Our Recruiting Budget Got Cut 60% So Now We're 'Creatively Sourcing' (AKA Begging on Reddit)
Our CFO announced that recruiting budgets are being "strategically optimized" for 2025. Translation: We're cutting your budget by 60% and still expecting you to hit the same hiring targets. Good luck!
So we did what any rational recruiting team would do when faced with impossible demands: we got extremely creative. And by "creative," I mean "desperate." And by "desperate," I mean we're now sourcing candidates through Reddit threads, Twitter DMs, and Discord servers like we're trying to recruit for an underground hacking collective.
Welcome to recruiting in 2025, where budgets are imaginary and the sourcing strategies don't make sense.
What We Lost in the Budget Massacre
Let's start with what got axed:
LinkedIn Recruiter seats: Gone. All five of our premium seats got cancelled. We're now limited to free LinkedIn searches, which is like trying to find candidates while wearing a blindfold and using one hand.
Job board subscriptions: Also gone. Indeed Sponsored, Dice, Stack Overflow Jobs—all cancelled. We can still post free jobs, but those get buried under 500 other postings within an hour.
Agency partnerships: Terminated. The external recruiting firms we relied on for hard-to-fill roles? "Too expensive." We're now 100% in-house, even though our team wasn't sized for that.
Career fair budget: Eliminated. No more campus recruiting events, no more industry conference presence, no more local hiring events. If we want to meet candidates in person, we better hope they randomly walk into our office.
Recruiting software tools: Mostly gone. Our AI sourcing tools, resume screening software, and candidate engagement platforms got cut. We're back to manual resume review like it's 2015.
What we kept: Our ATS (barely), email, and the hope that we'll somehow still hit hiring targets. That's it. That's the toolkit.
The "Creative Sourcing" Strategies We've Been Forced to Try
When your entire budget disappears but hiring targets don't, you get creative. Here's what we've been doing:
Strategy 1: Reddit Recruiting (The Desperation Chronicles)
We started lurking in subreddits relevant to our open roles: r/cscareerquestions, r/ExperiencedDevs, r/salescareerquestions.
Our approach: Find active posters who seem smart and knowledgeable, slide into their DMs with "Hey, I saw your comment about X and was impressed. We're hiring for a similar role—would you be open to chatting?"
How it's going: About 60% of people ignore us, 30% respond with "is this spam?", and 10% actually engage. We've made two hires this way in three months, which is simultaneously a miracle and incredibly depressing.
The Reddit community's response: We're now semi-famous (infamous?) in r/cscareerquestions. Someone started a thread titled "Has anyone else been cold-DM'd by recruiters on Reddit?" with 400+ comments. Several mentioned our company by name. It was... not flattering.
Strategy 2: Twitter/X Sourcing (Sliding Into DMs Like a F-Boy Recruiter)
Twitter is free. Twitter has professionals posting about their work. Therefore, Twitter is now a recruiting channel. That's the logic, anyway.
We started following engineers, designers, and sales professionals. When they tweet about projects they're working on or frustrations with their current job, we DM them. "Sounds like you'd thrive in a more supportive environment. We're hiring..."
How it's going: Mostly people think we're bots or scammers. One person tweeted "A recruiter just DM'd me on Twitter and I've never felt more like my data has been harvested." It got 12,000 likes. We were not tagged, but we know it was us.
Actual success rate: Three people responded positively. Two ghosted after the first call. One is in our pipeline but keeps rescheduling interviews. Twitter recruiting: 0/10, would not recommend.
Strategy 3: Discord Server Infiltration
Apparently professional Discord servers are a thing now. Engineers hang out in coding Discords. Designers have their own communities. Sales people congregate in SaaS Discord servers.
We joined about 15 of these, lurked for a week to understand the vibe, then started posting in the "career" or "jobs" channels when available.
How it's going: We've been kicked from three servers for "recruiting without permission." The others tolerate us as long as we also contribute to non-recruiting discussions, which means our recruiters are now pretending to care about mechanical keyboard preferences and arguing about whether TypeScript is overrated.
Actual hires: One. Singular. From Discord. It took six weeks of active participation in three different servers. The cost-per-hire calculation on this is absurd, but we can't use agencies so here we are.
Strategy 4: Employee Referrals (AKA Begging Our Team to Do Our Jobs)
With no budget for external sourcing, we doubled the employee referral bonus to $3,000. The logic: It's still cheaper than agencies or job board spend.
