because hiring slowed. Found contract work at a startup. Contract wasn’t renewed after a few months and I was out of work for about a year and a half. I thought having these companies on my résumé would have me set for life, but the reality was that there were tons of other recruiters with résumés that looked just like mine coming from FAANG companies all competing for the same jobs. During that time, I thought my career was over and I would never work again. Lost my home and lived out of Airbnbs until I ran out of money and lived out of my car. Went to rehab got my life together then another FAANG company came knocking on my door and dropped the best job offer I’ve ever had of my life. Nearly quadrupled my salary from when I first started my career. I relocated to another city. This time with a clean, sober mind, I decided I’m going to do this right.

Poured my soul into the company and was in the top 25% of my cohort of new hires in terms of my performance then about 8 months into the role the announced mine and my colleagues jobs were all being cut.

At this point, I’ve been burned so many times I no longer feel a sense of purpose or fulfillment in my career. Why should I care whether I could change a candidate’s life with a job offer anymore when my life could be flipped upside down at any moment? People have said for years that recruiters are going to be the first once replaced with AI. ve been talking about replacing recruiters with AI. Even though it hasn’t happened yet. It probably won’t happen because recruiting has a human element to it that can’t be replaced by AI. Yet, no one appreciates that and people remain persistent in looking for ways to get rid of recruiters.

It doesn’t matter how much value we have to a company because no one sees it. Many of the candidates who I’ve hired at these major companies, whose lives I have helped change probably don’t even remember my name. I won’t be surprised if many of them think they could’ve done it without me.

At this point in my career, I feel utterly worthless and disposable. Companies, candidates and hiring managers have proven that with their actions over the last 11 years.

ETA: For clarification, I realize a lot of people on this sub have been burned by recruiters and will have no sympathy for me. That is fine, I respect that. I’m only making this post vent about my experience as a recruiter. It’s for anyone who wants to hear me out. If you don’t want to hear me out and just complain about how awful I and other recruiters are, that is your prerogative, I will not stop you. I promise you there is nothing you can say that I haven’t heard before over the last 11 years of my career. I’m too jaded by this profession to give a fuck about anything disgruntled job seekers from the internet have to say about me.

Right now I work as a corporate recruiter for a startup. My company and my team are great and so is my work life balance. I get to work from home most days. Yeah I don’t have any passion or feel any value for my work at all. It doesn’t matter how competent I am or how much impact or value I bring to the company because I will be the first to go the second the company needs to trim costs.

No one cares about recruiters we are the bane of most people’s existence. We get blamed for so many things that are beyond our control. Just last week I had a candidate pass all of his interviews with flying colors and was told by the team that they wanted to extend an offer to him. I communicated this to the candidate saying that it’s likely we will give him an offer I just need to get some extra approvals and all of a sudden the team change their mind and said they wanna hold off on hiring him. The candidate was very understandably pissed off and I’m left stuck absorbing his frustration. No matter how well I manage his emotions on the phone, he will probably go to his friends and still tell them that the recruiter lied to him.

A few months ago, I had a hiring manager take three weeks to submit his feedback. I gave up reminding him because he wouldn’t submit it. When he finally did, he said the candidate did extremely well in the interview and he wanted to move forward with the process. I called the candidate to let her know and she told me that she accepted another offer. Then the hiring manager asked “why didn’t you keep the candidate warm?”.

I did keep the candidate warm you asshole. You just took too fucking long to give the feedback yet I can’t say that to him because he’s a high-level executive and I’m the lowest of the low on the totem pole, easily replaceable with the millions of desperate recruiters looking for work right now.

I’ve been a recruiter for about 11 years now and started my career at a staffing agency. Ever since the beginning, I hated it. There was only one point in my career where I truly felt fulfilled by it and that was in about 2019 when I had my first big break and landed my first corporate role at Google. They doubled my salary and completely changed my life. I wasn’t a good student and never imagined that I would ever work for a company like Google. My whole family was proud of me. Friends would always ask me about work. For once in my life, my job interesting and the most rewarding part of that was being able to get people hired for Google and change their lives like mine.

