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Comment by Moissanite | Hacker News Reader

Nice approach. However, my main take-away from the article is that they have 40 recruiters for a company of 800, which seems high. I know a company expecting growth is going to need more recruiters, but still 20:1 feels excessive. Is there a widley-known ratio which is sufficient to make regular turnover of staff manageable?

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According to this, those 40 recruiters grew Zapier from 550 to 800 in 2022. So they added 250 staff with about 40 recruiters, or 6.25 new hires per recruiter. That means less than 1 new hire per recruiter per month. Gitlab target 4-5 new hires per recruiter per month as per https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/metrics/

Agree, especially for being a remote company, this number is extremely low. However, other parameters, like compensation, may be affecting their ability to hire.

Zapier pays at 90th market percentile.

Source: I work there, and our pay bands are all internally visible. The pay is quite good.

It's definitely excessive. Realistically, an efficient internal recruiter should be hiring a minimum of 20 people per year to justify their role. If Zapier are planning on at least doubling their headcount, then a team of 40 makes sense.

I have a very good friend who is in tech recruiting. I feel for them a lot.

But I also can’t justify this ratio. When times are good they ramp up to support wild hiring.

Even if times are still good you hit some critical mass where the recruiter count just doesn’t make sense.

As much as they can be annoying at times, recruiters do get used and abused.

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