How it's going: We got 40 referrals in the first month. Fifteen were qualified. Three made it to final interviews. One was hired.
But here's the problem: Employees are now guilt-tripping their friends into applying, which creates awkward situations when those friends don't get hired. We've had two employees complain that rejecting their referrals damaged personal relationships.
Also, the $3,000 bonus comes out of our budget, so we're still spending money—just differently.
Strategy 5: "Employer Branding" Through Memes
With no budget for professional employer branding content, we started... making memes. Engineering memes. Sales memes. "Life at [Company]" memes.
How it's going: Our memes have gotten a combined 600 likes across all platforms over two months. Zero job applications have come from this effort. But hey, at least our social media engagement is up 15%!
The real result: Our marketing team is annoyed that we're "diluting the brand voice" with recruiting content. Leadership asked us to stop. We're still doing it anyway because what else are we supposed to do with zero budget?
Strategy 6: Cold Emailing With "Free" Tools
LinkedIn Recruiter is gone, but LinkedIn profiles are still public. So we've been manually copying email addresses from profiles (when visible) and sending cold emails through our personal Gmail accounts.
How it's going: Gmail now thinks we're spammers and keeps flagging our accounts. Two recruiters got temporarily locked out of their email. We're now spacing out outreach to avoid triggering spam filters, which makes everything slower.
Response rate: About 2%. And half of those responses are "how did you get my email?" followed by threats to report us.
What Leadership Thinks Is Happening
When we report on our "creative sourcing strategies" in weekly meetings, leadership nods appily. "Great! You're thinking outside the box. This is exactly the kind of innovation we need."
What they think we're doing:
- Leveraging untapped talent pools through strategic community engagement
- Building authentic relationships with passive candidates on emerging platforms
- Driving employer brand awareness through grassroots social media efforts
What we're actually doing:
- Desperately DMing strangers on Reddit and hoping they don't block us
- Getting kicked from Discord servers for recruiting without permission
- Making memes that get 11 likes and zero applications
The Actual Results
After three months of "strategic optimization" (budget cuts), here's where we're at:
Open roles: 35 Roles filled: 8 Fill rate: 23%
For context: Last year with a real budget, our fill rate was 78%.
Time-to-hire: Up from 32 days to 67 days on average. Because sourcing manually through Reddit, Twitter, and Discord is slow. Shockingly slow.
Candidate quality: Down significantly because we're no longer accessing premium talent pools. We're hiring who we can find, not who's actually best for the role.
Recruiter morale: Let's just say our team has had three people quit in two months. Turns out "do the impossible with no resources" isn't a great retention strategy.
What We've Actually Learned
1. "Do more with less" actually means "do less, badly." You can't maintain the same output with 60% fewer resources. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or has never actually done recruiting.
2. Free platforms aren't really free. Reddit, Twitter, and Discord require massive time investment to be effective. Time is money. We're spending it differently, but we're still spending it.
3. Desperate recruiting looks desperate. Candidates can tell when you're sourcing out of desperation versus strategy. Cold DMs on Twitter don't exactly scream "thriving company with exciting opportunities."
4. Budget cuts have long-term costs. Our employer brand is taking a hit. Our pipelines are drying up. Our time-to-hire is skyrocketing. We might be saving money in 2025, but we'll pay for it in 2026 when we have to rebuild everything we've lost.
5. Leadership often doesn't understand recruiting costs. They see job boards and LinkedIn as "expensive" without understanding that the alternative—manual sourcing at scale—is even more expensive when you factor in recruiter time and opportunity cost.
The Bottom Line
73% of recruiting budgets are stagnant or shrinking in 2025. We're not alone in this nightmare. Recruiting teams everywhere are being asked to "get creative" while their budgets disappear.
But when "get creative" means "replace your entire sourcing strategy with free alternatives because we won't fund recruiting properly," you're not innovating. You're just failing more slowly.
If you're a recruiter dealing with massive budget cuts: I see you. I feel your pain. We're all out here sliding into DMs and making memes, hoping leadership notices that hiring targets and recruiting budgets need to be aligned.
And if you're in leadership cutting recruiting budgets while maintaining hiring targets: Respectfully, this isn't sustainable. Your recruiting team isn't magic. Hire fewer people, extend timelines, or fund recruiting properly. Pick one.
But don't ask us to "do more with less" and act surprised when quality tanks, timelines explode, and your recruiters start job searching on Reddit.
Actually, wait—we're already on Reddit. Maybe that's how we'll fill these roles after all.
Sources:
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