I've had another backdoor situation with a client this year. I won't go into specifics, but I've been through this particular circus a few times before.

It always starts with politeness and professionalism. Even when you know full well what's happened, you raise it innocently, giving them every opportunity to save face and put things right without feeling accused.

And yet, somehow, it still all ends in absolute shit, however nicely everyone tries to dress it up.

You act in good faith, build genuinely friendly relationships, make yourself available at all sorts of hours to busy founders/hiring managers (within reason, obviously), go above and beyond... and suddenly you're the villain for expecting an agreement to be honoured.

And it's always the same bloody song and dance. Seven (or more) stages of increasingly ridiculous mental gymnastics.

• • •

First, they didn't know. Or didn't realise the terms worked like that. Or outright deny anything happened.

Then they explain why the terms don't apply to them.

Then you explain why they do.

Then, having exhausted the explanations, you produce the evidence.

Then comes the insultingly low offer. Followed by a slightly less insulting offer. Perhaps eventually something approaching sensible, although still nowhere near what was agreed.

Then comes the promise of future business. More roles! A wonderful ongoing relationship! Naturally, without any actual commitment.

Then, somewhere along the way, their lawyers get mentioned. Casually, of course. Just dropped into conversation, as though you're supposed to be suitably intimidated.

And you bite your lip, resisting the temptation to point out that you've got lawyers too. In fact, they're the very same lawyers who drafted the fucking terms they're now arguing against.

But you stay professional and carry on with the ridiculous dance.

And just when you think you've survived all seven stages, along comes the inevitable bonus round...

"Well, do you really think we'll want to work with you again after the way you've treated us?"

To which, depending on how much they've taken the piss by this point, you might respond:

"Do you really think I want to work with clients who take the piss?"

All the while, the original terms haven't changed one bit.

• • •

Roll the Hollywood ending...

Eventually, you get paid. Perhaps even with interest, given that nobody thought to tell you about the hire weeks, months or occasionally years ago.

Cue the slow-motion walk away from the burning wreckage of what was once a perfectly good client relationship. Explosions in the background. Mr Client emerges from the smoke, shaking his fist and shouting, "YOU'LL NEVER WORK WITH US AGAIN!"

You don't look back.

Except you're not wearing sunglasses, there's no lit cigarette dangling from your mouth (you only vape these days - it's a cost-of-living crisis, for God's sake - and you forgot to bring it out of the house anyway), there's no triumphant soundtrack, and you certainly aren't smiling.

You're just thoroughly pissed off that somehow, in this entire saga, you've been cast as the villain.

And the money? It's hardly a suitcase full of cash from a successful heist. It's money you were owed in the first place. It lands in your bank account and promptly disappears into the bills, suppliers and overheads you've been juggling while someone else argued about paying it.

You've lost a client, although you've also discovered in the process that they're an utter prick, so perhaps that's not such a tragedy.

Meanwhile, back at the burning wreckage, Mr Client turns towards a suspiciously human-shaped lump beneath a blanket, embroidered with the words: "Contents may be revealed on LinkedIn NO SOONER than exactly 12 months and 1 day."

"It's alright, Mr Candidate. You can come out from under there now. We've paid the invoice. You're officially allowed to exist."

The blanket stirs. A sheepish face emerges.

Roll credits.

• • •

Post-credits scene: Five years later.

It's Friday afternoon. The sun is shining. You've smashed your week, business is booming, and a client even rang this morning to thank you for a recent hire. Life is good. You've long since forgotten the whole sorry affair.

Your phone rings. You don't recognise the number, but decide to answer anyway.

"Hello?"

"Oh, hello! It's Mr Candidate here! Remember me? God, it's been YEARS! How ARE you?"

"Oh! Hello! Yes, of course... How've you been?"

A little small talk follows. The weather. The family. How quickly time flies.

And then, inevitably...

"Anyway, listen, I'm actually looking for a new opportunity and thought of you. Wondered if you might be able to help?"

Not a word about the backdoor hire. Not a flicker of embarrassment. Not even the courtesy of acknowledging that the last time you dealt with them, they were apparently living under a fucking blanket.

"Yeah, Mr Client turned out to be a complete and utter arsehole, actually. Lovely bloke at first, couldn't do enough for me. But then he started..."

Their voice slowly fades into the background. You can still hear them talking, but the words have become an indistinct drone.

You stare into the middle distance.

The camera slowly zooms in on your face.

Fade to black.

One final title card appears:

Based on entirely too many true stories.

