How much time does your recruitment agency lose to admin?

Skilled recruiters spend between 8 and 15 hours a week on manual, repetitive work. Here's where those hours go — and how to get them back.

The hidden cost of admin

You pay recruiters to find and place candidates. But a large slice of their week goes elsewhere: data entry, chasing timesheets, reformatting CVs, chasing invoices. This work shows up in no report, yet it costs you — in time, in errors, and in placements lost because no one got to the call in time.

At a consultant costing, say, £18 an hour, 10 hours of admin a week is over £9,000 a year, per person — for work nobody would choose to do.

Where the hours go

• Data entry: the same details, typed into your CRM/ATS, spreadsheets and finance tools.
• Timesheets: weekly back-and-forth so payroll and invoicing run on time.
• CVs: reformatting to your template and stripping contact details before they reach a client.
• Onboarding: compliance documents, checks and references — sent and tracked by hand.
• Invoicing: raising invoices and chasing them so cash doesn't sit an extra month.

How to get the hours back

You don't need to automate everything at once. The best first step is to measure: pick one process, track how long it really takes, then automate the repetitive part — keeping a human to approve anything that reaches a candidate or client.

Start with a quick estimate. The calculator below gives you, in 60 seconds, an honest figure for the hours you lose to admin each month.

Want to go further? See what AI automation for recruitment agencies looks like — one workflow at a time, fixed price, live in four weeks.