r/recruiting

I’ve been wondering if others feel the same way about Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). I'm currently working with ICIMS but also I used BambooHR, Workday, Lever, ADP, SmartRecruiters, JazzHR and I always feel the same problem.

From my experience (and conversations in recruitment), it seems like a lot of strong candidates end up getting “lost” in ATS databases without ever being properly reviewed or moved forward in the hiring process.

It almost feels like these systems become a kind of “CV graveyard” where potentially great talent just sits without visibility.

Has anyone else experienced this from the recruiter side?

I start this chat acknowledging that I know what it's like to be in TA and understaffed, exhausted and struggling with your workload. I've been there very recently. But a quick reminder to close out your candidates. Specifically, those you've submitted for interviews.

This isn't some content creator crap. I'm only posting this here. If you don't like it, move on. Sorry if this is long - I'm wordy.

For those who hung in there and are following, I was laid off recently and unexpectedly. I haven't been on the job market for years. It was sorta unexpected and really shitty/scary because I know what it's like out there.

A few months before, I'd been interviewing someone for a role. I screened them and liked them immediately. Unfortunately, they didn't end up being a strong enough fit - just not senior enough for the position. So I emailed them, told them where things landed, and asked if they were willing jump on a quick call to walk them through the why. That candidate was really grateful as to how I handled the rejection and mentioned that they'd been ghosted by most of the recruiters they met with in the past. They were just grateful for the insight and information...

About 5 months later, my company lays off a shit ton of people unexpectedly, including me. I immediately start working my connections and thought I'd reach out to this candidate as we really hit it off and were in a similar industry. We talked and caught up and I learned they found a new job at a local company.

About 3 business days later they call me. They have a freelance gig referral for me. I interview, I take it. This week was my first week. I'm literally employed again about THREE WEEKS LATER.

Lesson is to keep your connections strong. Do right by your candidates. It's a really small world out there and yes, we're short staffed, but it pays off - and worst case, it just makes people feel like human beings.

Really grateful to keep working and again, I know how hard it is out there. Hang in there and keep your side of the street CLEAN with your candidates. I'm sure I'll get shit for this post, but just a quick and gentle reminder - treat your candidates LIKE GOLD. If comes back ten fold.

Small world.

We're a small startup, and one thing we've learned pretty quickly is that we just don't have the capacity to micromanage anyone.

When you're a team of 5–10 people, everyone wears multiple hats. Priorities change overnight, processes are still evolving, and sometimes there isn't even a playbook to follow.

What we really need are people with an ownership mindset. Not people who know everything, but people who notice problems, ask good questions, figure things out, and keep moving without waiting for instructions every hour.

The challenge is I don't know how to reliably identify those people before hiring. Resumes don't tell you much. Almost everyone says they're "self-motivated" or "proactive." Interviews help a little, but I've seen candidates interview brilliantly and then need constant direction once they join.

Would love to hear how other founders, hiring managers, or recruiters approach this. Where are you finding people who naturally take ownership? Are there certain communities, backgrounds, or hiring channels that consistently attract them? How do you screen for the skills & mindset?

And during interviews, what are the green flags that make you think, "This person will figure things out without me having to hold their hand every day"

Still trying to build a team that can grow alongside the company, and this feels like one of the hardest hiring problems to solve.

My wife is a recruiter at a well funded tech start up in San Francisco. She has been having such a hard time finding another recruiter to hire for her company. They do require 4 days in person in the office. Is that the reason? She doesn't seem to be receiving many applications and there isn't much interest. Where is everyone?

Edit: The pay is $150k-$200k + equity + 401k plus good health benefits. Requirements: 5 years of experience and previous work at a start up.

Uk recruiter recruiting office support HR finance etc.

For the last 4 months, I can’t fill anything?
10 years in the game, been consultant of the year 7+ times, but I actually can’t get anything to go my way. Am i just cooked now? The market can’t be this bad where clients just aren’t hiring anyone? The role isn’t even getting filled it’s just rolling on and on.

It doesn’t help that my clients who have good paying jobs mostly have gone internal i’m left with what feels people who are experiencing their first day on earth.

They don’t want to listen. They don’t want to pay more. They don’t want to hire it feels? There’s a problem with EVERYONE they see. EVERY CV they see. Even strong interviews are being declined and feedback is just absent?

Most of the time the jobs are just going on and on not really getting filled.

And if I do get a client interested the candidate isn’t. It is extremely painful.

Because I work in my own lane I have no peer to compare to as my colleagues do a completely different type of recruitment.

I don’t really have an option but to keep going as when it’s good it’s good but what is annoying me is there’s no rhyme or reason behind it all. Have I gotten so pissed off I just now don’t care? I genuinely can’t find any good candidates either.

