What am I missing about recruiter workflows?

Over the last few months, I've been researching the recruitment industry as a college student trying to understand where AI and automation can genuinely help.

One problem kept appearing everywhere I looked—ATS reviews, LinkedIn discussions, recruiter communities, and Reddit threads with hundreds of upvotes.

Recruiters repeatedly talked about:

• Follow-ups

• Interview coordination

• Stakeholder chasing

• Keeping pipelines updated

• Switching between multiple tools

• Making sure nothing falls through the cracks

Many described spending more time managing the process than actually recruiting.

This led me to start building Platypus, a workflow coordination layer for boutique recruitment agencies that works alongside existing tools rather than replacing them.

The thing is, I'm still not sure I've identified the root problem correctly.

Is it workflow fragmentation? Is it too much admin work? Is it poor integrations? Is it something else entirely?

And even if the problem is real, I'm not yet sure whether recruiters would pay for a solution.

So I'd love to hear from recruiters, agency owners, and HR professionals:

What actually causes the most operational friction in your day-to-day work? And if you could wave a magic wand and remove one part of the recruitment process forever, what would it be?

I'm here to learn as much as I am to share what we're building.