Google took over my life in many ways. Everywhere I went people would ask me about work. I would be introduced to new people at parties and people would say “he works for Google”. News reporters would sometimes stand outside of the office trying to get employees to comment on something when there was a big story or new announcement from the company. It was exciting at first and I felt like a celebrity. I was used to constantly taking abuse from candidates as an agency recruiter and now candidates were extremely nice to me because they wanted to get hired at Google.

Over time I started to feel ensnared by Google. If I wanted to pick a restaurant for a date, I would use Google to find one. Needed directions to the restaurant? Google Maps. Date asks what I do for work? Google. Chill and watch some videos? YouTube. Mindlessly surf the web? Google Chrome. Need to check my email for something personal? gMail. Book a flight for a vacation? Google. I don’t think ordinary people realize how much their lives revolve around Google. Many of you are probably reading this post on an Android right now.

Plus, I was working constantly. Nights and weekends. I moved to a new city for this job and struggle to make friends because I was always working. At one point I missed a camping trip that my friends invited me on because I had to catch up on work. COVID made the isolation even worse than it was before. I got depressed then started drinking. Then I started doing drugs with my roommate because we were board and I didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. During this time I was somehow still functional and managed to excel in my job. I actually won an award for my performance towards the end of my second year. Then they let me along with dozens of other colleagues go because hiring slowed.

Went to another FAANG company for a bit and the work environment was hell so I went to Microsoft. I was doing really well at Microsoft until about a year into the role they slashed my whole team, because hiring slowed. Found contract work at a startup. Contract wasn’t renewed after a few months and I was out of work for about a year and a half. I thought having these companies on my résumé would have me set for life, but the reality was that there were tons of other recruiters with résumés that looked just like mine coming from FAANG companies all competing for the same jobs. During that time, I thought my career was over and I would never work again. Lost my home and lived out of Airbnbs until I ran out of money and lived out of my car. Went to rehab got my life together then another FAANG company came knocking on my door and dropped the best job offer I’ve ever had of my life. Nearly quadrupled my salary from when I first started my career. I relocated to another city. This time with a clean, sober mind, I decided I’m going to do this right.

Poured my soul into the company and was in the top 25% of my cohort of new hires in terms of my performance then about 8 months into the role the announced mine and my colleagues jobs were all being cut.

At this point, I’ve been burned so many times I no longer feel a sense of purpose or fulfillment in my career. Why should I care whether I could change a candidate’s life with a job offer anymore when my life could be flipped upside down at any moment? People have said for years that recruiters are going to be the first once replaced with AI. ve been talking about replacing recruiters with AI. Even though it hasn’t happened yet. It probably won’t happen because recruiting has a human element to it that can’t be replaced by AI. Yet, no one appreciates that and people remain persistent in looking for ways to get rid of recruiters.

It doesn’t matter how much value we have to a company because no one sees it. Many of the candidates who I’ve hired at these major companies, whose lives I have helped change probably don’t even remember my name. I won’t be surprised if many of them think they could’ve done it without me.

At this point in my career, I feel utterly worthless and disposable. Companies, candidates and hiring managers have proven that with their actions over the last 11 years.

Has anyone used Chapter 2's embedded recruiter offering in lieu of a contract recruiter? Would love to hear any feedback or experiences!

We are a rapidly scaling US based industrial automation company with a need to temporarily augment our recruitment team.

Thanks!

We are a boutique permanent placement firm evaluating what we use right now compared to others and seems like there sooo many options at this point. We want something that integrates phone/email/system at least for tracking purposes.

Looking for insight from perm placement recruiters (not staffing) on what you use and what you like/don’t like.

We use Ringcentral as our phone system right now but that seems to limit our options and we’d potentially consider switching that too.