My company has always had a little slippage from our new grad Engineering hiring where a couple of folks who accepted their offers later ghost us after accepting someone else's offer, but this year it has gotten out of control with like 25% of hires later pulling out.

Is this a trend others have noticed? Is there anything we can do about it?

We started overhiring a little based on the expectation of a reneg or two, but this year it really got away from us. It really hurts us as a smaller company that has been depending on those hires for upcoming initiatives for the past 6 months when they accepted, and we invested a lot of resources in interviewing this cohort and selecting these hires.

For context, we pay more than general FAANG, but less than some top AI labs and hedge funds, which is where people are going after shopping our offers around. We have very good glassdoor and blind ratings.

Hey I’m a fellow recruiter looking for another recruiter like me. I was wondering if anyone knows any recruiters or is a recruiter in the YouTube/ creative industry. That has a really good understanding of finding editors, producers, thumbnail designers, etc. Any help would be appreciated!

I do technical recruiting, mostly robotics, hardware and ML roles, and i got tired of every sourcing tool handing me 700 results where 500 obviously dont fit. So over a few months i built my own sourcing skill in Claude instead of paying for another platform, and it’s been the biggest change to how i work in years.

The biggest problem for me was that the tools fragment what you ask them. I'd search for an embedded engineer with CAN bus and motor control experience, and instead of people who actually had all three, it would surface anyone with any one of those words somewhere on their profile. The more context i gave it the worse the results got. And the data was constantly out of date, i'd find a perfect person who had actually started a new role months ago and the tool never caught it.

What i built runs the search the way i would. I describe the role, it pulls the live JD, then it makes me score about 5 candidates first so it learns my taste before it ranks the rest. That calibration step is the whole thing, after that the top of the list is people i'd actually pick up the phone for. It also surfaces the non-obvious ones, the candidate whose current title doesnt match but whose actual path does, which is the 25-35% the keyword tools just skip. It even picks up timing signals, like flagging when someone's company just got acquired, since thats usually when people there are open to a move.

It took real setup, a few weeks of me correcting it and writing down how i actually evaluate people before it got good, so its not a quick solution if thats what you're after.

On the stack, i use Crustdata for the people data since its live and properly filterable over an api. Prospeo for mobile numbers, it only charges you when it actually finds a verified number which is great. FullEnrich for email when Prospeo comes up short. That data layer is the part that makes or breaks all of this, the skill is only ever as good as what it can actually pull.

The payoff has been worth it though. Once a role is calibrated i can run 5-6 searches in an hour instead of one a day. I sourced a whole batch over a weekend in little gaps around my kid's birthday, which just wasnt possible before. And the first time i woke up to a finished search i hadnt sat over, clean enough to push straight into outreach. Picked up a couple clients i would've had to turn down otherwise.

When you see anything relating to 'agentic' in the world of recruitment facilitation - i.e. as in an agency advertising 'agentic' recruitment tooling, or agentic processes, what's your first though? .
it more like:

1. Shit, shit, need to catch up. These guys are way ahead of me
2. More slop - recruitment never was, isn't and won't be solved by machines
3. Machines are after my job - PANIC!
4. Bollocks, my bots are ahead of them Other ?

Been 15 years in the industry ans the AI wave is getting me too. As I can foresee. How do I upgrade folks. Any suggestions?

Hey everyone, I just landed a new job with a client and they're looking for maintenance technicians, mechanics, assemblers, and production supervisors. Since most of these folks aren't active on LinkedIn, getting reliable direct phone numbers has been a massive pain. What tools or platforms are actually working best right now for finding hands-on technical talent in manufacturing and getting good contact info? Thanks!

I've received hundred of applications on LinkedIn, but I want to send all the candidates who've applied a mass email inviting them for our Open Day. Is there a way for me to download all the applicants in one go rather than individually downloading AND saving (since LinkedIn doesn't let it go straight to your downloads tab)?

Thanks.

I'm an in-house TA lead for a startup and just got conned into doing a fake interview with a hungry UK agency recruiter. I had a suspicion it could be a fake role when I took his call because in his outreach message he mentioned that it was for a confidential client but he gave enough specific details where it could have been plausible. I got more suspicious when I saw that he'd worked in the UK for 10 years before coming to the US.

On our call he immediately started juicing me for info like the headcount of our company, my compensation, comp structure, what areas of our business we're growing. It was so transparent. I kept redirecting him to learn more about the role he'd reached out to me about and the mysterious client company. BTW I used to be on the agency side and used to do confidential work for clients but this guy was hilariously bad at dodging questions where I tried to narrow down more about the clients' area of the industry - I don't think he's ever worked on a confidential search in his life. At a certain point, maybe 10 minutes in after ineffectively responding to basic clarifying questions about the client company/their maturity/the role I think he realized the jig was up and seemed to run out of things to say.

