Speed to lead

Speed to lead comes from sales: when someone fills in a form, how long until you get back to them? In recruitment it's the time between someone applying and the first real contact, a call, a message, anything personal that isn't an automatic email.

And this matters more than people think, especially with candidates from social ads. Someone who filled in your form on Instagram during their lunch break wasn't planning to switch jobs today. They were curious for a moment. If you call them that same day, they still remember the job and why it caught their eye. If you call them days later, you're a random number, and they've maybe applied somewhere else in the meantime.

The fix is usually not about people working harder, it's about setting it up. Get a notification the moment someone applies, block time every day to call new applicants, and send an automatic personal-sounding message right away saying when you'll call. And measure it, because most teams think they're a lot faster than they actually are.

How to calculate it

For each applicant, measure the time between the application coming in and the first personal contact. Then take the average or, better, the median across all applicants.

Example

A staffing agency runs lead ads for warehouse jobs and notices many people don't pick up when they call. They check, and the calls were happening a couple of days after people applied. They start calling within the same day, and suddenly far more people answer and still know which job it was about.