The candidate experience scorecard for your agency

The scorecard agencies forget to run on themselves

We added a scorecard feature inside Recruitly recently. Recruiters score a candidate against a job's criteria, yes, partial, or no, and the AI pre-fills suggestions you can override. It makes the hiring decision faster and more defensible, and it gives you a tally of where AI got it wrong over time.

That scorecard is about the candidate. The harder one, the one almost no agency runs, is the scorecard about the agency itself. Most agency directors would say their team is not the one ghosting candidates. Most would say it with complete confidence. Most are wrong.

I look at customer pipelines every week. The same five gaps show up again and again. Each one quietly damages your brand long before any candidate writes a Glassdoor review. Here is the scorecard I use when I want to know whether an agency is actually doing right by the people moving through it.

Time to first reply: four working hours is the line

From the moment a candidate sends a CV or replies to your outreach, how long before a real human at your agency answers them. Not an autoresponder. A reply with the candidate's name and the role they applied for, written by someone who has actually read what they sent.

Four working hours is the line I draw. Inside four hours you look organised. By the end of the working day you look acceptable. By 48 hours you look like every other agency they applied to last week. By day three you have lost them, and they will tell their friends.

The fix is not magic. It is a shared inbox or an applicant tracking system that flags new applications to a duty recruiter every morning and again after lunch. Set the rule, hold the team to it, and read the actual response times in your reporting. If you are billing thirty placements a year and your average time to first reply is two days, that is the loose thread to pull first.

The Friday status update that costs nothing

Pick any candidate sitting in interview stage at your agency right now. Open the email thread. When was the last time someone from your team actively wrote to them. If the most recent message is "client is reviewing your CV" from eleven days ago, you have a problem.

Candidates do not need news. They need to know you have not forgotten them. A one-line Friday update is enough. "Quick update. Client still working through the shortlist. I will chase them Monday and come back to you the same day." That is thirty words and it buys you another full week of goodwill.

I tell every recruiter the same thing. If you would not let a hot lead at a client go a week without a touch, do not let a candidate do it either. The candidate is the lead. They become your placement, your referral, your next reference. Managing multiple clients well is the part every agency focuses on. Managing the candidates inside those clients is where most agencies quietly leak trust.

The rejection email people will actually accept

This is the test I run on agencies that ask why their referral numbers are flat. Send me your last ten rejection emails. Nine times out of ten they all look the same. "Thank you for applying. Unfortunately on this occasion we will not be progressing your application. We will keep your CV on file."

That email tells the candidate three things. You did not really read their CV. You have nothing specific to say. You probably will not keep their CV on file. Every recruiter who has ever sent that template knows it is a fiction. Candidates know too.

The replacement is short, honest, and sent the same day the decision is made. "Hi Sara, I shared your CV with the client and they have decided to move forward with candidates who have more direct life sciences experience. I think you interview well and I would like to keep you in mind for the next biotech role we get. I will reach out when something fits." Fifty words. It tells the truth, names the gap, and leaves the door open. Candidates remember the agencies that wrote them an honest rejection. They forget the rest.

The interview prep call most recruiters skip

Walk into any agency at 4 pm on a Thursday and you will hear interview prep happening as a two-minute WhatsApp voice note. "All the best for tomorrow, send your CV across in the morning, the interviewer is Anna from HR, you will be fine." That is not prep. That is a goodbye message.

A real prep call is fifteen minutes on the phone. You cover three things. Who is on the panel and what each person actually cares about. The two or three questions the client always asks for this kind of role. The one weakness in the candidate's CV the panel is likely to probe, and how the candidate should handle it. Do that and your conversion from interview to offer goes up. I have watched it move from one in five to one in three at agencies that started taking prep seriously.

The same applies after the interview. A five-minute debrief call before you call the client. What went well, what felt rocky, any salary or counter-offer signals the candidate picked up. You walk into your client call with information no other agency has. That is the unfair advantage, and tracking your interview-to-offer ratios is one of the cheapest performance lifts available. It costs nothing except discipline.

The post-placement check-in nobody bills for

The placement closes, the invoice goes out, and the candidate disappears from your pipeline. That is where most agencies stop. It is also where the strongest agencies start.

Two weeks after the candidate's start date, call them. Not email. Call. Five minutes. Ask how the role is going, whether anything is harder than they expected, whether they are settling in. Three months in, call again. Six months in, ask if anyone in their network is looking. Candidates who feel cared for after the deal closes become your highest-converting source of referrals. I see agencies who get forty percent of their placements from referrals, and they all do the same thing. They stay in touch when there is no money on the table.

The flip side is the agency that goes silent the moment the cheque clears. Those agencies wonder why their database feels cold three years in. Their candidates do not hate them. They just do not feel anything about them. Indifference is worse than dislike. You can recover from a complaint. You cannot recover from being forgotten.

How to score yourself honestly

Pick ten candidates who passed through your pipeline in the last quarter. Five who got placed, five who did not. For each one, score the agency on the five criteria above. Time to first reply. Weekly updates during interview. Honesty in rejection. Quality of prep call. Post-placement check-in.

Use yes, partial, no. Three points, one point, zero. Total out of fifteen per candidate, fifty out of seventy-five for the cohort. Anything over sixty and you are running an agency candidates recommend to their friends. Between forty and sixty, you are average, which in this market is dangerous. Below forty, you are bleeding goodwill you cannot afford to lose.

Do this once a quarter. Make it a team exercise. The conversation that comes out of the exercise is more valuable than the score itself. People start saying things they would never raise in a one-to-one. The candidate who complained about being ghosted last month. The rejection email the junior consultant copied from a template they found online. The prep call that got cancelled three times. Those are the things you need to know about before your best clients start hearing them on the grapevine.

If you want to see what a more formal scoring framework looks like inside a CRM, we built a scorecard inside Recruitly for evaluating candidates against a job's criteria. Same idea, different target. Both versions answer the same question. Are you being honest about how things are actually going. For more on agency operations, read our guides on why agencies stop growing and running candidate communications through your CRM.