Selling Into Staffing and Recruiting: Fill Rates, Redeployment and the Req That Went Dark

The business you are actually selling into

Staffing is a spread business. That is the whole thing. An agency bills a client one rate for an hour of a worker's time and pays the worker a lower rate for that same hour. What is left over, after burden and insurance and the recruiter's desk, is the business. Every decision a staffing leader makes rolls up to protecting or widening that gap.

This matters because most software sellers walk in and pitch productivity. They talk about saving recruiters time. And a VP of Recruiting hears that as: you want me to pay you money so my people can have more hours in the day. She does not sell hours in the day. She sells placed hours at a spread. If your product does not connect to filled reqs, faster fills, longer assignments, or better margin, you are a nice-to-have in a business that runs thin.

I have sold in environments where the buyer's economics were completely different from mine, and the mistake is always the same. You describe your product in your own units instead of theirs. Staffing has very clean units. Learn them and you will be one of the only vendors in the pipeline who sounds like a peer.

The four numbers a VP of Recruiting manages to

When you get a staffing leader on the phone, she is carrying four numbers in her head. Not ten. Four. If your opening line does not touch one of them, you are competing with her inbox.

Fill rate

Of the reqs the agency accepted from clients, how many did they actually fill? A req that comes in and never gets a body on site is not neutral. It is a client relationship quietly degrading. It is also a recruiter who spent a week sourcing for nothing, and that week is a real cost against a desk that has to carry itself.

Fill rate is the number that gets a branch manager a phone call from a regional VP. It is also the number that is easiest to blame on someone else. The client changed the spec. The rate was too low. The market is tight. Half of your discovery job is finding out which of those is the story and which is the truth.

Time to fill

How long from req received to worker on site. In contingent staffing especially, speed is often the entire competitive advantage. If three agencies are working the same req, the one that presents a qualified candidate first frequently wins, and the other two just paid for sourcing they will never bill.

Time to fill is where technology pitches usually land, and it is also where they usually get too abstract. Do not say you make recruiters faster. Say what part of the clock you take out. Sourcing? Screening? The gap between offer and start where candidates ghost? Name the segment.

Redeployment rate

This is the one most vendors never mention, and it is the one I would build my whole expansion motion around. When an assignment ends, does that worker go on another assignment with the same agency, or do they disappear?

Redeployment is pure margin. The agency already paid to source, screen, onboard, background check, and drug test that person. Putting them on a second assignment costs almost nothing by comparison. Every staffing leader I have talked to knows this and almost none of them are happy with how their branches actually do it. It is the classic gap between a metric everyone agrees is important and a process nobody owns.

Gross margin per placement

The spread, after burden. This is the number the CFO looks at. It gets squeezed from both ends: clients pushing bill rates down through procurement and MSP programs, and workers pushing pay rates up because they have options.

If your product touches margin directly, lead with it. If it does not, do not pretend. Tie yourself to fill rate or redeployment and let the margin math follow.

Why "efficiency" is the worst word in your deck

Efficiency is a word that means nothing to someone running a spread business, because it does not specify which side of the spread it moves.

I have watched reps open with "we help staffing firms operate more efficiently" and then get thirty polite seconds and a request to send materials. The buyer did not reject the product. She could not find the product. There was no hook in the sentence for her to hang anything on.

Compare that to: "most of the branch managers I talk to can tell me their fill rate but not their redeployment rate, and the second one is where their margin is hiding." Now she is either nodding or arguing. Both are fine. Both are a conversation. That kind of specific, numbers-native opener is the whole idea behind the staffing and recruiting cold call script we use for reaching VPs of Recruiting and branch managers, and it works because it proves in one sentence that you have been inside this business before.

The branch is the real buying unit

Here is the structural thing that kills more staffing deals than pricing ever will.

Most staffing firms of any size run on branches. A branch has a manager. That manager typically owns a P&L, or something close enough to a P&L that it walks and talks like one. Her comp is tied to the gross profit her branch produces. Her recruiters are often on some mix of base and commission tied to placements or spread.

Now imagine you sell your platform at corporate. The VP of Recruiting signs. Everyone shakes hands. And then nothing happens, because the branch manager in Columbus looks at your rollout and does the only math that matters to her: this costs my recruiters hours this month, and the payoff shows up next quarter, and my number is due in three weeks.

She is not being difficult. She is being rational. Her incentives are shorter than your value curve. If you do not solve that explicitly, your logo becomes a shelfware case study and your renewal conversation becomes an autopsy.

What to do about it

Three things, in order.

First, ask about branch autonomy in discovery, early and directly. "When corporate rolls out a new tool, how much say does a branch manager have in whether her team actually uses it?" The answer tells you whether you are running one deal or twenty.

Second, find the branch that is already in pain. Somewhere in the org there is a branch with a fill rate problem the regional VP is unhappy about, or one that just lost a big account and has bench they need to redeploy. That branch manager will pull your product in rather than have it pushed on her. Start there and let the internal case study do the selling.

Third, price and scope the pilot so that the branch manager's near-term number is not the thing at risk. If your rollout costs her recruiters a week of throughput, say so out loud and negotiate for that week. Vendors who hide the implementation cost get found out in week two, and then the branch manager becomes an active opponent instead of a passive one.

The seasonal cycle decides your close date, not your quarter

This is the part sellers hate. Your urgency does not matter. The hiring calendar does.

Light industrial and logistics agencies ramp hard into peak season and then contract. Healthcare staffing moves on contract cycles and census. Retail-adjacent staffing has a holiday shape that everyone in the industry can see coming from a mile away. Whatever the vertical, the branch has a season where every recruiter is heads-down filling and a season where the phones are quieter.