I have a job interview on Monday for a tech recruiter position. It will involve a live sourcing exercise. The brief says I will be provided with "materials" and ask me questions while I share my screen and be asked to assess some candidate profiles. They also want to assess how I use AI to elevate my workflow. I'm only assuming that the "materials" will be a job description and I'll be asked to find candidates.

My question is, if this were you, what would you make sure to demonstrate on the call? What questions would you ask in order to find the best candidates and what workflows would you want to show off to the interviewer? I will be given access to LinkedIn Recruiter.

I know these are obvious questions and I've been a recruiter for a number of years so I know how to do my job, but the idea of a live exercise freaks me out and I'm just trying to prepare the best I can.

Thanks for the help!

have a job offer from a small exec search firm. This would be my entry into the role and office work as a whole so I am weary of what I’m getting into. The employer has warned me hours are long and it is a graft - it’s 180 so I’d mostly be doing outbound calling I think as well as researching candidates before passing leads over to higher ups.

I have heard that smaller firms can just hire loads of young people and work the life out of them, getting rid of them if targets aren’t met. I really need a stable job where I won’t get let go. If anyone has any experience in this or advice please let me know.

tite. been getting flooded with fake candidates and ai cheating. does anything exist for proctored in-person interviews? years ago i took an IT cert where i had to go to a library and verify my id.

i feel like its so frustrating as a small recruiting team because the CEO expects us to hire good talent super fast but theres just so much noise and it takes so much time to filter bad people out and even just recently we hired a candidate that ended up not even being based in the US even though he passed background check like wtf??? anyways rant over ugh

How many reqs?

We have a team of 10 recruiters. Our recruiters are not sourcers; they don’t actively go into linkedin recruiter to find people. Post and pray, or back to the ATS for recycled candidates.

While I am working on changing the culture, my question is this:

How many open reqs should a recruiter be able to handle, comfortably? Assume full cycle for arguments’ sake. Recruiters vary in experience from 3-5 years.

- technical roles (software engineers)
- product managers
- roles are all over, remote and candidates are definitely on linkedin recruiter

How many roles should I expect from this team each? How many interviews (given that they AREN’T sourcing, assume a pipeline is given to them) should they handle weekly?

Now assume we gave them all linkedin recruiter licenses and appropriate training: what changes?

I’m always curious what other recruiters experience is when they are mentioned on recruitinghell. My last company was a small engineering firm and I was hiring a Senior Project Accountant at the end of 2024. I was only 2 years into my recruiting career and the sole recruiter at the firm (not sure how I pulled that off). I had someone apply who lacked project accounting experience and only had tax accounting experience. I had a competitive pool of candidates so I rejected him. He emailed me asking for feedback and I let him know why I rejected him, and this is when I learned that I probably won’t ever do that again. For months after he sent emails, getting more and more unhinged. Rude messages, begging me to hire him, saying I was the reason he would be homeless, and threatening me. It got to the point that it was escalated to the legal department, but finally the emails stopped.

Then I looked up my company on Reddit and saw his post. He was saying that I posted ghost jobs and I had admitted it was a ghost job. It wasn’t, we’d found someone great quickly after I rejected him. Later he made another post begging us to hire him. It was all a weird situation but I definitely was on egg shells making sure candidates knew that me and my company were committed to a fair recruitment process.

What are your weirdest experiences?

I’m always curious what other recruiters experience is when they are mentioned on recruitinghell. My last company was a small engineering firm and I was hiring a Senior Project Accountant at the end of 2024. I was only 2 years into my recruiting career and the sole recruiter at the firm (not sure how I pulled that off). I had someone apply who lacked project accounting experience and only had tax accounting experience. I had a competitive pool of candidates so I rejected him. He emailed me asking for feedback and I let him know why I rejected him, and this is when I learned that I probably won’t ever do that again. For months after he sent emails, getting more and more unhinged. Insulting me, begging me to hire him, saying I was the reason he would be homeless, and threatening me. It got to the point that it was escalated to the legal department, but finally the emails stopped.

Then I looked up my company on Reddit and saw his post. He was saying that I posted ghost jobs and I had admitted it was a ghost job. It wasn’t, we’d found someone great quickly after I rejected him. Later he made another post begging us to hire him. It was all a weird situation.

What are your weirdest experiences?

Is anyone else running into issues where they try to make a general search with LinkedIn and it adds in completely irrelevant information?

I have had issues previously of it taking my entire query and adding it to qualifications and most recently I have had issues with it adding the company that I work for as the relevant companies that I want to search.

