Let's talk about a problem that's been quietly getting worse for the past three years: recruiters are drowning in work, and nobody seems to care until it's too late.

According to Gem's 2025 recruiting benchmarks report, the average recruiter headcount per team declined from 31 in 2022 to 24 in 2024, even as hiring activity resurged. At the same time, the average recruiter now manages 56% more open job requisitions and handles 2.7× more applications than three years ago.

Do the math. It doesn't work.

The Workload Explosion

Here's what the numbers look like in practice:

2022: 31 recruiters per team, each managing ~40 open reqs, processing ~500 applications per month

2025: 24 recruiters per team, each managing ~62 open reqs, processing ~1,350 applications per month

That's not a slight increase—that's a fundamental restructuring of what we expect recruiters to handle. And spoiler alert: most recruiters are not equipped with the tools, support, or bandwidth to manage that volume without burning out or sacrificing quality.

Why Teams Got Smaller

The reduction in recruiter headcount wasn't random. It was deliberate cost-cutting driven by a few factors:

The 2023-2024 Layoff Wave: When companies did mass layoffs, recruiting teams were among the first to get hit. The logic was simple: if we're not hiring, why do we need recruiters?

"Do More With Less" Mandates: CFOs across industries pushed efficiency initiatives that targeted support functions like HR and recruiting. The expectation was that AI and automation would pick up the slack.

Shift to Hiring Managers: Some companies pushed more recruiting responsibilities onto hiring managers themselves, expecting them to source, screen, and interview candidates with minimal recruiter support. (Spoiler: that didn't go well.)

Centralization Experiments: Companies consolidated recruiting teams to "centers of excellence" or outsourced to RPO providers, reducing internal headcount but not necessarily reducing workload.

The AI Band-Aid

The official narrative from leadership is that AI will make up the difference. And to be fair, there's some truth to that—companies using intelligent automation report up to a 70% reduction in time-to-hire and AI now handles 95% of initial candidate screening.

But here's the thing: AI is great at handling volume tasks like resume screening and interview scheduling. It doesn't replace the strategic work that recruiters do—building relationships with candidates, advising hiring managers, negotiating offers, managing stakeholder expectations, and navigating the messy human side of hiring.

What's happening in practice is that AI is eliminating some tactical busywork, but the strategic workload is increasing. Recruiters now spend less time manually screening resumes and more time dealing with anxious candidates who've been ghosted by automated systems, hiring managers who want more personalized service, and executives who demand faster results with smaller budgets.

The net effect? Recruiters are working just as hard, but on different things.

The Quality Sacrifice

When recruiters are managing 62+ open reqs simultaneously, something has to give. Usually it's candidate experience and quality of hire.

Slower Response Times: Candidates report waiting days or weeks for responses to applications and interview requests. That's not because recruiters are lazy—it's because they're buried in volume.

Less Personalization: Cookie-cutter outreach messages, generic job descriptions, and impersonal communication become the norm when recruiters don't have time for customization.

Weaker Candidate Relationships: Building genuine relationships with candidates takes time that overloaded recruiters simply don't have. The result? Higher offer decline rates and lower candidate satisfaction.

Shorter Pipelines: Proactive sourcing and pipeline-building fall by the wayside when recruiters are in constant reactive mode, filling urgent reqs instead of planning strategically.

The Burnout Problem

Let's be real: recruiter burnout is at an all-time high. When you're managing 60+ open reqs, processing 1,300+ applications a month, dealing with demanding hiring managers, and getting pressure from leadership to move faster—all with a smaller team—the stress compounds fast.

The symptoms are showing up in predictable ways:

High Turnover: Recruiting roles are seeing higher-than-average turnover as burned-out recruiters leave for less stressful roles or companies that staff their teams more reasonably.

Quality Decline: Rushed processes lead to bad hires, which creates more work downstream (backfilling roles, dealing with performance issues, repeating the process).

Cynicism and Disengagement: When recruiters feel like they're set up to fail, they disengage. The passionate, proactive recruiting that drives great hires gets replaced with "just get bodies in seats" mentality.

What Companies Are Getting Wrong

The fundamental mistake here is treating recruiting as a purely transactional function that scales linearly with technology. The logic goes: "If AI can screen 10x more resumes, we only need 1/10th the recruiters."

But that's not how recruiting actually works.

Recruiting is relationship-driven. The best hires come from recruiters who understand the business deeply, build trust with candidates, navigate complex stakeholder dynamics, and sell opportunities effectively. None of that is automatable—at least not yet.

What companies are discovering is that cutting recruiting teams too deeply creates downstream problems:

• Longer time-to-fill (because overloaded recruiters can't move quickly)
• Higher cost-per-hire (because you're relying on expensive agencies and job boards instead of internal sourcing)
• Weaker quality-of-hire (because rushed processes miss red flags)
• Damaged employer brand (because candidate experience suffers)

Those problems are expensive. Often more expensive than just staffing the recruiting team properly in the first place.

The Recruiter-to-Req Ratio Reality Check

Industry benchmarks suggest that a healthy recruiter-to-req ratio is between 1:20 and 1:30, depending on role complexity and recruiting model.

At 1:62, we're nowhere near healthy ratios. We're in crisis territory.

Some companies are trying to compensate by segmenting recruiting efforts—using coordinators and sourcers to handle high-volume, low-complexity roles while senior recruiters focus on strategic, hard-to-fill positions. That helps, but only if you actually hire those coordinators and sourcers. Most companies are just expecting recruiters to do it all.

The AI Dependency Risk

Here's a scenario that should concern every talent leader: What happens when AI tools fail, get expensive, or hit regulatory restrictions?

If you've cut your recruiting team to the bone and you're 100% dependent on AI to make up the difference, you're one vendor contract renegotiation or one regulatory change away from a crisis.

Smart companies are using AI to augment recruiting teams, not replace them. The technology handles volume tasks, freeing up recruiters to focus on high-value work that requires human judgment and relationship-building.

What Needs to Change

If you're a talent leader or executive reading this, here's what you should be thinking about:

Right-Size Your Team: Benchmark your recruiter-to-req ratio against industry standards. If you're consistently above 1:40, you're understaffed. Period.

Invest in Enablement: Give recruiters the tools, training, and support they need to work efficiently. Good ATS, sourcing tools, automation for scheduling, and analytics to track performance.

Segment Recruiting Functions: Not every role requires the same level of recruiting effort. Use coordinators for administrative tasks, sourcers for pipeline building, and recruiters for relationship management and closing.

Measure What Matters: Track recruiter workload, burnout indicators, and quality metrics—not just time-to-fill and cost-per-hire. If your team is hitting speed metrics but burning out, you're optimizing for the wrong thing.

Stop Treating Recruiters as Order-Takers: Empower recruiters to push back on unrealistic req loads, challenge poorly defined roles, and prioritize strategically. They're talent advisors, not requisition processors.

The Bottom Line

The current state of recruiting workload is unsustainable. You can't cut teams by 23%, increase requisitions by 56%, and expect the same quality outcomes.

Something has to give—either companies need to staff recruiting teams appropriately, invest heavily in automation and enablement tools, or accept that they're going to lose good recruiters to burnout and deliver mediocre hiring results.

The companies that figure this out will have a massive competitive advantage in 2026. The ones that don't will keep wondering why they can't hire fast enough or retain their recruiting talent.

If you're a recruiter managing 60+ reqs right now: I see you, I respect the hustle, and I hope your leadership figures this out before you burn out completely. You deserve better.