This post by Tracker is part of our blog series, “The Recruitment Rule I’d Break”.
Every agency I’ve ever worked with tracks it. Time to first submittal. Fastest fingers win the req. It’s treated as the ultimate scoreboard: the recruiter who gets a CV in front of the client first is doing their job right.
I’ve spent twelve years in staffing tech, most recently building out the marketing function at Tracker, and I don’t think this metric deserves to be thrown out. Speed still matters. Clients notice when an agency is slow off the mark, and in a competitive market, being late can cost you the req entirely. But speed on its own tells you almost nothing about whether the recruiter actually understood the brief.
Speed to submit alone rewards volume, not fit. It tells recruiters that being first matters more than being right. So candidates get pushed forward on a skills match alone, without a real conversation about why they’re looking, what they want next, or whether this role solves for it. Clients get flooded with CVs that look right on paper and fall apart at interview. And recruiters burn hours resubmitting for the same req because the first round wasn’t good enough to close. Fast and mediocre isn’t a differentiator anymore. Clients can get fast and mediocre from a job board.
What should replace it: stop treating time to submit as a standalone KPI and start pairing it with submit-to-interview ratio. A recruiter who sends three candidates in an hour and gets two interviews is doing better work than one who sends fifteen candidates in ten minutes and gets one. Speed shows hustle. Ratio shows judgment. You need both numbers side by side to see the full picture.
Agency owners and team leads have a role here too. Keep coaching recruiters to move fast but don’t stop there. In every pipeline review, ask why a candidate was submitted, not just how quickly. If a recruiter can’t tell you something about the person that isn’t on the CV, that submission was a guess dressed up as a match. Build that question into your one-to-ones and your CRM notes, not just your dashboards.
This isn’t about slowing everything down. It’s about refusing to let one number stand in for the whole job. The agencies that win long term aren’t just the fastest. They’re the ones who are fast and know their candidates.