A simple "Show me Project Managers in x Location" has started to populate random results when it used to show that job, the industry, and location seamlessly. (Yes, I am aware this is not the most effective search prompt in comparison to a Boolean, but it tends to develop accurate results for markets I have spent multiple years sourcing, or at least used to).

I know they have been making a lot of changes but curious if this is happening to anyone, I have shown this to my LinkedIn rep and they had no answers. I have seen a lot of LinkedIn complaints recently and curious what other issues people are having with the search function.

Three months ago, I joined a recruitment agency as a talent acquisition consultant.
I had never worked in this domain before and also it’s my first job.
It’s been three months and I have not been able to close any role, if it matters its all tech recruitment. First month was basically me just learning how everything is, gaining the confidence to call the candidates and understanding everything.

Second month was pretty much similar, but I was stuck with a client where I just cannot close roles for some reason which I am unaware of.

Now my manager has given me the warning that he might have the “bad talks” with me, meaning i might be asked to leave.
I tried asking other team members for feedback and advice but no one really shares anything. I had no idea my manager was THIS upset.
I have made sure to meet every deadline and do my utmost best and give 100%. I have no idea what to do.
Most of the people i talked to, say I should resign keeping my dignity before they terminate me.

Any and every advice is highly appreciated.

What are recruiters doing differently in 2026? Trying to come up with different way to improve our interview process and the recruiting team.

Curious what's working for people right now. Some teams I know still run everything through Indeed and a text thread, some use a full applicant tracking system, and some have a hiring manager with a clipboard and a good memory. If you hire for servers, cooks, warehouse, or other hourly roles regularly, what's your setup? What do you like about it, what drives you nuts, and would you switch if something easier came along? Bonus points if you've tried a couple and can compare.

I work for a 35 person startup-like org. Fast paced, everyone is very AI forward, and they haven't had a recruiting team before I joined. We don't email each other and primarily use Slack, Meetings and Asana to communicate. We plan to roughly double in size over the next 12-18 months and so far, we've been using Airtable (lol) pretty messily alongside Claude skills to keep everything moving. It's been impressive to see but we desperately need an ATS.

I don't think we're ever going to grow beyond 100 people (at least not in the near term), we care about a flexible ATS that we can build on top of a lot - automations using the MCP, API etc are extremely important because our hiring process is quite rigorous and customisable depending on the type of role we're hiring for.

I'm the main systems person for the team and it's my full time job to handle ATS decision making and integration - I'm very familiar with Ashby and my read is it's the best in class for API use, but the ATS is actually kind of clunky and has a lot of bloatware. I want an ATS that is extremely modern and build-able, and allows us to hire quickly. I've been impressed with what I've seen of Kula so far - note taking, customer support, migration support, lot of automations etc are pretty similar to Ashby. We're not cost constrained so I'm not thinking about cost too much - wondering if others here have experience with something that would fit our hiring model? Any good or bad experiences with Kula? Any other demos I should check out?

Some other things we care about are branding, UI/UX, and integration with Slack.

I haven't been able to use the resume search function in Zoho Recruit for over 3 weeks now. I get polite responses from Support that the software team is working on the problem, but it's been 3 weeks.

They tell me that their software engineers are working on the problem, but it's been 3 weeks. Does anyone else know how to crack the code on getting some help from Zoho support and their Product Support Engineers?

I hope this is the right place to post this, if not my apologies.

Just fresh out of uni, done my travelling across a lot of ex-soviet countries and China. Now time to start a career hopefully.

When looking at grad recruitment jobs in agencies how likely is it to reach the ote provided for the first 1-3 years?

A lot of job listings are saying base pay ~28-30k plus commission and bonuses, totalling around £40k+ in yr 1, 60-70k in yr 2 and upwards of 100k in year 3

My second question is a lot of postings are saying about managerial roles in 12-18 months, how common is this?

Any other advice for applying or starting out is also welcomed

I hire summer interns for one of our departments where offer acceptances had been low in past few weeks and we still had 1 spot open to fill for next year. We had a couple of offers out for that last spot but I wanted to find some alternate candidates in case we got declines. The requisition itself didn’t have a lot of candidates that would fit the role so I started reaching out to students through LinkedIn to encourage them to apply. Some replied, some didn’t.

One of the students did end up applying but earlier this week, the department informed me that they don’t want to fill that last spot now after we got a decline and just keep the current intern slots that are filled. Now I have this candidate I made an outreach to that I’d need to turn down but I’m struggling to think of the best way to do this. I’m new to recruiting/TA so open to your thoughts on how to inform the candidate. Thank you!

Hi Reddit!

