Every agency recruiter I know says they work 50 hours a week. Most of them are actually doing about 40 hours of work and 10 hours of admin theatre.
If you run or work in an agency, your recruitment workflow is probably leaking time in five very specific places. Let us name them.
Where the 10 hours actually go
First, CV reformatting. You receive a candidate CV, strip the contact details, drop it into your agency template, fix the formatting that Word just broke, and save it as a PDF. Ten minutes per CV, 15 CVs sent to clients a week, that is 2.5 hours gone.
Second, manual sourcing. Boolean searches on LinkedIn, copy and paste into a spreadsheet, check against the ATS for duplicates, message one by one. A decent recruiter spends 3 hours a week on this, minimum.
Third, intake calls that should have been emails. Thirty minutes with a client repeating the same questions you asked on the last role, because nobody wrote down the answers. Three intake calls a week, 1.5 hours, much of it recoverable.
The chasing tax
Fourth, candidate chasing. “Hi, just following up on that interview feedback.” “Any update on the offer?” This is the invisible work of agency recruitment. Two to three hours a week per desk, easy, spread across 30 small nudges that each feel like 30 seconds but are not.
Fifth, spreadsheet admin. Updating the pipeline tracker, reconciling it with the ATS, building a status report for the weekly client call. Another 1.5 to 2 hours that produces zero new placements.
Add those up honestly: 2.5 plus 3 plus 1.5 plus 2.5 plus 2 equals 11.5 hours. Call it 10 after rounding.
How to reclaim it
You will not reclaim all 10 hours. You can get 6 or 7 back without breaking anything, and that is the difference between two extra placements a month and none.
Start with CV reformatting. Use a tool that auto-formats CVs into your branded template in seconds, not minutes. Next, templated intake forms that clients fill in before the call, so the call becomes a 15-minute confirmation, not a 30-minute interview.
Then fix the chasing with scheduled automations. A polite nudge at day 3, day 7, day 10, written once and sent forever.
The last one, screening, is where AI actually earns its keep. Sieve screens, ranks, and shortlists CVs in minutes, so you can spend your reclaimed hours on the conversations that close deals. See it at sievecv.com.