The numbers behind a recruiting desk, and where each one comes from.
Screening time, database reuse, fill rate, fees and guarantee periods. Every figure carries the kind of source it is.
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- Vendor claim
- Published by a company that sells recruiting software or services.
- Survey
- From a survey of firms, reported by the surveyor or cited by another publisher.
- Secondary report
- A figure from one source as cited by another. The original was not read.
- Rule of thumb
- A number the industry repeats. Nobody measured it.
- Unverified
- Reported without a link we could check.
In short
Published figures put resume screening at about nine hours of a recruiter's week, say about one contingency job order in four is filled, and say most placements are sourced outside the agency's own database. Most come from vendors of recruiting software, not from independent studies. Each figure below carries its kind of source, and a link where there is one.
Last updated
Where screening time goes.
Screening takes several hours of a recruiter's week, and the number of applications per recruiter has grown.
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9 hours
a week spent screening resumes, at 30 to 90 seconds each.
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25 to 30 minutes
spent on the initial screening of one candidate.
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177%
more applications per recruiter between 2022 and 2024.
What it means
The first two figures measure different things: seconds on one resume, and minutes on the initial screening of one candidate. The source does not say what those minutes include, so the two should not be added together. No independent time study of agency recruiters was found.
What ATS Pal does about it
ATS Pal reads each resume against the requirements of the job order and returns a ranked list with the reason for every score, so reading starts with the candidates most likely to fit. Calls and conversations with candidates stay yours.
The candidates you already have.
Agencies often source a candidate from outside who was already in their own database.
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70%
of agency placements are sourced outside the firm's own database.
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66%
of those externally sourced candidates were already in the agency's ATS.
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25 to 30%
of business contact data goes out of date each year, as people change jobs, emails and phone numbers.
What it means
If these figures are near your own, part of the time spent sourcing goes to finding people you had already met. The decay figure is about business contact data in general. No measured benchmark for agency databases was found.
What ATS Pal does about it
You send the candidates you choose with the new job order, by upload or through the integration API, and ATS Pal ranks them against its requirements. It does not connect to your database and cannot tell you who is in it.
Speed of submittal and contingency fees.
In contingency search a fee is earned only when the client hires your candidate, and most job orders produce no fee.
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15 to 25%
of the candidate's first-year base salary is the usual contingency fee in the US, with a median of 20% for mid-level roles.
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25%
of contingency job orders are filled. About three in four produce no fee.
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3 to 5 business days
is the informal target from taking a job brief to the first candidate submission.
What it means
When three job orders in four pay nothing, the hours spent screening for them are unpaid. Being early with a strong submittal is one of the few things a desk controls. The fill rate is a rule of thumb, not a measurement.
What ATS Pal does about it
ATS Pal ranks the resumes for a job order in a few minutes and gives the reason for every score, so you can choose who to submit sooner. How much this shortens the time to a first submittal has not been measured, and this page makes no such claim.
Guarantee periods, and a profile that disagrees with a resume.
A placement can still cost the agency after the fee is invoiced.
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90 days
was the most common guarantee period in one survey of recruiting firms. If the candidate leaves in that time, the agency typically finds another candidate at no fee.
What it means
A guarantee period is a fact about contracts, not about LinkedIn. No source was found that measures how often a difference between a resume and a profile is behind a failed placement. Any link between the two is an assumption, and it is not made here.
What ATS Pal does about it
For the candidates you choose, ATS Pal compares the resume with the public LinkedIn profile and lists each date, employer or title that differs, so you can ask the candidate before a submittal. A difference is a question to ask. It can be an old profile or a typing mistake.
Questions people ask
Why are most of these figures from vendors?
Because independent studies of agency desks are rare. Where a figure comes from a company that sells recruiting software, the label says so, and you should read it as a direction and compare it with your own numbers.
Has ATS Pal measured its own effect on these numbers?
Not on these. In our benchmarks the rankings agreed with the choices of experienced recruiters and hiring managers 94.7% of the time. How much screening time or time to submittal changes on a real desk has not been measured.
How often is this page updated?
When a better source is found or a figure is withdrawn. The date of the last change is at the top of the page.
Compare these with your own desk.
Run one job order through ATS Pal and time it against the way you screen today.
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