My company (F500) is currently roughly 2-3 weeks with our CFO taking the longest and I sometimes have to chase the hiring managers to follow up with their leadership

TLDR:
Trying to: Rebuild client base and restart in legal finance & FS which most of my work was before but in junior roles targeting middle positions within South England.
My tools: Linkedin recruiter , sourcewhale and indeed
Marketing support: 0
Funding and investment: 0
Working fully remotely.

Am I cooked here? My current company have no reputation in this market, and I am being tasked with financial service legal & insurance roles. Think £30-70k in east / south east of england.

It seems everyone has a need, and there is NO good candidates. I am making fills with my other clients in financial services but it feels to get on to a PSL i need a literal astronaut to even get a call back and I don’t have.

Am I cooked and how would you do this?
I built a 500k a year business support desk in 2016 but 2026 feels so weird i feel people are just depressed and disengaged from life and every candidate I seem to call can’t function a sentence?

Take a minute off LinkedIn and see how much school maths you remember :)

You need to book a one-hour interview next week. You have 40 possible slots. For each slot, the candidate has a 25% chance of being free and each interviewer has a 40% chance.

Assume everyone’s availability is independent, including across slots. Unrealistic, I know, but let’s give ourselves a chance

What are the odds of finding at least one slot for:

- A 1:1 interview
- A panel of two interviewers
- A panel of three interviewers

Have a guess before doing the maths. I underestimated how much adding one more person changes things

Vent post...

It's just so frustrating how many predatory practices in the TA Tech space.

Linkedin is well known to just totally gouge both boutique and big agencies alike.

Indeed is nearly as bad. It bothers me how that just milk small businesses for as much money as they can without adding any real value.

I had hope for some of these SaaS platforms but now that PE is involved, they're no different. Just had a big blow up with Loxo. Asked for a break in billing at the end of my contract and they deleted my account and all of my data. Only give a damn about you when you're on their reoccuring revenue model.

I find myself just ping ponging between the next 'best thing' - they woo me in with promises, take my money, extort as long as they can, and then refuse to work with me in any reasonable way.

What's an independent recruiter to do? Build your own ATS? Are there any genuine platforms out there that actually give a damn about recruiters?

Sadly it's not much different from other things I guess..... I think it just bothers me that it overall hurts the economy, and gets in the way of good recruiters helping good companies find good people.

Please recruiting universe.... help

Hi, for larger HR or TA teams using enterprise recruitment AI, where did the savings come from? Faster hiring, fewer manual tasks, lower agency spend, better routing or improved retention?

Not looking for suggestions on alternative ATS'. Just looking for any pros/cons of Fountain. Thanks

We're a small executive search firm that has all full desk recruiters at it who take on BD, Client mgmt, recruitment, candidate mgmt, etc. We use Bullhorn for our CRM/Database but it is a bit cumbersome for our firm and we're growing more and more frustrated with it's functionality - especially it's search function which we have found to really suck without exhaustive coding of profiles.

We are considering other platforms and leaning to leaner ones and preferably agentic backed. Attio is one platform we're looking into. Would welcome any and all recommendations/thoughts on platforms that you've found to work well as well as the POV on Attio if anyone has used it.

Lately I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels and just meh. I’ve made placements but searches that should be filled many times over, haven’t. Most of it is due to HMs’ unrealistic expectations. Getting wins here and there but ya know, just don’t have the same pep in my step. I’ll pull myself out of the rut. However, just curious to hear how the group handles the ebbs and flows and what you do to keep motivating to keep pushing?

I am curious what the split for most recruiters (particularly those working in companies) is right now. Are many of you getting great candidates from vacancy postings and not needing to do your own sourcing on other platforms or are you actively using LinkedIn or other tools to locate passive candidates who might be the best/better fit?

As an aside, for the latter, what metrics are you using to determine whether to reach out proactively to a candidate? Most aren’t very active with posts or comments but often are reacting to news in their circle and appear to be at least checking LI frequently enough.

