The $70k Recruiter Lie: Why Your Best Talent Is Leaving with Adam Kovacs Live on Shally's Alley

This episode rips apart the myth that high recruiter turnover is a talent problem. Adam Kovacs, founder of Hire With Near, delivers hard truths about why your recruiting function is hemorrhaging people and money. The real issue? Organizations treat recruiting like an administrative function while demanding strategic results, then wonder why nobody stays. Adam breaks down the structural failures that create 96% burnout rates and shows exactly how treating recruiting as a revenue function changes everything. In this episode we talk about the systemic dysfunction plaguing recruiting teams across industries. You'll hear why most organizations are structured to burn out their best recruiters, how a single bad hire costs 300% of annual salary, and why the traditional recruiter compensation model is fundamentally broken. Adam shares battle-tested frameworks for rebuilding recruiting as a strategic function, including how to properly resource teams, when automation actually helps, and why your ATS might be making everything worse. This is the conversation every talent leader needs to hear. Key Takeaways: ➡ 96% of recruiters experience burnout with only 49% planning to stay in the profession, yet organizations keep hiring more recruiters instead of fixing the system. ➡ A single bad hire costs organizations 300% of that person's annual salary when you factor in separation costs, recruitment expenses, onboarding, and lost productivity. ➡ Most recruiters are drowning in 40-50 open requisitions when research shows the optimal load is 15-20 max for quality outcomes. ➡ The $70k base salary trap: Organizations underpay recruiters while expecting them to fill roles that generate millions in revenue, creating a compensation structure that guarantees failure. ➡ Automation works for high-volume, low-complexity roles but becomes a liability for senior or specialized positions where relationship-building drives success. ➡ Traditional ATS platforms force recruiters to work inside systems designed for compliance, not efficiency, adding hours of administrative burden to every placement. ➡ Organizations measure recruiting success by time-to-fill instead of quality-of-hire, incentivizing speed over sustainable talent acquisition. ➡ The broken loop: Bad hires create more turnover, which creates more requisitions, which overloads recruiters, which leads to more bad hires and recruiter burnout. Chapters: 00:00 – Intro 03:15 – The 96% Burnout Crisis in Recruiting 08:42 – Why Recruiter Turnover Is a System Problem 14:20 – The True Cost of a Bad Hire: 300% ROI Loss 19:35 – Requisition Load Reality: 40 Roles Is Setting Up Failure 25:10 – The $70k Compensation Trap 31:45 – When Automation Helps and When It Destroys Quality 38:20 – Why Your ATS Is Making Recruiters Less Effective 44:55 – Measuring What Matters: Quality Over Speed 52:30 – Building a Strategic Recruiting Function Sound Bites: "We keep hiring more recruiters to solve a problem that more recruiters won't solve. It's like adding more people to a burning building instead of putting out the fire." "The system is designed to burn people out. When 96% of your workforce is experiencing burnout and only half plan to stay, that's not a people problem, that's a design flaw." Guest Info: Name: Adam Kovacs Website: HireWithNear.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/adamkovacs Expertise: Founder of Hire With Near, specializing in fixing broken recruiting systems and building sustainable talent acquisition functions for scaling organizations. Subscribe on: ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠ |  ⁠⁠Apple⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠iHeart Radio⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Pandora⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠Amazon Music⁠⁠ About Shally: ⁠srcn.co⁠ AskShally GPT: ⁠srcn.co/sgpt⁠ The Sourcing Method Book: ⁠srcn.co/tsm⁠ The AI Browser Toolkit: ⁠srcn.co/aib1⁠ Follow Shally on LinkedIn ⁠https://srcn.co/follow⁠ LinkedIn Feed: ⁠https://srcn.co/feed⁠ Facebook Group: ⁠https://srcn.co/fb⁠ YouTube Channel: ⁠https://srcn.co/yt⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://srcn.co/ig⁠