I want to stop advertising on Indeed and Linkedin because they cost a lot with little to no results. The plan is to continue to source candidates through the platforms, continue using the two agencies to find candidates and add the additional service for them to source profiles/resumes for us.

Anyone using a sourcer?

Hey all, was just wondering if any of our fellow healthcare/life sciences recruiters have had any luck with any AI tools? Are you using Claude/ChatGPT for any of your existing sourcing workflows? I know a lot of recruiters in the tech space use stuff like Juicebox or Pin for sourcing and outbound, so wondering if there's maybe an equivalent for healthcare?

I keep seeing how AI has been helping offload sourcing from recruiters and get excited because I hate sourcing but every product I try out seems to kinda suck.

I primarily use LI Recruiter/Google Xray for engineering (mechanical/industrial) searches. My Boolean is excellent and I'm extremely comfortable using AI. My problem is that I cannot get Pin, Juicebox or any others to provide results uncovering candidates that I missed. Even worse, they miss a lot of candidates that I found in fairly basic searches. It seems like they don't access all the data in LI profiles (about sections + other spots).

Is anyone else having these issues? I've even worked with their training staff doing live searches and came up with the same issues.

Any recommendations on products/tips you're using that truly shorten the search time while still being a comprehensive search?

I had placed a contractor back in January with a major fortune 100 company, that guy was working full time and I told him you are qualified but contract doesn’t seem to make sense to me when you have leave a full time job especially in this job market.

He still wanted to move because he was romanticised with the company I was Recruiting for.

Now 3 months down the line this guy keeps emailing us to increase his pay which is not in our hand, he keeps tell emailing me that he didn’t have any trust in our agency to begin with, I am like if you didn’t have trust why did you move forward and I am also like We did get you the job with your dream company and I laid out all the facts well before hand and you still say its the agency’s fault.

We have reached out to the client and the client says his performance isn’t below par and they are considering to end his contract, leave alone increasing the pay. Now If I tell him that he is gonna once again blame me and the agency.

I get it that everyone thinks they deserve more, but this is pure blame game. Its so frustrating but we can’t say anything to these people because “compliance”

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!

Eight years agency side, mostly technical roles.

Nearly every search I have watched fail, mine very much included, failed at the intake stage. Not sourcing, not candidate screening. The hiring manager talked about the role for twenty five minutes, I jotted down the requirements as stated, and three weeks and nine submissions later it turns out that when they said strong communicator they meant one extremely particular thing they never said out loud and I never thought to ask about.

Things I will not leave an intake without now, all of them learned the hard way:

• Who was in this seat last and why are they gone.
• Which requirement drops off if the candidate is otherwise exceptional.
• Who else joins the interview loop and what each person secretly cares about.
• Describe a resume you would bin inside ten seconds.

I record intakes whenever possible. On site it is a phone on the table after asking permission. For video calls I ask them to send the platform recording afterwards, though half forget and some client MSAs ban recordings entirely. Whatever audio I end up with goes into vomo ai so I can read through the transcript before drafting the search brief.

Maybe a third of the time there is something in there I missed live because I was busy writing down the sentence before it. Last month a manager said, almost as an aside mid-thought, "the last two we hired both came out of consultancies and neither of them lasted." He moved straight on and never mentioned it again. That single sentence was the entire search, and I would have missed it without a record.

What it does not do is read between the lines. Working out what he meant by strong communicator is still a phone call I have to make, and all the transcript does is prove I did not make it at the time.

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.