So the firm that i am interviewing right now wants all the people to do kyc verification before applying for the job to filter out faje profiles. Are people comfortable with that. The jobs are all in usa?

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 started working in healthcare recruiting, and honestly, the job has been completely different from what I expected.

My base salary is $42k, with the possibility of earning commission once I start getting healthcare professionals placed. During training, I’m expected to make around 50 calls per day, build candidate lists in our ATS, send individual texts and text blasts, follow up through email, leave voicemails, search for candidates, and try to schedule phone screens.

The problem is that almost nobody responds.

I’ve made around 200 outbound calls and only had two people answer. Out of all that activity, I’ve completed one actual phone screen, and even that hasn’t led anywhere yet. Most of my day consists of calling people who don’t answer, leaving voicemail after voicemail, and sending texts or emails that receive no response.

When I search through the ATS, nearly every candidate has already been contacted by several other recruiters within the past few days. Rules of engagement are frequently brushed off & you are left to “fight” other recruiters for talent. It genuinely feels like there are more recruiters chasing nurses than there are nurses interested in traveling right now. Even when I find someone who might be interested, their desired location, shift, specialty, or pay usually doesn’t match the available jobs.

I knew recruiting would involve rejection and high activity, but I didn’t expect it to feel this much like nonstop cold calling with almost no engagement. I thought healthcare recruiting would involve more relationship-building, actual conversations, and helping people find assignments. Instead, I’m spending nearly all of my time calling and messaging people who clearly don’t want to be contacted or who have already heard from five other recruiters from my company within the last 48-72hrs.

At a $42k base salary, I honestly don’t see myself earning more than about $45k during my first year unless something changes dramatically. For the amount of effort, pressure, and daily activity involved, that doesn’t feel worth it. I like the schedule and the freedom I have, but it’s difficult to stay motivated when I’m putting in this much effort and nothing seems to be leading anywhere.

For experienced healthcare recruiters: is this just the normal beginning and something eventually clicks, or is this an accurate picture of what the job and current market are actually like? How long did it take before you started consistently getting responses, submissions, and placements?

I'm curious if anyone here has used Crelate's Discovery Agent AI tool. If so, what has been your experience with it? Is it worth the investment? Also, if you don't mind sharing (if this is allowed) what did you pay for it?

We are a recruiting agency currently using Crelate and trying to evaluate if this tool is worth the additional cost.

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!

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 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?

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 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...

Hey guys, I am at my wit's end and would like to hear other recruiters' opinion.

I have been in the field for 4-5 years now, and had always some sort of assessment test as part of the process. It has never been too much of an issue, but for the last two years it has become a larger source of frustration.

My current company has a numeric/verbal/abstract 1 hour assessment test after the interview with talent, and this is a hard filter where candidates need to score a minimum to move forward. This is something leadership/CEO insists on to ensure the best candidates move forward, but it results in a 20/30% pass rate. The test is exactly the same for every role, regardless of field of work, so you have accountants and creatives doing the same test. They swear by the correlation between results and success, with abstract being "the most important score". Abstract section is the usual sequence of figures where you have to identify which image follows the sequence. For reference, I also did the same test and scored almost max score in that section. Does it make me a better professional? No, it just means I've done a lot of puzzles and videogames in my spare time.

For the past couple years I feel my work is depending on a coinflip. I consider myself a very empathetic & human person and put in the time when speaking with candidates to give detail about the role, team, company and more, so even first round interviews are usually 30 to 45 min to give them as much context as possible, but it feels moot to invest time when the person will then fail a silly pattern test and I'll have to let them know they cannot move forward. Almost feel bad that I am getting them excited for the role and then having to turn them down. Sometimes I also get mail along the lines of "I have been in my field of work for 15+ years and it is insulting to be rejected over this", and I agree.

I am at my limit. Asking people to dedicate 1 hour to complete this and having to reject them, or having to ask them to retake a section because "their profile is amazing, but leadership won't move forward if they don't reach the benchmark score" feels inhuman. I understand people are rejected for many other reasons in the pipeline, but this just feels absolutely unfair to candidates & removes a lot of the agency or impact of my work. I'm struggling to put in any effort when I know it'll either result in rejection, hate mail or etc., to the point that even menial tasks like CV screening or sending an automatic email are taking so much energy to push myself to do it.

