Where is your hiring process losing time? Here’s what UK recruiters told us
Table of Contents
- Define: ads asking too much?
- Source: the channel gap
- Screen: more isn’t always better
- Interview: too many rounds
- Decide & Hire: the moving finish line
- Where’s your own drag, really?
- About the research
Faster hiring toolkit
DownloadHiring in the UK has never felt more complicated. Recruiters dealing with a rising 12-week average time-to-hire, AI tools reshaping applications on both sides of the desk, and a market that refuses to settle.
For small teams without the luxury of a dedicated talent acquisition function, that pressure lands hard: every slow stage is a chance for a good candidate to disappear, and another item added to a workload no one’s given you extra time for.
We surveyed over 1,600 recruiters and almost 3,000 jobseekers across two studies, our latest Hiring Trends Update (Spring 2026) and our Hiring Efficiency study from 2025. Together, they paint a clear picture of exactly where hiring processes are losing time.
Define: are your job ads asking for too much?
The instinct when writing a job ad is to ask for everything you could possibly want. The data suggests that backfires.
77% of candidates say job ads now ask for more skills and experience than they did three years ago. The effect isn’t a strong applicant pool – it’s a smaller one. Strong candidates who don’t tick every box rule themselves our, while less selective candidates apply regardless, leaving recruiters with fewer options, not better ones.
“Hire against a define but realistic bar – not a theoretically “perfect” candidate. Remember: part of the role of an employers is to create the conditions for employees to improve and grow within a role. Every extra week spent chasing marginal improvement has a real cost: strong candidates already in the pipeline move on.”
– Bradley Strong, Enterprise Customer Success Lead, Totaljobs
The fix starts with distinguishing genuine must-haves from a wish-list, while getting specific about salary, location and process upfront.
Source: the channel gap nobody’s talking about
Recruiters tend to lean on the channel they know best. Social media is the most-used sourcing channel among UK recruiters, at 55%. But paid ads and listings are rated almost as effective (94% vs 95%) despite being used by fewer than half of recruiters (43%). That’s a meaningful gap between habit and results.
The opportunity is straightforward: track which channels are actually converting for a given role before assuming your usual go-to is still the right one.
“We tell customers all the time: your busiest channel and your best channel aren’t always the same thing. Paid ads rarely get the credit they deserve, but one someone compares cost per qualified applicant against what they’ve always used, it’s usually an easy case to make more room for them in the mix.”
– Joshua Kerr, Enterprise Customer Success Manager, Totaljobs
Screen: why more applications isn’t the win it sounds like
A packed inbox can feel like momentum, but rarely is.
71% of recruiters say screening irrelevant applications is what slows their work down most, and the average recruiters now spends 3.3 hours screening CVs per vacancy. More applications don’t mean more suitable candidates – they mean more noise to sort through before you find them.
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Interview: too many rounds, not enough progress
Interviews are where good intentions quietly become bottlenecks. Recruiters told us the biggest time-wasters are lengthy interviews (34%), too many interview rounds (25%), follow-up to job interviews (23%), no clearly defined process (20%), and poor availability of stakeholders (18%).
“Every interviewer should walk in with pre-written questions and a scorecard tied directly to the role’s defined competencies. This helps measure candidates objectively, quickly, and efficiently.”
– Djifa Fia, Enterprise Customer Success Manager, Totaljobs
More rounds rarely mean a better decisions. They mean more scheduling, more coordination, and more chances for a candidate to disengage or accept another offer while they wait.
Decide & Hire: the finish line that keeps moving
Finding the right person doesn’t guarantee a fast hire. The paperwork, system updates and last-minute changes to the role can quietly add days to a process that should already be closing.
It’s telling that 81% of recruiters are already learning AI specifically to claw back time lost to this kind of admin, with the biggest early wins in writing job ads (24%) and CV screening (22%). The final stage is exactly where small process fixes tend to have an outsized effect.
Where’s your own drag, really?
Every one of these five stages, from writing the job ad to signing off the hire, can quietly leak time in its own way. The data above shows where the average Irish hiring process is losing ground, but yours might be losing it somewhere else entirely.
That’s exactly what our Faster Hiring Toolkit is for. It walks you through each stage with the fixes behind the numbers above, plus a simple way to score your own process, so you know where to focus instead of guessing.
Cut the drag, and the stress that comes with it.
About the research
This article draws on two Totaljobs studies: the Hiring Efficiency study (748 HR leaders and 2,025 jobseekers, fieldwork June-July 2025) and the Hiring Trends Update (885 recruiters and 2,017 jobseekers, fieldwork Spring 2026), both conducted independently online via Centiment. Candidate samples are representative of Ireland’s workforce by age and gender. Because the two studies used different questions and timeframes, figures are presented separately, and direct comparisons should be made with care.
A faster process starts with the right partner
Reducing friction across your hiring process isn’t just about internal fixes, the right tools matter too. Totaljobs All Jobs solutions and smart matching technology are build to help smaller hiring teams cut the admin and focus on the people who matter.
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