Top 5 Reasons Companies Struggle to Hire Recruiters

Are you having trouble hiring recruiters? Most companies are. The talent acquisition function is under more pressure than ever, and the people you need to staff it are some of the hardest to find and keep.

Here are five reasons most companies are struggling — and what you can do about each one.

1. Budget

Most companies do not have the proper budget allocated to talent acquisition, which puts a high requisition load on each recruiter you have on staff. It is impossible for recruiters to provide a high-quality experience for hiring managers or candidates if they are overwhelmed with too many open roles.

It also makes it difficult for recruiters to take time off. In an era where awareness of mental health and burnout is at an all-time high, show recruiters that you are committed to them by capping their requisition load to a reasonable number. For growth-stage tech companies, this could be around six to eight openings at a time.

When recruiters are stretched across 15 to 20 requisitions — which is common — quality drops, time to fill increases, and offer acceptance rates suffer. The result is that hiring managers lose confidence in the recruiting function, which makes the TA leader’s job harder and creates a cycle that is difficult to break.

The fix is not complicated, but it requires commitment: staff your recruiting team based on the hiring plan, not the other way around.

2. Bad Hiring Plans

Most companies do not invest enough time developing a hiring plan. Many forget to factor in capacity for backfill hires, or they put unrealistic time-to-fill or capacity standards into the plan, which can make the entire thing useless within six to twelve weeks.

A hiring plan that does not account for recruiter capacity is not a plan — it is a wish list. And when the plan breaks, the TA team takes the blame for what was actually a planning failure at the leadership level.

The best hiring plans are built bottom-up: start with the roles, estimate realistic time to fill for each one, assign them against available recruiter capacity, and surface the gap early. If the plan requires more capacity than you have, that is a staffing decision, not a performance problem.

3. Company Culture Not Optimized for Talent Acquisition

There is a general lack of appreciation and understanding for the value that recruiters bring to the table. From 2020 through 2022, the recruiting profession went through an especially difficult stretch. Demand for recruiters plummeted at the beginning of the pandemic, and then there was massive whiplash as hiring surged and many recruiters burned out under skyrocketing requisition loads.

You need to have a culture, policies, and structure in place to prove to potential recruiter hires that you are creating a healthy work environment where they can thrive — and in some cases recover from burnout.

This means capping requisition loads, giving recruiters a voice in how the hiring process is designed, investing in their professional development, and treating talent acquisition as a strategic function rather than an order-taking service. The companies that get this right have no trouble attracting top recruiting talent. The ones that do not will continue to struggle regardless of what they pay.

4. Missing Technology

Most recruiters lack the operational and technology tools and services they need to achieve their hiring goals. There is still a mindset that relationship-based recruiting is enough to scale talent acquisition, but this is not the case.

In revenue functions, we see robust technology stacks and a data-driven approach. But many times this is completely lacking within recruitment departments. Recruiters want to work for companies that understand recruiting operations and are willing to invest in the right technology to compete in a competitive market.

At a minimum, your recruiting team needs a modern ATS, sourcing tools, structured interview frameworks, and reporting that ties recruiting activity to business outcomes. Without these, you are asking recruiters to compete with one hand tied behind their back — and the best recruiters know it.

5. Poor Employer Branding

A lack of focus on employer branding, producing assets for candidates, and creating great candidate experiences can scare potential recruiters away from your company. If your company does not understand how important branding and the candidate experience are, the best recruiters will not work for you.

Recruiters evaluate your employer brand the same way candidates do. They look at your careers page, your LinkedIn presence, your Glassdoor reviews, and how your hiring process feels from the inside. If what they see tells them the company does not take recruiting seriously, they will pass — no matter the compensation.

The companies that invest in employer branding attract better recruiters, who in turn attract better candidates, who produce better hires. It is a flywheel, and it starts with taking the candidate experience seriously at every touchpoint.

When Building an Internal Team Is Not the Answer

Sometimes the solution to hiring challenges is not hiring more recruiters at all. If your company is scaling quickly and cannot build an internal recruiting team fast enough, an embedded recruiting partner can fill the gap — providing experienced recruiters who integrate directly into your team, your systems, and your hiring process without the overhead and timeline of building from scratch.

This is especially common at growth-stage tech companies where hiring needs outpace the ability to recruit the recruiters.

How SecureVision Can Help

For help building your recruiting function or supplementing your team with embedded recruiting support, contact us to see if SecureVision is a good fit.