TRN’s James Osborne dug into the last 4x quarters of data from 330 recruitment agencies. His finding: call activity still matters – but the link between dials and deals is far stranger than “more is better.”
Most of us came up through this industry on the same piece of advice: hammer the phones.
Make the calls, and the placements will follow.
It isn’t bad advice. The phone is still very much alive, and the latest data confirms it still matters. But when James Osborne, Chief Growth Officer at TRN, dug into the last 4x quarters of real activity data from 330 recruitment agencies, he found a caveat that should make every agency leader pause.
More calls don’t reliably mean more revenue. And the gap between the two shifts dramatically depending on the size and shape of your agency.
Take the smallest firms, those with one to nine recruiters. Across the year they grew their business development calls by roughly 40% – a serious lift in effort. Placements per head? They didn’t move at all. Revenue ticked up, but the extra dialling barely touched the result. The effort went in; the engine didn’t get more efficient.
Then there’s the group that ought to worry leaders the most – and it’s precisely the one a standard activity report would never flag. One agency size band kept its placements per head completely steady across the year, while its revenue per head more than halved. Same number of deals. Half the return. If you were only counting calls and placements, you’d never see it coming.
At the other end of the scale, enterprise agencies posted the highest placement volumes in the entire dataset – without making the most calls. Impressive on the surface. But look at their revenue per head quarter by quarter and it reads less like a trend and more like a rollercoaster: strong, weak, strong, weak. There’s a reason for that pattern, and it’s one of the most important lessons in the report.
The thread running through all of it is uncomfortable but clarifying: the busiest agencies were rarely the most valuable. The data even suggests that how long recruiters spent on the phone tracked revenue far more closely than how many times they picked it up.
So what should leaders take from this?
Osborne’s central argument is that activity targets need to get more intelligent. Volume still has its place – it creates rhythm, consistency and accountability. But on its own, it is no longer enough. The agencies pulling ahead in 2026 aren’t the ones making the most calls. They’re the ones connecting activity to commercial outcomes, and reading the relationships between their metrics rather than celebrating any single one.
As Derry Holt, CEO of OneUp Sales, puts it in the report: “Any single number in isolation lets you tell yourself a comforting story; put them side by side and the truth tends to fall out.”
The report data comes from OneUp Sales, a sales performance platform used by recruitment agencies to track activity, targets and revenue in real time. It’s what gives this benchmark its weight: the findings are built on what recruiters actually did, QoQ – not on what they later reported in a survey.
The full report breaks down all four agency-size bands, the call-duration findings, and the specific metrics worth building into your 2026 performance conversations – with commentary throughout from OneUp’s Derry Holt.
Read the full report on the OneUp Sales website →
The question is no longer whether your recruiters are doing enough. It’s whether they’re doing enough of the right things – and whether you can tell the difference.
