"Working in recruitment has become a nightmare"

I've just lost my job as the head of talent acquisition for a technology firm. I have a long history in recruitment, both working for agencies in financial services, and in-house. I echo the sentiment from some candidates on this site: things have never been worse. - This is the toughest market for a long, long time.

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

If you're a recruiter, it's especially bad. We recruiters are losing our jobs too, with almost no hope of finding new ones. But before we do, we're being lambasted by candidates complaining that we're blocking them from finding new roles. 

Recruiters are always the first to be cut. And if you're not cut, the amount of work you're expected to do has increased exponentially. When my team advertised a role a year or so ago, we would receive 300 responses. Now, we receive 3,000. Technical jobs especially are deluged with candidates now that the big tech firms have stopped hiring. There's a supposition that applicant tracking systems (ATS) will use AI to sift through all these applicants, but this only occurs at a very superficial level - ultimately, human recruiters need to assemble the shortlist, and it's a huge amount of work.

If you're a candidate and you're being continuously rejected for jobs, it's very easy to blame recruiters for turning you down and to claim that we're not doing our jobs properly. But you need to know that our only interest is getting the best individuals into roles. This is our function. If we're not doing that, it will be noticed and quickly rectified. If you're good, we will put you forward to line managers.

However, we're trying to do this job with fewer and fewer resources. While applications have increased 10x, recruitment teams have halved. It's a nightmare situation. 

Now that I've lost my job, I'm at least spared some of the trauma of working in recruitment in this climate. But I do need to work, and I'm not sure how easy it will be to find something else. There are very few open talent acquisition roles for someone of my seniority. At the same time, the roles that do become available are paying less and less. - Even at my former employer, we were hiring recruiters in 2024 on salaries 40% below those we were paying in 2019. 

I'm not at the stage of applying to Deliveroo yet. Hopefully I never will be, but it's not going to be easy.

Oliver Carver is a pseudonym 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. Signal also available.

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libelous (in which case it won’t.)