How many reqs can one recruiter actually hold

Every capacity conversation I have been in starts the same way: someone divides open requisitions by recruiters and produces a number. Ours was 12.8. The number is easy to produce and it explains almost nothing, because a graduate req in Poland and a principal engineer req in Munich are not the same unit of work.

So we stopped counting requisitions and started counting the things that actually consume a recruiter’s week.

The four inputs

Sourcing intensity: the share of the pipeline that has to be built rather than attracted. Stakeholder load: how many hiring managers a recruiter serves, not how many roles. Process length: median days from open to offer for that role family. Novelty: whether the role has been filled in the last twelve months in that location.

Each scored one to three, multiplied out, and normalised so that a mid-level role in a location with an established pipeline equals 1.0.

Graduate, PL0.44%

Mid engineer, PL1.010%

Mid engineer, DE1.616%

Principal, DE3.130%

Country lead4.241%

Internal load model, FY26 · calibrated against recruiter time tracking, n=38 recruiters over one quarter

Figure 1Copy citationDownload chart

What it showed

Applied across the portfolio, the picture inverted. Central Europe, which looked comfortably staffed at 11.9 reqs per recruiter, was carrying the lightest load in the company. Western Europe, at 15.3, was carrying almost double the work per head.

The quality complaints we had been receiving mapped onto the load column almost exactly, and onto the requisition column not at all.

Most hiring problems are capacity problems wearing a quality costume.

Letter 009 · Capacity planning

The line

Across four quarters, the point at which escalations began to rise sat between 18 and 20 load units per recruiter. Below eighteen, complaint volume was flat and uncorrelated with load. Above twenty it rose steeply, and the first thing to degrade was not time to fill but candidate communication, the part of the job that has no deadline attached to it and therefore absorbs every squeeze.

That gave us something to plan against. Not a headcount target, a ceiling.

What it did not solve

Load models make redistribution arguments winnable and hiring arguments harder. The first conversation after this landed was not about adding recruiters; it was about moving two of them from Central to Western Europe, which is a conversation with a country manager, not a spreadsheet.

The second was about whether the scoring could be gamed. It can. Anyone who assigns their own novelty score will discover their roles are unusually novel. We moved scoring to the operations team and published the rubric, which removes the argument without removing the incentive.

If you want to build one: start with time tracking on twenty recruiters for one quarter. Without a calibration set the weights are opinion, and an opinion in a spreadsheet is harder to argue with than an opinion in a sentence, which is the wrong kind of advantage to have.