How to Measure and Improve Speed to Submit at a Staffing Agency

What is speed to submit in staffing?

Speed to submit is the time between receiving a candidate’s application and sending their profile to a client for consideration. For a staffing agency, this happens across many open roles at once: recruiters find suitable candidates, screen applications, contact applicants, assess their suitability and submit the strongest profiles.

When these steps take too long, suitable candidates may reach the client after other profiles have already been considered, while recruiters spend their time coordinating screening instead of focusing on candidate quality and client relationships. The goal is to get qualified candidates in front of clients sooner without increasing client rejections. Start by measuring how long each stage takes: it shows where candidates are waiting and which parts could be automated.

Why speed to submit matters

Staffing agencies rarely work on one role at a time. A recruiter may manage several requisitions, each with its own applicant pool, client requirements and submission deadline. A delay that seems manageable for one candidate becomes a serious operational problem when repeated across hundreds or thousands of applications.

Submitting quickly is not the same as submitting the right candidates quickly. Unsuitable profiles increase client rejections and create more work, so speed to submit should be read alongside submission quality: reduce unnecessary waiting while keeping the checks that help recruiters identify suitable candidates.

Bullhorn’s GRID 2026 Industry Trends report shows the pressure on recruitment teams to move faster: 56% of top-performing agencies report placement times of under 10 days, and recruiters report that AI makes candidate screening 50% to 75% faster. These figures give context for the industry’s focus on efficiency. They are not a speed-to-submit benchmark: placement timelines and screening requirements differ across roles, clients and agencies.

How to measure speed to submit

Speed to submit is easier to improve when you know how long candidates spend in each part of your process. Track five timestamps in your applicant tracking system or a spreadsheet: application received, first contact logged, screening completed, recruiter review completed and submission sent. Together they break the process into four stages, and the total time to submit is the sum of the four.

Worked example: how Northstar Staffing handles 15 open roles

Northstar Staffing is a hypothetical agency managing 15 open roles at once. Each role attracts around 250 applications, a conservative assumption, so the agency is working through 3,750 applications to submit the 10 strongest candidates per role: 150 profiles in front of clients. One candidate’s journey takes 36 hours, and screening accounts for 24 of them. Cut screening to 8 hours by automating the initial screen and the journey falls to 20 hours.

Those are only the 150 candidates who reach submission. Northstar still has to process the wider pool of 3,750 applications, identify relevant candidates and decide who deserves one of those slots. Across 15 roles, resume review, outreach, screening coordination, assessment and profile preparation add up quickly, and every manual step adds load.

Fabric can automate the workflow from sourcing and resume screening to outreach, phone screening and first-round AI interviews. Recruiters spend less time coordinating early-stage screening and more time evaluating suitable candidates, working with clients and getting strong profiles submitted.

How to identify the bottleneck in your submission process

Once you have the timestamps, find the stage contributing the most delay. The fix depends on what is slowing that stage down.

1. Applications wait too long for first contact

If candidates wait hours or days before anyone contacts them, look at how applications are reviewed and prioritised. Automating resume screening against recruiter-defined criteria identifies relevant candidates earlier, so outreach can begin for the shortlist rather than after a recruiter has worked through every application. The goal is not to contact every applicant as fast as possible; it is to find and engage suitable candidates sooner.

2. Candidates take too long to complete screening

A recruiter-led screening call needs both people available at the same time, and missed calls, rescheduling and unanswered messages stretch the process. If scheduling is the main bottleneck, use a screening method candidates can complete when they are available, within the window set for the role.

Furlenco shows the capacity that changing early screening can unlock. Its in-house engineering team screened more than 10,000 candidates and hired 30 engineers across five technology stacks in two months, saving more than 1,000 senior engineering hours by replacing first-round interviews. Furlenco is not a staffing agency and its results are not a speed-to-submit benchmark; the lesson is that when early screening consumes team capacity, changing how it is handled frees people for higher-value decisions.

3. Completed screens sit in a review queue

Sometimes candidates finish screening quickly but their results sit untouched while recruiters manage other roles. Faster screening will not fix that. Check whether recruiters can see why a candidate meets or misses the criteria, or whether they have to listen to every recording and move between systems. Structured reports and scorecards make the evidence easier to review; a set review cadence and clear ownership for each requisition keep it moving. Automation should help recruiters decide, not remove their responsibility for deciding.

4. Approved candidates take too long to submit

If a recruiter has decided to proceed but the profile still takes hours to reach the client, look at formatting, copying between systems, summaries and required checks. Standardise submission formats for each client, remove repetitive steps and automate routine preparation where it can be done reliably, while keeping the checks that protect quality. Measure this stage separately so administrative delay does not hide inside recruiter review.

How to improve speed without increasing client rejections

Reducing time to submit is useful only if the candidates reaching clients remain suitable, so track speed and quality as a pair, and compare similar roles before and after any workflow change so a shift in role difficulty or applicant quality does not mislead you.

Trigent, an IT services and staffing company, reported a 30% improvement in its submission-to-selection rate using Fabric, alongside more than $3.5 million in added ARR over six months, 95% recruiter adoption and more than 4,000 requisitions a month. It is a useful example of why submission quality matters alongside speed: the 30% is in submission-to-selection rate, not time to submit.

Where Fabric fits into a staffing workflow

If early screening takes too much time, look at which parts can be automated while recruiters stay in control of candidate decisions. Fabric connects sourcing, resume screening, shortlisting, outreach, a five-to-ten-minute phone screen and configurable AI Round 1 interviews in one workflow.

Shortlisting triggers the phone-screen invitation. The 24-hour phone-screen window is a benchmark tied to the job closing time and can be configured by the recruiter, as can calling hours. WhatsApp is used for invitations and reminders. The AI interview is configured by the hiring manager and can last 30 minutes to an hour or longer, depending on the role; candidates can take it in a phone browser, including on a weak 4G connection, and rejoin after a connection drop.

Recruiters receive shareable reports and scorecards with reasoning to support their review. Shared reports open without a login, access can be revoked, and recruiters choose whether scores or recordings are visible; candidates do not receive feedback through these reports. Fabric supports up to 500 concurrent interviews and more than 20 in-interview cheating signals, which are separate from identity verification or proxy detection.

For an agency working across many roles, the value is in connecting these steps, so recruiters assess evidence and decide who is ready to submit instead of coordinating every early screen by hand. See how Fabric screens for staffing agencies.

What other Fabric clients have achieved

Other teams have used Fabric to handle screening and interviewing at scale, with different outcomes depending on what they needed: submission quality, screening capacity or less first-round interview work.

Read more in Fabric’s customer stories. For your agency, the starting point is the same: find where your own process loses time, then decide which steps can be handled more efficiently.

A four-week pilot to improve speed to submit

You do not need to change the whole recruitment process at once. Start with one role type or a small group of similar requisitions, keep role requirements and submission standards consistent, and use what you learn to decide whether to extend the change.

Frequently asked questions

Last updated: 27 October 2026.