Recruitment KPIs and reporting — what to track

Most agencies track the wrong numbers

I sit in on agency onboarding calls every week. One of the first things I do is look at what they're currently reporting on. Almost every time, I see dashboards full of activity metrics. Calls made. Emails sent. LinkedIn messages. CVs parsed. None of these tell you whether the agency is actually growing.

Activity metrics feel productive. They're easy to measure. But they don't correlate with revenue. I've seen agencies where consultants make 80 calls a day and still miss target. The numbers that matter are outcome metrics. There are five of them.

Revenue per consultant

This is the single most important number in your agency. Take your total billings for the quarter and divide by headcount. In the UK, a good benchmark is 50k-70k GBP per consultant per quarter for perm, and 30k-40k for temp/contract (margins are thinner). If someone is consistently below 30k on perm, something is wrong. Either they're working bad clients, they don't have enough roles, or they need coaching.

Track this monthly, review it quarterly. It tells you more about your agency health than any other metric. If revenue per consultant is climbing, you can afford to hire. If it's flat or falling while you're adding heads, you're scaling too fast.

Time to fill

Measured from the day you take the job brief to the day the candidate starts. Under 21 days is excellent. 21-28 days is fine for most roles. Over 35 days means something in your process is broken. Maybe you're not qualifying jobs properly upfront. Maybe your candidate database is stale. Maybe your clients take two weeks to give interview feedback.

Break this down by stage. How long from brief to first shortlist? How long from interview to offer? You'll usually find one stage that's dragging the whole number up. Fix that stage and the rest follows. Your CRM pipeline should track these dates automatically.

Submissions per hire

How many CVs do you send before you make a placement? If you're sending 15 CVs per hire, your qualification process needs work. Good agencies run at 4-6 submissions per placement. That means every CV you send is a serious candidate, not a hopeful punt.

High submission ratios waste everyone's time. Your consultants spend hours formatting CVs that go nowhere. Your clients lose trust because you're sending people who don't fit. AI matching helps here, but the real fix is better job qualification at intake.

Pipeline value and client retention

Pipeline value is your forward-looking revenue. Add up the estimated fees for every live job you're working, weighted by probability. A job at interview stage might be 60% likely. A job you just received the brief for might be 20%. This gives you a realistic forecast for the next 60-90 days.

Client retention rate tells you whether you're building a business or just chasing one-off deals. Measure what percentage of clients gave you a repeat job within 12 months. Anything above 60% is solid. Below 40% means you're constantly hunting for new business, which is exhausting and expensive. If a client hasn't sent you a role in 6 months, find out why.

The weekly review that actually works

Every Monday morning, 30 minutes. Pull up the leaderboard and look at three things: pipeline value per consultant, submissions sent last week, and interviews booked. That's it. No deep dives into call logs. No interrogation about LinkedIn activity.

Leaderboards create accountability without micromanagement. When the numbers are visible to the team, people self-correct. The consultants who are behind know it before you say anything. The ones who are ahead feel recognised. I've watched agencies transform their culture just by making the right five numbers visible.

Client reporting in 5 minutes

Your clients don't want a 20-page PDF. They want to know: how many candidates have you found, how many are in process, and when can they expect to make a hire. A good CRM generates this from your existing pipeline data. You shouldn't be copying numbers into PowerPoint. If your weekly client report takes more than 5 minutes to produce, your system is failing you.

The agencies that grow fastest are the ones that spend their time on outcomes, not on measuring activity. Track the five KPIs above, review them weekly, make them visible, and let everything else go. Read more about scaling your agency or what to do when growth stalls.