Learn how company size, worker type, growth targets, and global hiring influence the ideal number of recruiters needed to effectively scale your workforce.
Your company is only as good as its talent. To ensure you always attract and hire top workers for your company, you need to dedicate sufficient resources to your recruitment team. One of your first considerations will be determining how many recruiters to have on this team. Several factors influence this decision.
Determining the number of recruiters based on company size
For a baseline of how many recruiters to have on your team, consider what companies of the same size as yours are doing. This will be useful because company size tends to correlate to the number of openings your business has each year.
Startups and small businesses
If you’re a startup or small business, you likely have no more than about 10 openings each year. It’s typically unnecessary for such businesses to have a human resources (HR) department, let alone a dedicated recruiter. Often, an employee will take on recruitment tasks in addition to his or her regular duties. Plus, the founder is usually involved in interviews and other aspects of recruitment.
It may be worth changing your approach to recruitment (especially as your company grows) to bring qualified candidates to your team more efficiently while allowing other employees to focus on their core work. Rather than hiring a recruiter, a better option is to contract an agency or freelancer.
Midsize businesses
As your company grows from a startup to a midsize business, your recruitment needs are likely to double to around 10 to 20 vacancies a year. At this point in your growth, you may need an in-house HR team (or at least one individual). It’s worth looking into expanding your team to include one or two recruiters in addition to an HR generalist to lead the team. Alternatively, it may be more cost effective to continue outsourcing your recruitment needs.
High-growth enterprises
When your company reaches a high-growth stage, it will likely need to fill between 20 and 80 openings a year. This is the point when it definitely becomes necessary to have at least one recruiter on your team (although this may initially be a part-time position). If your hiring needs fluctuate over the year, your best option may be to bring in an agency to support your recruitment team at times when workloads are high.
Large businesses
Once you’ve established a large business, you’ll have at least 80 vacancies a year and up to as many as 1,000. You’ll need a permanent team consisting of several recruiters as well as a manager to lead your team, a recruitment marketer, a data analyst, and an administrative assistant.
To determine the exact number of recruiters you should have on your team, think about recruiter workload. Across all industries, the average open requisitions per recruiter is between 40 and 60. However, the exact number will depend on factors such as time-to-fill rates, acceptance rates, turnover, and retention. It’s important to keep workloads reasonable to prevent burnout.
Multinational corporations
The biggest companies of all have more than 1,000 openings a year. To fill these vacancies, a recruitment team needs to contain a range of roles, typically consisting of a VP for talent acquisition and some specialists in both recruiting and sourcing talent. For instance, the team may include specialists for executive level sourcing, IT recruitment, and targeting recent graduates by attending campus events.
How type of workers impacts recruitment needs
Companies of the same size may need a different number of recruiters on their teams due to the type of talent they’re hiring. The kind of employees you need for your company will influence the workload for recruiters as well as the length of the hiring process.
Scarcity of talent
You may be looking for certain skills that only a limited number of workers possess, which will mean you have a smaller pool of candidates. Plus, you may find that some candidates meet your requirements on paper but don’t turn out to be a good fit for your company, meaning your search may need to continue for longer. In contrast, if you’re looking to fill an opening where you have plenty of choice, the recruitment process is likely to be faster.
Employee quality
The length of the hiring process is frequently linked to the quality of the employee. A high-quality employee could be one with a great deal of experience or one who is highly qualified for a specialized position. You may need lower-quality candidates if you’re looking to fill entry-level positions.
Active or passive candidates
Candidates fall into two main categories: active and passive.
- Active candidates are those who come to you because they’re searching for a job.
- Passive candidates are those your recruiters approach because they have the skills or experience you need for an open position.
Since you need to seek out passive candidates yourself and then convince them to join your team (which often involves persuading them to leave their current positions), the hiring process takes longer.
Specific vs general roles
If you need several employees for a general role, the hiring process will be faster, as you’ll be able to use the same job description and select several candidates from your interviews. When the role is more specific, you need to dedicate the same amount of resources to just one hire.
Other factors to consider
There are a few more factors to bear in mind when deciding how many recruiters to have on your team:
- Unemployment rate — When unemployment is low, you should expect fewer applicants, which will lead to a higher requisition load for recruiters. In contrast, high unemployment will lead to more applicants as well as higher offer acceptance rates and lower time-to-fill rates.
- Knowledge and experience of individual recruiters — Recruiters who have less experience may cost less to hire, but they may also be less efficient. You’ll need to decide what tradeoffs you’re willing to make.
- Turnover — If your company has a high turnover, it may have more vacancies in a year than is typical for a business of your size. If turnover is higher than average for your industry, it may be worth investing more into retention strategies.
- Competition — Other companies may be competing for the same talent as you, which could lead more candidates to turn down offers.
- Resource availability — You may be able to reduce workloads for recruiters by providing them with access to more resources, such as AI recruiting tools.
Increasing hiring capacity to meet growth goals
It’s also important to think about how your recruitment needs may change in the near future, as this will enable you to meet your growth objectives. First, consider your hiring goals for the upcoming year. If you expect a large increase, will your current team be able to handle the workload or will you need additional support? Take the factors mentioned above into consideration: will your hiring process going forward be more complex or time-consuming?
Bear in mind, there are ways to enhance hiring capacity that go beyond increasing the number of recruiters at your company. For instance, you could involve employees outside your HR team in the recruitment process or improve capabilities for recruiters, such as by implementing more automation or providing clearer guidelines about what you’re looking for in candidates.
While increasing your recruitment team and improving internal processes are common ways to scale hiring efforts, they aren’t the only solutions. Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) offers a highly effective alternative, providing the flexibility to manage large-scale recruitment needs without overloading your internal team. RPO providers bring specialized expertise — from advanced sourcing techniques to global talent acquisition — allowing you to scale efficiently.
By leveraging RPO, you can seamlessly expand your hiring capacity. Partnering with an RPO provider ensures that your company can meet its growth objectives while maintaining a high standard of quality and efficiency.
Recruiting talent abroad
If you want to expand your business into foreign markets, you’ll likely need to start hiring workers abroad. A more significant factor than how many recruiters to have is the expertise of your recruiters: they’ll need to be familiar with the labor laws in the countries you want to enter. Furthermore, you won’t be able to hire foreign workers unless you establish a legal entity in each country where you want to operate.