How Many Calls Should a Recruiter Make Per Day? [Data included]

How Many Calls Should a Recruiter Make a Day?

The call data is intriguing, to say the least. There is no consensus on how many calls a recruiter should make a day to be deemed productive.

Here’s how it breaks down when a sample of recruiters was asked how many marketing calls they make in a day:

• under 10-53.7 percent
• more than 100- 15.9 percent
• I don’t make marketing calls-30.5 percent

This suggests that call volume is actually a relatively small part of a successful approach. To directly answer the question of how many calls should a recruiter make per day — it depends.

For many recruiters, calls dedicated solely to marketing are a secondary or tertiary duty, the primary being strategic calls with a sourced history that lead directly to placement.

Now let’s take things to the next level and look at what the recruiter job entails:

A Day in the Life of a Recruiter

Studies indicate that most recruiters spend 3-5 hours a day on recruiting calls, and one recurring theme they mentioned was about the need for sourcing, research, and quality conversations.

What this means is there is more to the recruiter’s job than making calls to candidates. To match candidates with the right employer, they have to research the role by browsing job listing platforms to see what the responsibilities are in general, and research different companies to find what their specific requirements are.

Once a recruiter matches a candidate with an employer, they should also prepare the candidate for the interview. To be a good recruiter, one has to expand their knowledge and network. This means they have to attend workshops and events to stay up to date with new trends and widen their network.

What that means is that planning and admin play an important role in recruiting. Hiring managers tend to want to see an average of 20-25 calls a day, with five of those calls being dedicated to marketing presentations and the rest devoted to recruiting presentations.

Out of those 15-20 recruiting calls, the goal is to identify 1-2 qualified candidates per day. The other goal is to get one job order per day, preferably a high-quality order if possible.

Those are certainly useful metrics, but there are plenty of other significant ones. Some of these statistics pertain to the need for persistence, while others illustrate the need to go beyond the numbers.

How Many Times Should a Recruiter Call a Candidate?

This suggests persistence when following up with candidates to be just as important as the volume of calls made in general. Studies indicate that 44 percent of all salespeople tend to give up after a single follow-up effort when it actually tends to take five follow-ups to make approximately 80 percent of the sales.

Similarly, over 60 percent of those who requisition information about your company will take at least 3 months to act on it, and as many as 20 percent will need over a year before they actually buy something.

Focus on the Quality of Communication, Not the Number of Calls Made

The numbers presented so far certainly tell an interesting story, but what about the quality of the communication? Is there a way to effectively break that down?

Absolutely. For starters, studies indicate that about 60 percent of the candidates given a presentation will remember the story they’ve been told, with less than 10 percent remembering the actual statistics that are presented.

Similarly, studies analyzing the reaction of candidates indicate that the words used in a phone conversation represent less than 15 percent of the actual communication that occurs, with the tone of the conversation being what really matters to the rest.

So what does it all mean?

TL;DR – How Many Calls Does a Good Recruiter Make a Day?

One of the problems with relying exclusively on numbers and data is that these things can be slanted any number of ways, and the meaning can get lost in the info fog.

Let’s cut to the chase, then. Here are three conclusions you can take away from what’s been presented, including some recommendations on procedures and how to use the data.

• As a recruiter, you need to make two placements a month to be profitable. So keep in mind that that’s your bottom line number, and use everything else presented here to help meet or exceed it.
• Focus on the quality of your communication. It’s fine to set a goal of 80 calls a day, but the real issue is getting four hours of productive connect time per day. This allows a further breakdown into additional metrics about things like job orders, quality candidates, and other advanced metrics.

• Consider using a pro recruiting tool like LeadFuze. Used in conjunction with email solutions and other advanced tools, LeadFuze builds and enhances your database, leading to better results when it comes to potential candidates, response rates, and final results.

These three conclusions represent a starting point of sorts. The best way to use them is to integrate them into your individual system and use them to pick out blind spots you may have or get better outcomes in certain key areas. 

This will enhance your final results and your bottom line, and make you more successful and better at your job in the process. Ultimately, not about how many calls a recruiter should make a day, but the quality of those calls.