How to Determine the Optimal Number of Recruiters for Your Company
Talent acquisition is key to meeting your hiring needs. Having an optimal number of recruiters can make all the difference in identifying, attracting, and selecting top talent. But how many recruiters does your company truly need to ace hiring in 2025? Your hiring needs are the key factor here. Hence, the ideal recruitment team size and factors to consider when determining the number of recruiters required for your company.
And how many recruiters you need depends on workload, requisitions, company size, and resources available to each recruiter. By following the steps outlined in this article, you can determine your optimal number of recruiters.
Factors to Consider When Calculating Recruiter Workload
When determining the optimal number of recruiters for your company, workload and requisitions are crucial factors to consider. While there are several factors to consider, the following are the primary criteria:
- Time and effort required to recruit for the requisite roles
- Amount of experience and knowledge of the recruiter in the labor market
- Resources available to the recruiter to complete the task
- Your company’s size and the number of prospects you contact can also impact the target number of recruiters you hire. Keeping a careful balance between recruiters and requisitions is key.
How to calculate recruiter capacity? Ideal Number of Recruiters per Company Size
Startups, small businesses and medium-sized businesses (< 20 openings per year)
In small teams, you’ll be unable to hire a full-time recruiter, and most likely you’ll have a dedicated HR employee work as a recruiter. If the company isn’t discovering and recruiting great talent on its own, the most cost-effective solution is to hire a freelance recruiter or an agency. However, if your organization has an HR generalist, this person is most often responsible for leading recruiting. If the company does not have an HR generalist, a part-time or freelance recruiter can be engaged or use recruitment process outsourcing.
Scale-ups and high growth enterprises (20-80 vacancies per year)
At this point, a full-time recruiter is necessary, depending on the number of vacancies and the scarcity of your target demographic. Specialized external freelancers or agencies can be employed to help.
Larger Businesses / Corporations (80-1,000 vacancies per year)
Numerous recruiters and a recruiting manager are essential at this stage. The recruiting team should engage active job seekers, target passive candidates effectively, and conduct data analysis.
The Recruiters You Need on Your Team
Key questions you should answer before deciding on how many recruiters you need, involve how to determine your hiring needs and the recruiting capacity model you’ll have. Namely these are the core three questions to answer:
- Number of hires to be made
- How many requisitions per recruiter
- How many positions should a recruiter fill per month
Take the following steps to determine the number of recruiters you need:
- Determine how much recruiting capacity you’ll need to satisfy your hiring objectives: look at your previous performance and present bandwidth to decide if your recruiting staff can reach your company’s hiring goals. You’ll need to figure out how much extra capacity you’ll need to close the gap.
- Projection of future results: calculate a theoretical capacity or bandwidth for the future based on your recruiters’ prior performance. Let’s say you wanted to hire 500 new staff in the coming year. This implies that you’ll need roughly 20 recruiters to reach your target.
- Make a plan to expand your hiring capacity: explore using your resources or outsource your recruiting requirements to make better use of your current resources. If using your present resources to employ more applicants isn’t an option, you might want to explore using a recruiting firm. You can look into these services at Gyfted as well.
How many recruiters do I need?
The number of recruiters you need depends on factors such as workload, requisitions, company size, and available resources. To determine the ideal number of recruiters for your company, you can follow steps such as calculating recruiting capacity, projecting future results, and making a plan to expand your hiring capacity.
Factors to consider when determining recruiter workload include time and effort required to recruit for roles, recruiter knowledge, and resources available. What’s also important to figure out is your talent acquisition team structure. You’ll want to maintain a careful balance between recruiters and requisitions for sure when deciding this.