Time is the currency of recruitment. And in most agencies, it’s being spent poorly.
A recent report by TheHRDirector found that workers lose an average of 13 hours every week to tasks that deliver little to no value. In recruitment, that number becomes particularly painful.
Recruiters aren’t just losing time—they’re losing revenue.
From Admin to Anomaly: Where Recruiter Time Really Goes
Ask any recruiter where their day goes, and the answer is rarely “on the phone with candidates or clients.” Instead, they’ll tell you about CV formatting. Copy-pasting notes. Converting PDFs. Rewriting bios. Trying to tailor candidate profiles to job specs. It’s the kind of work that feels necessary—but isn’t what generates income.
Let’s run the numbers.
- A recruiter billing £150,000 per year equates to ~£2,884 per week
- If 13 hours/week are wasted, that’s roughly 32% of a 40-hour workweek
- That’s a potential £937 in lost productivity per recruiter, per week
- Over a year? That’s £48,724 per recruiter
Multiply that by a team of 10? You’re looking at nearly half a million pounds in lost productivity.
Why This Happens
The issue isn’t poor work ethic. It’s poor systems.
Modern recruitment moves fast. Clients expect speed, polish, and insight—and they expect it now. But most recruiters are still working with outdated, manual tools. The result? High performers get bogged down with admin, and time that should be spent on high-impact conversations disappears into formatting, prepping, and rewriting.
It’s not that recruiters are doing the wrong things. They’re just doing too many of the wrong things by hand.
Where Automation Enters the Conversation
Technology in recruitment is often spoken about in the context of sourcing or outreach. But the middle of the funnel—the candidate-to-client presentation process—is just as critical.
That’s where automation tools like Rekbot’s CV Zone have emerged—not as flashy add-ons, but as core operational infrastructure.
Designed specifically for recruiters, CV Zone tackles some of the most time-consuming pain points in the workflow:
- CV Conversion (PDF to Word)
- Client-Ready Formatting with company branding
- Adding Candidate USPs directly from interviews
- AI-Content Scanning to verify authenticity
- Job Description Matching, including:
What used to take 30 minutes now takes under 30 seconds.
Rethinking Time as a Strategic Asset
Time in recruitment isn’t just about workload—it’s about opportunity. Every hour spent on formatting a CV is an hour not spent qualifying a better candidate, consulting a client, or chasing a deal.
The challenge for recruitment leaders isn’t just to reduce inefficiency. It’s to reallocate effort toward activities that generate revenue.
Automation, when applied thoughtfully, doesn’t replace recruiters. It unlocks them.
Final Thoughts
Recruitment has always been a fast-moving industry. But in 2025, speed alone isn’t enough. Precision, presentation, and preparation now matter just as much.
If you’re looking at ways to improve revenue per head without increasing burnout or headcount, the solution may not be a new hire. It may be fewer CVs formatted manually. Fewer job specs matched by hand. Fewer hours wasted on admin.
And instead, more time for what recruitment is really about: people, placement, and performance.