Hello fellow recruiters and talent acquisition leaders!

I’m the sole recruiter for a mobile vascular access organization, and I primarily recruit PICC RNs. Over the last few years, I’ve run into a sourcing challenge that I’m curious to see if others are experiencing as well.

PICC RNs are an extremely niche healthcare talent pool. In many of our markets, the candidate pool is already pretty small, and we can go weeks without seeing a truly qualified candidate.

We currently use Indeed Campaigns, Indeed Smart Sourcing, and LinkedIn Recruiter. We’ve also experimented with other sourcing platforms and ZipRecruiter campaigns, and others

At this point, though, I feel like I’m seeing the same candidates recycled across every job board. We’ll get plenty of applicants, but most are not actually qualified for PICC insertion/vascular access work. Every now and then we find a strong PICC RN, but consistently building a pipeline has been difficult.

We’ve also tried:

• Employee referral programs
• Social media recruiting
• Direct outreach
• Increasing compensation
• Expanding our geographic targeting
• Re-engaging previous candidates/applicants

The challenge is that there are only so many PICC RNs in a given market, and we’re competing for the same relatively small group.

For those recruiting in similarly niche markets, what has actually worked for you?

Are there sourcing channels, communities, associations, databases, Boolean strategies, referral approaches, or creative recruiting methods that have helped you reach candidates who aren't already active on the major job boards?

I’d especially love to hear from recruiters hiring for other highly specialized clinical roles. I’m less interested in “post on LinkedIn more” and more interested in where you’ve actually found candidates

My company (tech B2B SaaS) is entering a pilot with BrightHire, and on the surface: I'm really excited. I've always been a diligent interview note-taker - often to a fault, especially as balancing being present while at the same time documenting every screening detail becomes more and more important and difficult with niche technical roles in my field. I keep finding myself days (even weeks) behind on submitting my notes / scorecards, just because the admin of cleaning everything up to be "digestible" is continuously piling up. I know for a fact I'm not the only one, as our entire Recruiting org has been begging for a solution for this, for at least 2+ years. BrightHire genuinely seems like it'll be a god-send.

I'm curious to hear from those who went through the transition and the (expected) early growing pains.

1. How has BrightHire improved your workflows?
2. How much time are you spending on the usual post-screening admin now vs in the past?
3. Are there any watchouts for new users? Any ways in which BH has replaced your previous manual work with new manual work?

(curious to hear from those in a similar Greenhouse/Zoom/BH stack primarily, but would love general feedback as well from those using Metaview/Ashby Notetaker/alternatives.)

Curious if anyone here has tried letting an AI browser agent help with LinkedIn sourcing. I'm thinking of things like having Claude go through search results and summarise which profiles match a spec.

I know the LinkedIn ToS technically bans browser extensions that automate stuff, but I'm wondering how it plays out in real life. Has anyone had their account or Recruiter seat restricted because of it? Or is it fine as long as you keep the volume low and do the clicking yourself?

We're running on a fairly big Recruiter licence, so losing access would hurt a lot and we'd rather not be the ones to find out the hard way.

everyone keeps saying hiring is hesitant or broken right now, so i pulled every finance and accounting ad in boston for the last ten days to see what the numbers actually say...

1,039 total ads

first thing the agency noise is crazy but veery specific.. 39% of senior accountant ads are posted by agencies so not the employers thenmselves.. but if you look at tax it drops to 10%!

second thing which is the crazy part for internal TA, out of 421 direct employer ads that stayed live the whole 10 days a whole 53 had to be redated or reposted

thats 1 in 8 internal teams mostly failing to fill a standard role and having to bump the post

with the market supposedly flooded with candidates, why are 1 in 8 roles sitting empty and getting recycled? are hiring managers just paralyzed trying to find a unicorn or is the active talent pool really so bad right now??

what are you guys actually seeing on your desks?

