The five most common causes of recruiter downtime

Recruiter downtime rarely comes from one dramatic failure. It's usually a handful of recurring, preventable issues that quietly eat billable hours every week.

The usual suspects

• ATS/VMS outages or slowdowns — often caused by unmanaged integrations or expired API credentials rather than the platform itself.
• VoIP and softphone failures — a dropped line during a candidate screen is a lost placement, not just an inconvenience.
• Email deliverability issues — outreach landing in spam because of poor domain reputation or misconfigured SPF/DKIM records.
• Endpoint slowdowns — aging laptops and unmanaged updates that turn a 5-minute task into a 30-minute one.
• Access and permissions delays — a new recruiter waiting days for the right ATS and email access during onboarding.

Why these get missed

None of these show up as a single catastrophic outage — they show up as a slow leak in productivity that's hard to quantify until someone actually measures ticket volume against them.