How to improve recruitment operations without more hires

This is a guest blog from Dries De Coster, Founder and CEO of our trusted business partner meet DWIGHT.

After a long period of subdued hiring, there are signs recruitment activity is beginning to improve.

October's KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs found permanent placements increased in August for the first time since September 2022, while temp billings grew for a fifth consecutive month.

For recruitment agencies, that creates an opportunity, but also an operational question. With more activity, does increased headcount follow?

Labour costs are already cutting margins. The latest ONS data found 37% of UK businesses with 10 or more employees said labour costs were affecting their turnover in September 2026, making it the most commonly reported challenge for businesses of that size.

Before hiring, recruitment firms should understand whether they need more capacity or whether existing capacity is being lost to repetitive work.

More activity shouldn't automatically mean more admin

More placements create more work. Candidates need onboarding. Compliance checks need completing. Records need updating. Timesheets need processing. Clients need invoicing.

But not all that work requires the same level of human input.

If experienced people are spending hours completing repetitive admin tasks, adding another person might increase capacity without addressing what's consuming it. That becomes a more expensive problem as the business grows.

Find the work that doesn't need to be manual

Look for where information is copied between systems. Which tasks rely on someone remembering the next step? Are teams entering information the business already holds? Which checks follow defined rules?

Reporting is another area worth examining. If someone regularly pulls information from several systems and manually assembles the same report, the process may be creating unnecessary work.

Keep recruiters and compliance teams responsible for decisions. Look instead at the steps around those decisions: transferring information, checking whether a document has arrived and prompting the next action.

Fix the handoffs between systems and people

Sometimes the issue isn't one inefficient task, but what happens between tasks.

A compliance check is completed, but someone still has to update the CRM. A placement progresses, but another team needs to be notified manually.

Each handoff might only take a few minutes, but this adds up across hundreds of placements.

Improving recruitment efficiency means looking at the entire workflow, including how information moves between systems and teams.

Build capacity before you need it

Recruitment businesses don't need to wait until teams are overwhelmed to examine operational capacity.

The latest Report on Jobs is encouraging, but the wider market remains mixed. Overall, vacancies continued to fall in August even as permanent placements and temp billings improved.

That makes now a useful time to review existing processes before higher volumes expose their limitations.

Recruitment growth will always require people for relationships, expertise and judgement, but increases in placements, candidates or clients doesn't need to mean more workload.

Take one placement from acceptance to invoice. Mark every point where someone copies information, checks a status or reminds another team to act. Those are the steps to review before assuming growth requires another operations hire.

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