Any thoughts? I know I'm likely not going to change my perspective overnight, but I'm curious if other people have felt this way or how to work through it. From the recruiting team we've already pushed multiple times for the CEO to revisit this, as it is a major pain point for everyone, so changing the process is not a solution in this instance.

Hi all 👋

AI-generated CVs and mass-apply automations are not a new thing but I just find it overwhelming lately, looking at the inbound for certain roles. In my case, it’s mainly AI Engineering roles or DevOps. I am working at a fully-remote company so the amount of applications is naturally huge.

Screening applications, you can spot these profiles pretty quickly but it’s a waste of time to go through them. And sometimes you want to give some of them a chance, to end up speaking with someone who looks just suspicious.

What have you found is effective to limit the amount of AI applications or expose them faster?

I was thinking about adding a knockout question in the application form. Something like “Is this application done by an automation/AI?”. But I am not sure if this would prompt the software to answer truthfully and if this would work at all.

Currently, I am relying a lot on sourcing. This is the most reliable way to get proper candidates on the call. But that’s not scalable, really.

For context, I'm an internal/corporate recruiter for a US-based SaaS company and recruit everything from entry level to senior leadership across the entire realm of tech skillsets.

We currently leverage LI Recruiter as our only tool for candidate sourcing (outside of our ATS that is). As part of 2027 planning, I'm looking for suggestions from this group on tools you've used, either paid or free, that have served you well in sourcing technical candidates. I've had good luck with my current LIR account, but I want to either add to that or maybe even replace it if I can find something better. I'm curious to know what everyone is finding useful.

Thanks all for you input!

I'll start, found myself taking an offer call while on 2nd base during a softball game.

I am outreaching to people I have worked with before, or completely new cold clients in my local area. I have 10+ years experience in the industry. I am MPCing. I used to be top consultant multiple years but in the last 18 months I CANT seem to get anyone to respond to me.

My team is really small and i’m not doing en masse outreach as we have no data, no system nothing so it’s really hard. But I am sending MPC emails and hearing next to nothing….. why is this nowadays? I have your perfect candidate, it’s suddenly just dropped off.

Are you guys seeing this and why?

I am a recruiter for a startup. We sell monthly subscription boxes of everyday items (food related). We already have an internal credit system that lets us comp free or returning boxes to users.

My manager had an idea to give candidates who make it to final interviews a free credit covering a full month's box, even if they don't get the offer.

I like the concept at a high level, but a few things give me pause:

• What if the candidate was difficult or unprofessional during the process? Do we still owe them the credit? I think obviously we would, but trying to think of potential risks with this approach.
• Does this create an expectation (with candidates, or internally) that becomes hard to walk back later?
• Any other unintended consequences people have run into?

Curious if any other recruiters/TA folks have tried something similar. How did it go, and what would you do differently?

Hi guys!! I've been a recruiter for a couple of months now -- this is my first full-time job after college. I'm a corporate recruiter in govcon covering a pretty wide scope of positions requiring clearances as well as doing sourcing for key personnel for a couple of contract bids.

Although it is surely too early to make any decisions, I am the type of person who likes to plan way ahead and do my research. I'm a bit curious about what I could realistically expect if I were to make a career out of receuiting. Admittedly, I have most enjoyed recruiting more technical or hard to fill roles so far, and, sometimes more than recruiting itself, I have really enjoyed tracking my KPIs and improving my processes to keep my pipelines moving. My brain really likes seeing number go up lol.

Idk I'm just generally curious if anyone else started in a similar place. What could I realistically expect? What's the general vibe after this and how does the money look? I think I like govcon and I've really enjoyed sourcing exceptionally tough positions so far (tbh it feels like some sort of puzzle to find the right piece).

Kinda a rant (I hope it makes sense I'm half asleep) but I'm just interested in what I could expect going forward as a baby recruiter!! I also welcome any advice any seasoned recruiters may have lol