Time to hire
Approval to accepted offer, by role family. The number most talent teams quote is the one for the hire that went well.
Perm, contract and embedded desks
Most of the firms you call have no role on today
Outreach at volume, a board presence, LinkedIn. All three end in the same call, and that call establishes one thing: whether something is open right now. When the answer is no, the firm goes back in the sequence for a quarter and you have learned nothing about why their hiring is not working.
Not open yet. Ours scores your own funnel, which is the quickest way to see one of these from the client’s side of the table.
The Hiring Health Check
Question 3 of 12
Sample questionHow many of your last ten offers were accepted first time?
All of themMost, after a negotiationFewer than half
Today
Three lead sources, and one conversation at the end of all of them
The outreach goes out at volume because the hit rate is low and everyone knows it. The board presence catches firms who have already decided to hire and are already talking to two other agencies. LinkedIn catches the ones who were curious on a Tuesday.
None of those three qualifies a lead. They establish that a company exists and that somebody answered, and they tell you nothing at all until the moment a requisition is open. So the whole motion is a timing lottery, run at scale, with the cost of the scale absorbed by your consultants.
You are qualifying for a date, and selling on a diagnosis you never get to make.
The cost
A vacancy check qualifies for timing and for nothing else
Two outcomes, and only one of them pays. Either there is a role, in which case you are the fourth agency on it, discounting your percentage to be first to submit, or there is not, and nothing you learned is worth keeping.
Before
Have you got anything on at the moment?
One yes or no, from a firm that already knows the answer.
After
Your offer stage is the weakest of the five things we scored.
Five scores, a costed gap, and a reason to keep talking in February.
The second conversation is the one a retained fee comes out of, because it is the only one where you said something the client did not already know. The client’s own belief is that the market is tight. Until somebody measures their process against a comparable firm, that belief is unfalsifiable and you are a supplier. Until then your pipeline is other people’s timing.
67%
A Head of Talent will decline your call and will answer 12 questions about their own hiring, because the second one gives them something back. That is the window this is built for, and it is open whether or not anybody picks up.
What we would build
Score the client’s hiring, not their appetite to buy
The Hiring Health Check. Five factors, scored against comparable firms by sector and salary band, ending in a figure for what an open requisition is costing them a week.
Offer acceptance
How many of the last ten offers were accepted first time, and how many were countered, delayed or turned down.
Interview process
Stages, decision latency and who has a veto. Most drop-outs happen in the gaps between stages, not in the stages.
Employer brand
What a candidate finds before they reply, and whether anyone in the business owns it.
Salary competitiveness
The advertised band against the band that is actually accepting, for that title and that region.
Four of those five are things an in-house team half knows. The fifth, offer acceptance, is the one nobody has looked at, and it is usually where the loss is.
A comparison needs a cohort, and on day one you do not have one. So day one ships the five scores and the cost figure, which stand on their own arithmetic. The sector and salary-band comparison builds as the responses arrive, every answered set making the next one sharper, and it belongs to your firm rather than to a platform you rent.
What they get
The report is the thing your champion forwards to the hiring manager
Two screens from the client side, so you can judge the trade the way a Head of Talent would.
youragency.com/hiring-health-check, question 4
Question 4 of 12
About 90 seconds left
How long does a typical hire take, from approval to accepted offer?
youragency.com/hiring-health-check/result
54of 100
Losing them at offer
The process is not slow. It is slow at the end.
Time to hire sits mid-range for this sector and salary band. Offer acceptance does not, and both of the weakest answers were about what happens after the final interview.
- Strong
Attraction. Applications arrive, and enough of them are the right shape to shortlist.
- Leaking
The offer stage. Three of the last ten offers were countered, delayed or turned down.
- Next
Close the gap between final interview and offer, then re-score in 90 days.
Sample screens. RampFunnels is pre-launch, so the question, the answers, the counts, the score and every line of the breakdown are written to show the components and are not drawn from a real response.
The Head of Talent who answered is not the person who releases the fee. The PDF is what reaches the finance director who does, and the hiring manager who has spent six months telling everyone the market is impossible. It is built as a document for that reason, rather than as a receipt for an email address.
How it runs
The model gets written before a single question does
Four steps, in order. The first one is the only one with a hard stop, because everything after it inherits whatever it gets wrong.
The model
Four or five factors that separate a client worth a retained conversation from one worth a sequence. Whoever runs your BD signs it before anything gets designed.
The questions
Roughly 12, answerable from memory by a Head of Talent between meetings. Anything that sends them into an applicant tracking report costs you the completion.
The report
Five scores and a cost-of-vacancy figure, as a PDF. It is written to be shown to a hiring manager who thinks the market is the problem.
The routing
Weak offer acceptance plus a live requisition goes to your diary. Everyone else goes into a sequence written against their lowest score, not their job title.
The routing is where the revenue is. A firm with weak offer acceptance and a live requisition is worth a consultant’s afternoon. A firm with a strong process and nothing open is worth a quarterly sequence and a re-score, and telling those two apart before anybody picks up a phone is the entire commercial point.
Your channels
The two places you already spend, pointed somewhere better
Taken from how this sector actually generates work, not from a list of channels we like.
Outbound
You already send it at volume. An email asking a Head of Talent how many of their last ten offers were accepted is not the same email as one asking for 30 minutes. Same spend, and a qualified lead at the end of it instead of a reply rate.
A lead gen form on LinkedIn costs two taps and tells you a job title. The same spend pointed at a scored hiring review tells you where their process breaks.
Packages
Three packages, fixed scope, nothing open ended
Package 1
The hiring review, built
The model, the 12 questions, the five score bands, the cost-of-vacancy calculation, the report and the live build.
Package 2
The BD motion around it
Everything above, plus the outbound and LinkedIn entry pages, the sequences written against their weakest score, and the routing into your CRM.
Package 3
The benchmark, kept
Everything above, plus quarterly re-scoring, new question sets by role family, and somebody reading the responses so the sector comparison stays worth quoting.
Prices are not published yet because they are not final. When they are, they go on the pricing page as numbers, not as a form.
Questions
What agency owners ask before they commission one
It tells them their offer stage is the problem, and you are the firm that told them. That is the whole trade. A client who believes the market is tight buys a contingent search on price. A client who has just been shown that their decision latency is losing them candidates buys advice, and advice is what a retained fee is for.
Your turn
Judge this from the side your client sits on
Ours scores your funnel on the four things that decide whether the traffic you pay for turns into work, and names the one costing you the most.
Not open yet. When it opens, the score and the report are yours whether or not we ever speak.