In August 2025 Totaljobs published a survey of 748 HR leaders. One line from it is the clearest picture we have found of where a recruiter's week goes: recruiters spend an average of 17.7 hours per vacancy on administrative work. Two working days, for every role, before a single placement is counted.
The breakdown is the useful part. Per vacancy, respondents reported 3.6 hours reviewing applications, 2.5 hours scheduling interviews and another three hours processing post-interview notes. That is nine of the seventeen hours in three activities that have nothing to do with judgement and everything to do with moving information from one place to another.
The same survey asked jobseekers. 28% said they had dropped out of a hiring process altogether, and the reasons they gave were slow communication (23%) and a process that took too long (25%). The administration is not only a cost to the agency. It is the delay the candidate feels.
What a small agency can do with this
Take a desk of four recruiters carrying six vacancies each, and suppose a vacancy runs about a month. Seventeen hours of administration per vacancy is then roughly a hundred hours a week across the desk that nobody pays a fee for.
Three of the activities in the breakdown are the ones software is good at:
- Reviewing applications. A parsed resume with a summary and a fit score against the requirement turns a stack into a shortlist. The recruiter still reads, but reads the right ones first.
- Scheduling. Availability, invites and calendar files from one place, with the resume attached, and a reschedule that updates everyone.
- Post-interview notes. A scorecard that asks for evidence at the time, instead of a write-up reconstructed from memory the next morning.
What the number does not say
The survey is British, and it measures HR leaders' estimates, not timed work. It says nothing about placements. We use it on this site as the default for one input of a model, clearly labelled, and we would rather you replaced it with your own measurement.
Source: Totaljobs survey reported by People Management, 19 August 2025. Read it at the source.