You cannot implement software during peak. Nobody will train. Nobody will migrate data. Nobody will change a workflow while they are trying to put hundreds of bodies on sites. If you push for a signature in that window, one of two things happens: you lose, or you win a deal that never gets deployed, which is worse.

So ask. Early, in the first call. "When is your busiest stretch of the year, and when is the window where your team actually has bandwidth to change how they work?" Then build your close plan backward from that window instead of forward from your quarter end.

The good news is that this cuts both ways. The post-peak lull is when leadership does its post-mortems. That is when the reqs they could not fill get counted, when the bench that never got redeployed shows up as a line item, and when someone says out loud that they cannot go through that again. That is your window. It is also why the best time to plant a seed is right in the middle of their chaos, with a call that says nothing more than: I know you are buried, let's talk in six weeks when you can breathe.

I would rather have a dated, structural reason for a deal to close in the second week of a specific month than a manufactured discount deadline. Staffing buyers see through the second one instantly. They negotiate rates for a living.

"The req went dark" and what actually broke

Ask a recruiter what went wrong on a req and you will hear some version of "it went dark." The client stopped responding. The hiring manager went quiet. The req sat and then got pulled.

That phrase is a lid on a box. Your entire discovery job is to get it open, because "went dark" is never the actual failure. It is the symptom the recruiter noticed last. Something broke upstream, and the client's silence was the confirmation.

When I hear "it went dark," the questions I want asked are the boring, sequential ones. Not clever ones. Sequential ones.

The sequence

"Walk me through that req from the day it came in. What was the first thing that happened?"

You are building a timeline. Reqs die at specific joints, and the joints repeat. It came in with a spec nobody clarified. It got worked by two recruiters who both assumed the other one owned it. Candidates were submitted but the format was wrong for the client's ATS. An offer went out and the candidate took a competing role because the gap between interview and offer was too long. The client's internal budget got frozen and nobody at the agency had a relationship deep enough to hear about it.

Each of those is a different product problem and a different sale. If you accept "went dark" as the answer, you pitch generically and you lose.

"How many candidates did you submit before it stopped?" If the answer is zero or one, this is a sourcing problem. If the answer is six, this is a qualification or a client alignment problem, and no amount of sourcing volume fixes it.

"Who at the client actually said yes to the last placement you made with them?" You are testing relationship depth. Agencies that only know the procurement contact go dark constantly, because they have no line of sight into what is really happening on the hiring side.

"What did you do differently on the req you filled fastest last quarter?" This is my favorite question in this whole vertical. It moves the conversation from failure to a working example, and people describe their own best practice far more honestly than they describe their own problems. Then you ask why that does not happen every time. The answer to that is your product wedge.

That sequence, and about a dozen more like it, is what the 25-minute discovery playbook for staffing and recruiting is built around. Not because the questions are exotic, but because most reps ask two of them and then start presenting.

Pricing: they negotiate rates for a living

A quick word of warning. You are selling to people whose core professional skill is negotiating a rate. Procurement pressure is their daily weather. They know exactly how to ask for a concession without giving one.

What this means practically is that you should never bring a number to a staffing buyer that you have not already decided you will hold. Discounting off a first quote teaches them, correctly, that your first quote was fiction. And once they know that, every renewal is a re-negotiation.

It also means you should expect a per-seat model to get picked apart. Branches flex headcount with the season. A recruiter roster in March may not look like the roster in October. If your pricing punishes them for scaling up during peak, you have created a reason for a branch manager to hide users from you. Think about pricing that maps to something the buyer already accepts as variable, and be ready to defend it. Holding your number on the call after you have won is a specific skill and it is the one most likely to determine whether the deal you closed is actually a good deal a year later.

Redeployment is your expansion story

Here is where the year-one customer becomes a much larger year-two customer.

When you first land, you almost certainly sold on fill rate or time to fill. That is fine. Those are the urgent numbers. But somewhere around the third or fourth quarterly check-in, you will have something no vendor pitch can manufacture: the customer's own data about what happened to the workers they placed.

Assignments ended. Some of those people went on to a second assignment with the agency. Most, in the branches I have heard described, did not. That gap is the most expensive thing in the business, because every one of those workers was already paid for. Sourced, screened, onboarded, cleared. And then let go into the market for a competitor to pick up.

So the expansion conversation is not "here is our new module." It is: let's look at everyone whose assignment ended in the last two quarters and count how many are working for you today. Then let the silence do the work. That reframe, from check-in to redeployment conversation, is exactly what the upsell script for staffing and recruiting customers is designed to run, and it lands because you are not asking them to believe a projection. You are showing them their own leakage.

Redeployment also happens to be the metric a branch manager can move without a rollout. She does not need to change how her recruiters source. She needs a list and a reason to call. That makes it the rare expansion that her short incentive horizon actually likes.

What I would do next

If I were picking up this vertical on Monday, I would spend the first week doing nothing but learning to say the four numbers out loud without stumbling, and building three versions of an opener around each one. Then I would practice them against objections until "we already have an ATS" and "talk to the branch" stop knocking me off script. That is the part reps skip, and it is why the discovery call turns into a demo three minutes in.

That is the specific thing we built DrillCall for. You run the staffing cold call and the discovery call against an AI buyer who pushes back the way a VP of Recruiting actually pushes back, and you get the reps in before you spend them on a real branch manager who only takes your call once. Do it for a week and the fifth version of your opener will be dramatically better than the first, which is roughly how it works in the real world too, except in the real world the first four cost you accounts.