Talent Acquisition leaders are often faced with the question of “how many requisitions can a recruiter manage at a given time?” … but the answer is more than complex than it appears.
If you’ve been a recruiter, you’ll know that not all requisitions (reqs or open jobs) are created equal and if you’ve been a recruiting leader, you’ll know assigning reqs to recruiters is not a simple division of reqs. Various factors make a requisition harder to fill and requires a higher level of effort and time from a recruiter. Some of the factors are the job level, type of job (tech, non-tech), required skills, business area, and external factors like the labor market.
For example, the effort to recruit and fill a Vice President of Medical Affairs is vastly different than an Administrative Assistant. That’s pretty obvious, but what’s not so obvious is how much more effort is required. Without an answer, it’s difficult to know how many reqs you can assign a recruiter. Over allocating reqs to a single recruiter will impact time to fill, candidate experience, and recruiter job satisfaction. Under allocating impacts costs and productivity.
Recruiting leaders face the challenge of assessing req difficulty when managing recruiter capacity and distributing requisitions with constantly changing priorities. Ways to approach this challenge range from manual tracking of historical metrics in spreadsheets to more advanced approaches using competitive benchmarking and labor market research. All too often, this results in extra manual work, more meetings, and falling back on the “gut” feeling of the recruiting leaders.
More recently, a recruitment workforce optimization software, Taltrics, launched to tackle recruiter allocation, capacity management, and strategic planning challenges with advanced metrics like req difficulty in addition to AI and labor market insights, enabling recruiting leaders to move smarter and faster in an increasingly competitive talent landscape.
