Short answer: the five numbers that tell a recruitment agency the most are placed revenue, the weighted forecast, the conversion funnel from submission to placement, time to fill and fall-offs. Measure each one the same way every period, compare it with your own previous period, and act on the gaps. This guide explains how to measure each metric, where the common mistakes are, and how Crumblelead's Reports page calculates them.
Last reviewed 15 October 2026.
Why measure only five metrics?
Small agencies rarely have the time to maintain a dashboard of twenty KPIs, and most of those numbers never change a decision. These five cover the whole business: what you earned, what is coming, how well your desk converts, how fast you deliver and how much you lose after the fact. If one of them moves, you know where to look.
A note on benchmarks: we have not found reliable, published benchmarks for small recruitment agencies, so this guide does not quote any. The most useful comparison is your own history. Crumblelead's Reports page lets you compare any period with the period before it or with the same period last year.
1. How do you measure placed revenue?
Placed revenue is the total fee on placements made in a period. It sounds simple, but agencies count it in different ways, so decide on one rule and keep to it.
- Which placements count: placements that are placed, active or completed. Cancelled placements and fall-offs should not count, or your revenue will look better than it is.
- Which date counts: use the placement date, not the start date or the invoice date. That keeps revenue in the period where the work was won.
- Currencies: if you bill in more than one currency, convert each fee with the exchange rate that applied to that placement, not today's rate.
Two companion numbers make placed revenue more useful. Average fee (placed revenue divided by the placements with a fee) shows whether you are winning bigger or smaller roles. Uninvoiced revenue (placed revenue not yet marked as invoiced) shows money you have earned but not yet billed.
In Crumblelead: the Placed revenue card counts placements with status Placed, Active or Completed whose placement date falls in the selected period, converts other currencies with the rate saved on each placement or your team's rate table, and flags any fee that has no rate. Average fee, Invoiced and Uninvoiced sit alongside it, and you can open the list of uninvoiced placements from the card.
2. How do you forecast revenue from open jobs?
Placed revenue looks backwards. A forecast tells you whether next month will be busy or quiet while there is still time to act. The simplest honest method is a weighted pipeline:
- For each open job, take the expected fee per hire. Use the agreed fee if you have one, or the salary midpoint multiplied by your fee percentage.
- Multiply by the openings still to fill (openings minus placements already made).
- Multiply by your estimate of the chance the job places.
- Add the results up.
Keep the unweighted total (step 2 without step 3) next to it. A big gap between the two means much of your pipeline is speculative. Leave jobs on hold out of the forecast until they resume, and list them separately so they are not forgotten.
In Crumblelead: the weighted forecast uses exactly this formula. Each job has an estimated fee (or salary and fee percentage) and a closing probability, which starts at a default you can change per job. The forecast explains which jobs it included and which it left out and why: no fee information, no exchange rate, or on hold. Moving candidates between stages does not change the forecast; the closing probability on the job does.
3. How do you measure your conversion funnel?
The funnel shows where candidates drop out between being added to a job and being placed. It is the metric that most often explains a revenue problem, because it separates "not enough candidates" from "candidates not converting".
Count the candidates added to jobs in the period at each stage: submitted, interview, offer and placed. Then work out the conversion rate between each pair, for example interview to offer. Two rules keep the numbers honest:
- Count a candidate at their current stage and every stage before it. Someone at offer has also been submitted and interviewed, so each stage can never be bigger than the one before.
- Leave out candidates who have been dropped from the job, or your later stages will look smaller than they are.
If submission to interview is low, look at the quality of your shortlists or how well you understand the brief. If interview to offer is low, look at candidate preparation and client feedback. If offer to placement is low, look at pay expectations and counter-offers.
In Crumblelead: the Conversion funnel counts active candidates added to jobs in the period at their current stage and every stage before it. Which stage means "submitted", "interview", "offer" and "placed" comes from the stage roles you set in Settings > Pipeline stages, so the funnel works with your own stage names. Reports also show the overall placement rate and interview-to-offer rate, and the team table shows submissions, submission-to-interview and interview-to-offer for each consultant.
4. How do you measure time to fill?
Time to fill is the number of days from a job being opened to the candidate being placed. It tells you how quickly you deliver for clients, and long times usually point to one of three causes: a thin pipeline, slow client feedback or a brief that is out of line with the market.
Measure it per placement and average it over the period. Leave out fall-offs, and compare like with like: a specialist senior role will always take longer than a volume role, so look at time to fill by client or job type before drawing conclusions.
In Crumblelead: Avg time-to-fill is the average number of days from a job being opened to the placement date, over placements in the period, with fall-offs left out.
5. How do you track fall-offs?
A fall-off is a placement that does not stick: the candidate withdraws before starting or leaves early. Fall-offs cost you the fee (or a rebate), the client's confidence and the time to refill the role, so track them as carefully as placements.
- Count fall-offs in the period they fell off, not the period they were placed, so a bad month shows up when it happens.
- Record the fee you lost as well as the count.
- Look for patterns by client, role type and consultant. A cluster of fall-offs usually means something was missed at the offer stage.
In Crumblelead: placements marked Fell off or Cancelled are counted in the period they fell off, and their fee is shown as lost revenue. The Fall-offs column appears in the team table when anyone had one in the period.
What else is worth watching?
- Client concentration: the share of placed revenue that comes from your biggest client. If one client is a large share of your revenue, losing them would hurt, so treat it as a risk to manage. Crumblelead's Reports show each client's share of placed revenue.
- Credit by consultant: when two consultants share a placement, split the fee between them so each person's numbers are fair. In Crumblelead, revenue, placements and fall-offs are credited by each placement's split, so counts can be fractional, such as 1.5.
- Where candidates come from: record a source on each candidate, such as LinkedIn, job board, referral or CV upload. You can filter the candidate list by source, and each consultant's personal report shows how many candidates they added from CV uploads and LinkedIn.
What does Crumblelead not measure?
Crumblelead does not calculate cost per hire, because it does not hold your advertising, tool and salary costs. It also does not track contract margin: you can mark a job as contract or temporary, but there is no way to enter bill rates, pay rates or hours. If you need these numbers, keep them in your accounting system.
Who can see these numbers?
Admins and managers see the company-wide Reports page, including every consultant's figures, and can switch to their own personal view. Consultants see a personal report of their own activity and results. Reports cover the last 7 days, the last 30 days, the quarter to date, the year to date or a custom range, and can be exported as a PDF: a full internal report, a team performance report without client data, or a client-safe summary.
How do you build a monthly metrics routine?
- At the start of each month, open Reports for last month and compare it with the month before.
- Check uninvoiced placements and raise any missing invoices.
- Review the weighted forecast with your team, and update estimated fees and closing probabilities on jobs where things have changed.
- Look at the funnel for the stage with the biggest drop, and agree one action to improve it.
- Review any fall-offs and what you would do differently.
The numbers are only as good as the data behind them, so the most important habit is recording placements, fees and fall-offs on the day they happen.
Sources
- Crumblelead Reports definitions, from the in-app help on each metric and the Reports and revenue tracking help article, checked against the product on 15 October 2026.
- No external benchmarks are quoted. We have not found reliable published figures for small recruitment agencies.