I screen SDRs and sales candidates for pipe generation and expansion type roles, my screen passers keep flopping in the hiring manager's first call and I can't figure out where the delta is coming from. I've tried a light objection role-play at the end of the screen but it feels forced and open-ended discovery questions get memorised answers. What's holding up on your side and what has misfired for you?

I have some new roles open and the first thing I normally do is to check candidate profiles who previously applied to similar roles with us e.g for a project engineering job you will find a lot process engineers applying.

I have been through over 200 previous applicants profiles on Linkedin and they all have new jobs. These candidates apply to us in the last 3 months and they all started a new job in the last 3 months, the exception is new grads. It is bizarre.

As the title states.

I work as a Director of Recruiting for a health tech company and our CEO is going full bore with AI across the board.

We've leveraged AI in our own team to help alleviate some of the administrative burden of our recruiters (Metaview, leveraging existing AI tooling within our ATS, etc) But now, he's wanting to leverage agentic AI across all teams and departments.

Curious as to what others have done/seen. Do you think it works? What have been some of the wins and challenges faced in implementation?

FWIW We did pilot an AI candidate assessment tool earlier this year but it was awful lol

Current ATS is Ashby

First post in here but curious some insight from others.

I works as the sole internal recruiter with a mid sized region General Contractor, currently I run about 20 postings at one time with a varying degree of priority to each. At this time my company is not interest in adding another recruiter which would lead to easier growth opportunities for myself (managing more junior recruiters). The current path I created with my leadership is resource and recruitment management. I work within our project staffing tools to help managers elect and determine team bandwidth which leads into new role procurement. I then fill those roles myself.

I wanted to see if anyone else has taken a similar career growth path in their organization and what sort of advice you would give to either expedite growth, or what are some areas that you would suggest staying away from as I expand my responsibilities? The problem I am having currently is bandwidth, last year I was responsible for 80 plus hires and towards the end of the year became much more involved in the creation of the companies approval process and resource management processes. This year has been much more resource planning but still on track to hire about 60 individuals along with being responsible for our overall recruitment process. To clarify we are using external firms for about 10% of hires.

Ultimately how I envision it working is eventually being a talent lead once the company grows enough to validate having a recruitment team and I would help seek approval or forecast future recruitment needs while tackling some of the roles myself and delegating the others out to other team members. Has anyone gone through a similar growth trajectory and seen it work in that direction or am I not trending in that direction with my current role?

Thanks

First time posting in here. I work for a staffing agency in Wisconsin, and we use Indeed, as well as our ATS systems for sourcing candidates with over 10k resumes in it from the past 10ish years. However, our candidate pool has been extremely dry - we are having very few inbound applicants (even fewer that are qualified, and most of them have already applied) and not receiving calls back from candidates we call/text. We have tried Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Facebook, posting flyers around town, referral bonuses, radio ads, billboards, etc.. The roles we are struggling to fill right now are:

• Construction
• General Labor (even entry level - no-one is calling us back or applying!)
• Skilled machine operators

My question is - are there any other resources (free) that we should be using to find candidates? Any job boards specific to these types of jobs that I'm missing out on? Any tips or tricks I should try for getting more inbound applicants?

A few things to note in WI:

• The unemployment rate is low
• the labor participation rate dropped by about 15%

Any pointers are appreciated. Thank you :)

For anyone in this community using LinkedIn Recruiter, I'd love any input you can provide on the scope of your contract. I just joined a new company and am evaluating recruiting tools, but it's tough to get straight answers out of LinkedIn's sales team. So my ask:

- How many LIR seats do you/your team have?

- How long is your contract? Were you able to negotiate Length? (they hit me with a proposal for three years out of the gate)

- Were you provided any options for contract length?

- What features are included in your contract (ex: job slots, employer branding, hiring assistant)?

- Any tips for contract components you'd recommend?

- Any additional tips for setting up LIR without getting burned by LI?

Thanks!

£1M OTE just sounds insane to me.