This post by Farid El Machaoud at Wiggli is part of our blog series, “The Recruitment Rule I’d Break”.
If there is one rule I would break, it is measuring a recruiter’s value by how many calls they make.
Every desk I have run tracked it. Dials logged. Sendouts counted. A leaderboard rewarding whoever dialled the most. When I launched Gentis, the first years I worked on that model too, but moving away from that has had a huge impact on billings, as that number was not a KPI anymore, because what it actually measured was who tolerated rejection best.
A recruiter making 100 calls and hearing 95 nos is usually calling blind: no signal on who is hiring right now, no read on why a candidate might move, nothing to open with beyond “I’ve got a role you might like.” The number looks impressive in a Monday Morning meeting. The placement rate rarely agrees.
The rule survives because a call count is easy to put on a dashboard and quality of conversation isn’t. Leadership defaults to what the CRM can count rather than what actually predicts a placement, so activity becomes the proxy for performance, and the proxy quietly becomes the goal, which is a disaster.
I would replace it with a different pair of numbers: calls to real conversations, and real conversations to sendouts or to jobs pulled (and there I would even track the commitment of the pulled ones). A recruiter making 20 calls with 12 conversations that move something forward is outperforming the one making 100 and getting nowhere, even when the leaderboard says the opposite.
The problem is that it took a rare mix of instinct and hours nobody had spare, so it stayed the edge of the two or three best people on the desk, while everyone else compensated with volume, hoping fifty extra dials might stumble into the same signal by luck.
That shift only works if agencies give recruiters context before they dial, not just a tally after. Who is hiring this week. What changed for this candidate since the last call. Which company is a genuine fit based on where similar profiles have actually landed, not a hunch.
Remove the guesswork before the phone gets picked up and the call itself gets more efficient, because the recruiter isn’t fishing anymore.
The takeaway: stop scoring how hard someone dials. Start scoring how well informed they were before they picked up the phone.
