Eric Keller ran his desk off spreadsheets for years. After moving to Agency+, he's managing 22 active reqs with time-to-submit down 40% — not because he started working harder, but because his stack stopped fighting him. That's the whole story, and it's worth unpacking, because most agencies assume their bottleneck is talent or hustle when it's actually the four tabs they're forcing every recruiter to work across.
How did one agency recruiter cut time-to-submit by 40%?
He stopped running his desk across three or four disconnected tools and moved everything — candidates, clients, splits, submissions — into one system. That's it. No new sourcing strategy, no bigger team, no longer hours. Just one less system fighting him every time he tried to move a candidate forward.
Before Agency+, Eric worked the way most agency recruiters still work: candidates logged in one place, client conversations tracked somewhere else, splits and benches held together by memory and a spreadsheet nobody else fully trusted. Every submission meant reconciling three sources of truth before he could even pick up the phone.
After the switch, he's running 22 active reqs at once — a load that would have been unmanageable on spreadsheets — with submissions moving 40% faster. The work didn't get easier. The friction around the work got removed.
What is time-to-submit, and why does it matter for agency recruiters?
Time-to-submit is how long it takes a recruiter to get a qualified candidate in front of a client after a req opens. It's the clearest measure of how much friction sits inside an agency's process, because it captures everything between "I found the right person" and "the client actually saw them."
Clients don't experience your sourcing skill. They experience your speed. Two agencies can have equally strong candidates, and the one that submits first usually wins the placement — not because their candidate was better, but because they got there before the client filled the role somewhere else. A slow time-to-submit doesn't just cost individual placements. It trains clients to see you as slower than your competition, even when your talent pool is just as strong.
What does running a desk on spreadsheets actually cost you?
It costs the minutes between finding the right candidate and actually submitting them, multiplied across every req, every week, for as long as the spreadsheet stays in the loop. Your ATS doesn't know what a split is. Your CRM doesn't know what a bench is. Your spreadsheet doesn't know anything — it just sits there until someone remembers to update it.
That's not a discipline problem. Plenty of sharp, disciplined recruiters run desks this way, because it's how the tools were handed to them. It's a stack problem: three or four systems that were never built to talk to each other, each one owning a different piece of the same placement. Log a candidate update in the ATS. Jump to the CRM to update the client. Check the spreadsheet to see who's actually still available. Repeat that all day, every day, and the time adds up to less time actually recruiting.
What changed when Eric Keller moved off spreadsheets?
Delivery and business development started living in the same system, so a submission didn't require checking three places to confirm it was still accurate. A placement is both sides of the same transaction — the candidate side and the client side — and keeping them in separate tools never made sense. It just became normal because nobody built the alternative.
With Agency+'s ATS+ handling both sides in one place, Eric isn't reconciling data before he can act on it. He can see the client relationship, the submission history, and the candidate pipeline in the same view. That's what actually moved the number — not a new sourcing tactic, not more hours, just fewer steps between "I have the right person" and "the client has them in front of them."
Can other agency recruiters replicate this result?
Yes, if the bottleneck is the same one Eric had: tools that don't talk to each other. Agencies running a single connected system, instead of an ATS, a CRM, and a spreadsheet held together with hope, consistently see faster submissions, because the friction Eric had isn't unique to him. It's the default state of agency recruiting for anyone still stitching tools together by hand.
The results won't look identical for every desk — reqs and candidate pools vary. But the mechanism is the same: every minute spent reconciling data across systems is a minute not spent moving a candidate toward a client. Remove that reconciliation, and submissions move faster almost automatically. Pairing a unified system with Forecast for headcount planning and Retain for keeping placed candidates on the job means the speed gain doesn't just show up at submission — it shows up through the whole lifecycle of a placement.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is time-to-submit in recruiting?
Time-to-submit measures how long it takes a recruiter to present a qualified candidate to a client after a req opens. It's a direct measure of process friction — the more systems a recruiter has to reconcile before submitting, the slower that number gets.
How much time do spreadsheets actually cost agency recruiters?
It varies by desk, but the cost compounds every time a recruiter has to check a spreadsheet against an ATS or CRM before acting. Eric Keller's desk saw a 40% drop in time-to-submit after removing that reconciliation step entirely by moving to one connected system.
What's the difference between an ATS and a CRM, and why does it matter here?
An ATS is built to move candidates through a hiring process. A CRM is built to manage client relationships and business development. Most agencies run both separately, which means the candidate side and the client side of the same placement live in two different systems. Agency+ combines both into one system so a recruiter isn't reconciling data across tools.
Is switching off spreadsheets realistic for a solo recruiter or small desk?
Yes — arguably it matters more at smaller desks, where one recruiter is doing the work of an entire back office by hand. Eric Keller ran his desk on spreadsheets before switching. The transition is less about learning complex new software and more about removing the manual reconciliation that spreadsheets require every day.
How does PerfectHire's Agency+ help cut time-to-submit?
Agency+ keeps candidates, clients, splits, and submissions in a single system instead of scattered across an ATS, a CRM, and a spreadsheet. Conduit, the AI backbone underneath it, connects candidate and client data automatically, so recruiters aren't manually syncing three sources of truth before they can submit a candidate.
If your recruiters are reconciling spreadsheets before they can submit a candidate, that's not a hustle problem. Book a demo and see what a connected stack actually does to time-to-submit.