I Tracked Where My Recruiters' Hours Actually Went. The Answer Changed How I Think About Hiring Forever.

Surinder Bhagath
I Tracked Where My Recruiters' Hours Actually Went. The Answer Changed How I Think About Hiring Forever.

When I was running HR at scale, I asked my team a simple question: what did you do today?

Not in a micromanagement way. I genuinely wanted to understand where the hours went. We had a team of recruiters who were working hard, staying late, and still falling behind on time-to-fill targets. Something wasn't adding up.

So we tracked it. Not with a tool. Just a simple log for two weeks. What did you do between 9am and 6pm?

The answer was painful.

Roughly 40% of their time went to resume review. Not strategic evaluation. Just opening files, reading through experiences, checking locations, comparing against the job spec. Four minutes per resume, hundreds of resumes per week. A full day of work that produced a yes/no decision that could be made in seconds with the right criteria.

Another 15 to 20% went to dead dials. Calling candidates who didn't pick up. Leaving voicemails. Logging "no answer" in the ATS. Scheduling a callback for tomorrow. Then doing it again. And again. At a 40 to 50% pickup rate, more than half the outreach effort produces nothing.

Then there was call time on candidates who were never going to make it. Ten to fifteen minutes per call, even when it was clear within the first two minutes that the fit wasn't there. But you can't just hang up. You need to be respectful. You need to let them finish. You need to document why they didn't pass.

And finally, the administrative overhead. Updating the ATS. Writing status notes. Briefing the hiring manager. Coordinating handoffs. Responding to "what's the status on that candidate?" messages.

Add it all up and the picture is brutal. My recruiters were spending 60 to 70% of their time on work that required zero judgment. Mechanical execution. Process compliance. Administrative overhead. And the 30% that actually required their expertise, the relationship building, the selling, the judgment calls, the candidate persuasion, got squeezed into whatever time was left.

This is not unique to my teams. This is every TA operation at scale. If you're honest about where your recruiters' hours go, the breakdown will look similar.

And here's what bothered me most: adding more recruiters doesn't fix this. It just adds more people doing the same low-value work. The ratio stays the same. 60 to 70% execution, 30% judgment. You've just made the execution layer more expensive.

This is the problem I set out to solve with Gigin.

Not "how do we make recruiters faster at reviewing resumes" but "why are recruiters reviewing resumes at all?" Not "how do we improve call pickup rates" but "what if the system handled the calling and only involved the recruiter when a verified, assessed candidate was ready?"

In production, Gia screens resumes in a median of 6.8 seconds. Places the assessment call within minutes. Completes a structured conversation averaging 7.6 minutes for qualified candidates, under 2 minutes for those who don't meet must-haves. Documents everything automatically. Scores, transcripts, reasoning.

The recruiter's first touchpoint is a shortlisted, assessed candidate with a full evaluation. Not a raw application. Not a voicemail they need to return. Not a status update they need to log.

The efficiency gain in production: approximately 3x. The equivalent of 3 recruiters' output delivered by one AI agent. And what did recruiters do with the recovered time? They focused on closing. On selling the opportunity to shortlisted candidates. On building relationships with hiring managers. On the work that actually requires a human.

But the real number that matters isn't the efficiency gain. It's the shift in how recruiters spend their time. When the execution layer is handled, recruiters go back to doing what they're actually good at. Selling the opportunity. Building relationships with hiring managers. Making judgment calls on culture fit that no AI should make. Closing offers.

If you're a CHRO or a VP TA reading this, here's the question that changed everything for me: what percentage of your recruiters' time is spent on work that requires their judgment? If it's below 50%, you don't have a recruiter capacity problem. You have a workflow design problem.

And that's a solvable problem. If you want to talk about what we've learned solving it, I'm here.

gigin.ai

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