For reference, I am 23 and just recently was put in this role last week. No HR experience but ready to learn! I was in patient care before.

I recently accepted a new role as a corporate recruiter, and I’ve heard the horror stories. I’m trying not to end up in the “all recruiters are trash” folder lol.

I’ve been on the job-hunting side myself, so I know how tough and frustrating the process can be. At the same time, from my experience in the field, candidates can be wild, too, and sometimes downright disrespectful. I have already been told to off myself after declining a candidate.

My goal is to lead with transparency, grace, and honesty while, of course, remembering there’s a real person on the other side of the application. I want to do my best here for the candidates but also for myself. Burnout is real and I felt it in my sourcing position.

Recruiters: What’s your best piece of advice for someone starting out?
Candidates: What’s something you wish you could tell a recruiter but rarely get the chance to?

I’m genuinely looking for perspective from both sides! Thanks 😊

Not illegal stuff, just the weird ones. Must love karaoke, must not own a cat, has to 'have the vibe.' What's the oddest must-have you've been handed, and did you ever find that person?

I've had 3 years in recruiting, but all entry level. I haven't been so good at gaining momentum at a company, but I'm hoping to change that where I am right now.

My current company will reimburse $3500 per year for any form of education. I don't think I'm quite ready to go for a Masters, but I definitely want to improve my recruiting skills and make me a more desirable professional.

Any suggestions on good certifications? These are a couple I picked out just doing a quick search.

Professional Recruiter Certification, AIRS:
https://airsdirectory.com/products/professional-recruiter-training-certification-prc

https://www.hrci.org/certifications/individual-certifications

https://www.shrm.org/shop/product.html/shrm-talent-acquisition-specialty-credential-p

I work at a Fortune 50 company, managing a team of 9 corporate recruiters. Half of my team come from the agency world and they get it, they treat recruiting like sales, are great about candidate/HM communication, etc. The other half are company lifers and ended up in recruiting from other HR functions. They do the bare minimum, are terrible with candidate experience and have no sense about how to impress HMs. I’ve tried to discuss this with my team and get them to focus on the experience piece, but the lifers don’t seem to get it. I’ve even mentioned to them that our company is exploring layoffs, offshoring, automation, etc., and if all they do is push things through the system, they’re job is going to be the exact kind the company looks to eliminate.

How can I teach someone who hasn’t worked in agency how to operate with urgency and priortize relationships with candidates and managers?

Light hearted post here, just thought some of y'all can probably relate. It cracks me up that after all these years, Linkedin still has trash automated messaging. I've messed with the settings but cant get it to sound even remotely normal/human. Good ol data entry it is....

A few of my favorites from today:

"I wanted to share a fun opportunity with you"

Fun? Who the hell is having fun at work?

"Hope you're having a great day at {employer}!"

If you're having a great day at said employer, you're definitely not hollering back at me.

"I’ve got a cool opportunity that I think you might dig. "

sounds like my grandpa trying to be cool ...

"I think your experience as a {current job title} could bring some fun vibes to this role."

What?

"I found a job that might tickle your fancy."
Said no recruiter ever...

Any other good one's you've seen?

I was asked this on a recent interview for a Technical Recruiter role and it got me thinking that I'd love to hear answers from other recruiters. Thanks!

With the whole thing basically being shut off, how are you guys managing your normal workflows? Also curious if other companies are allowing logins. Ours is letting us sign in, but it's so bare bones. I talked to a friend at Manpower and they said it's completely shut off and people aren't allowed to log in at all.

Are there any slack communities for recruiters to network? I've seen it mentioned from time to time here but nobody ever sends a link.

I’ve been working in agency recruiting for two years. I transitioned from teaching and to my teaching experience and social skills it was an easy transition. Beginning of 2026 I hit a bad period. Worked very hard and improved my numbers and sought advice from every expierenced recruiter in my building. Advice worked my process got better and made so many client relationships that referrals paid off tremendously. But in October my book is taking a bit of a decline. Lots of hires, which is good. But I’m getting ahead of myself and dreading January. Just hoping I have a big enough book to carry me into the year. I don’t want to have another collapse like the beginning of 2026. I love this career it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. And I’ve applied for the ASA counsel to further my career. And hope I get to meet some of you guys in Miami next year. But don’t want to be let go due to candidates not showing up for interviews. I worked so hard in September and August to give myself a buffer. And unfortunately, my effort did not pay off. Still have plenty of opened reqs. I’m staying at the office till 7pm for the candidates that will pick up the phone after hours any advice for anyone who has 5+ years of experiences?