I decided to put us both out of our misery and thanked him for his interest in my background and ended the call early. Beware of Linkedin messages peddling "Senior Talent Acquisition Partner (GTM & Corporate Functions) for a Global AI-first B2B SaaS organization."

we've been testing a few platforms for async video interviewing. HireVue and Spark Hire came up a lot in our research, both solid but pricing gets pretty steep once you're dealing with decent volume.

stumbled across Coensio which seemed to hit the right balance for our budget. the flow looks reasonable from what we've seen so far but haven't run a full cycle with it yet.

anyone used it? or found something else that doesn't break the bank while still giving you usable signal on candidates?

Hello, I'm sort of new to recruiting. I'm recruiting for a sales position where 've met with a few different qualified candidates, my last one is an interesting case.

They have the skills that I think would translate for the team, but no sales experience. The interesting factor that applies to every role, not just recruiting for sales is that they use a different first and last name compared to their legal name. They applied under that name on their resume, just in the formal "use your legal name section" I noticed a completely different name. The way we recruit has us screen the background early on for each candidate, so they are completely fine background wise. They didn't address it besides saying "my legal name is..." at the second stage interview where we covered some basic legalities. I guess this could be normal because that's the name they go by? Same gender style of name to clarify. I've only seen it with a first name, not both. Hope to get some advice, and perhaps stories from your experiences.

Seemed a bit odd to me. Would you second guess, or push for answers? Trying to make sure that the team were building is here for the long run.

TLDR: Office support recruitment in UK local area targets seem high. No data provided no where to get leads from no prospects nothing just a phone. Thoughts?

I have been at a newish company for about 4 years. They are a small - medium sized business that focused on a different type of recruitment but I got brought in to focus on new higher margin work. It went well first two years I hit and exceeded target.

Since the markets gone a bit weird, and vacancy rates in uk market are dropping a few things have happened that make me feel like i’m going insane?

Can someone from the market tell me if this is normal, I have no friends in recruiting anymore.

April targets were set:
- Team manager , expected to bill £300k in office support in a local market
- Team members between £160,000 - £250,000 per year in office support in a local market

That in itself isn’t the main problem although, it’s that they won’t invest in any company data. So when someone starts they just get a phone and that’s it and have to make £80k in probation. We’re not talking mega experienced hires here either

For an office desk with no clients, no data, no ways of finding leads etc it seems a bit steep. This is without a specialism btw, i’m talking like bog standard office recruitment

I’ve tried to get zoom info and stuff but won’t do it

Does this seem like just how it is? I remember in previous jobs you’d at least get a data set of 100 companies or something!

I’ve been trying to get my own firm back off the ground moving away from contingent towards retained but am in a tight spot with money so I’ve been applying to way too many hourly part time jobs advertised online. Those rarely even send rejection notices out, and I’ve been more than qualified for the bulk I’ve applied for. Is there a good method for securing part time hourly work in the search field? I had good luck running a list of boutique firms a while back and reaching out to leadership/owners about potential employment options but now I’m shifting away from the idea of joining a firm full time and need to see what I can identify for some part time work to get money coming in. Open to any ideas that have worked for others, I need to secure about $4k per month for bills/life to buy myself enough time to give my startup a real chance to grow.

But candidates complain that employers use AI too.

AI-written job descriptions. AI screening. AI interviews. AI-generated rejection emails.

Feels like we're heading toward a world where AI is talking to AI, and humans occasionally join the call 🤡

WDYT?

Solo recruiter at a tech start-up. I’ve been at the company for years, but maybe over the past 9 or so months we seem to be really struggling with the folks we hire. It’s become even more prevalent over the last few months or so: we’ll hire a candidate and then a few months later (sometimes as soon as 30 days in) the team will come to us and say the new hire isn’t working out and we’ll have to fire them. The reasons vary: they think the person is lazy, not picking up the tech fast enough or not ramping up fast enough, they aren’t as good as the other people on the team, or even just that the person turns out to not be a good culture fit. This is happening to maybe 10 recent new/newer hires on various teams.

WHAT is going on?! Anyone have insight? The teams are making the decision to hire these candidates and don’t make any objections during the interview processes! However, after the fact, I hear that they “knew” the hire would be bad but they picked the “least bad” candidate out of all the “terrible candidates” presented to them.

I have never experienced this in the 15+ years I’ve been recruiting. Is it me? Is it just the company? Needless to say, my position is now on the chopping block if this doesn’t improve.

Layoffs were getting 1,000+ apps per request on senior eng roles, way more than usual. Standard screening is taking forever and the shortlist quality is dropping because we just can't read all of it carefully. What's actually working when the funnel is clogged?