In my years as a recruiter, I met around 400 candidates a year. I placed fewer than one in twenty.
I want to be honest about that figure, because it matters. It is not a study. It is my own experience on the desk, and the experience of nearly every recruiter I have compared notes with since. The numbers shift a little between agencies, but the pattern holds. And the part that took me too long to see clearly is this: it was almost never about the candidates.
The people I could not place were good. Skilled, vetted, ready to work. They did not fall short, and they did not go away. They simply went and did it all again with the next recruiter, and the next, and sent out application after application, until something eventually lined up. Most of them landed somewhere in the end. It just took far longer, and far more effort from them, than it ever should have.
That is the real problem in recruitment, and it is not a talent problem. It is a problem of reach and timing.
Why one recruiter places so few
Two things cap what any single recruiter can do, no matter how good they are.
The first is reach. I could only represent a candidate to the handful of employers I had relationships with. The right employer for them might be three suburbs over, sitting in another recruiter's book, or in no one's yet. I could not see the whole market, so I could not connect them to most of it.
The second is timing. Roles in contingent and blue-collar work come up urgently, and the window is short. To place a candidate, the right role had to be live on my desk during the narrow stretch when that person was actually available. Miss the window by a week and the match never happens, even though both halves of it existed the whole time.
Put those together and the maths is brutal. A capable candidate and a willing employer can be a perfect fit and still never meet, because the one recruiter who knew the candidate did not know the employer, or did not know them at the right moment.
So we made the candidate carry it
Because no single recruiter can cover the whole market or guarantee the timing, the system quietly pushes the work onto the candidate.
To improve their odds, a job seeker has to meet many recruiters and apply for many roles, telling the same story over and over, hoping that one of those introductions happens to coincide with a live vacancy. We have turned finding work into a numbers game, and we have handed the candidate the dice. The people with the time, the networks, and the confidence to play that game relentlessly do better. The people who do not, often the ones already facing the steepest barriers, fall behind, for reasons that have nothing to do with how good they are at the job.
It is a loss shared three ways. Candidates pay in time and repetition. Recruiters lose placements they could have made with more reach. And employers never meet available, capable people who were sitting one desk away the entire time.
What if we ran it the other way around
Here is the reversal we are building toward at Find Your People. Instead of one candidate having to find their way to twenty recruiters, one candidate meets a single recruiter, and through that one relationship reaches the whole market at once.
The recruiter represents them, exclusively, to every employer searching for those skills, in real time, across the marketplace. The candidate stops repeating themselves across a dozen agencies and a hundred applications. The recruiter's reach is no longer capped by their own client list. And the employer finally sees the vetted, available person they would otherwise have missed, because the timing and the reach are handled by the platform, not left to luck.
Candidates are surfaced on skills first and de-identified, so the match is made on capability rather than assumptions, which also widens the pool. Exclusive representation is preserved, so the recruiter keeps the relationship and the margin. What changes is not who does the work. It is how far that work can travel.