Building a Recruiter Capacity Model That Actually Works

Building a Recruiter Capacity Model That Actually Works

Lessons from Stephen Collopy, TA Ops & Enablement at Delivery Hero

"If you're targeting your sales team to make five sales a quarter, would you only give them five leads?"

That’s Stephen Collopy — currently leading TA Ops & Enablement at Delivery Hero — summing up the problem with how most recruitment capacity models are built (or not built at all).

In our latest Open Source Hiring episode, we went deep on the topic every Head of TA is wrestling with right now: how many roles is too many for one recruiter? What’s a fair workload? And how do you actually model capacity in a way that’s accurate, dynamic, and gets buy-in?

Spoiler: there’s no single model. But Stephen’s approach is one of the best we’ve seen — and it’s grounded in real-world usage across 60+ recruiters at a global scale.

🚦 Why capacity modeling is so hard

Most teams either wing it or fall into one of two traps:

• Over-simplified quotas (“10 roles per recruiter, full stop”)
• Over-engineered spreadsheets nobody updates after month two

Stephen calls it like it is: a lot of capacity models aren’t built for reality. They don’t factor in complexity, the tools (or lack of tools) recruiters are using, the support they have around them (sourcers, coordinators, hiring teams), or the constant disruptions that hit their calendars daily.

🧠 Stephen’s capacity framework

Here’s how he does it — in plain terms.

1. Score each role by stage
   He uses a 6–1 scale to measure load.
   • 6 = heavy lift: new role, intake, JD, setting up the funnel
   • 1 = close to done: offer out, waiting on start date
     Every recruiter scores their roles weekly.
2. Layer in disruption
   He assumes 30% of recruiter time is lost to unplanned interruptions — Slack messages, fires, ad hoc meetings. (If you’re being honest, it’s probably more.)
3. Build a total capacity score
   Multiply # of active roles × their stage scores, then add 30%. That gives you a dynamic load number per recruiter.
4. Benchmark against actual hiring output
   If someone consistently makes 3–4 hires/month with a load score of ~60–80, you’ve got a baseline to plan around.

Simple to explain. Smartly nuanced. And crucially — owned by the recruiter, not just the ops team.

🔁 Output ≠ effort

One of the biggest points Stephen made: output alone doesn’t tell you much.

“If we're only measuring recruiter performance on output, we're doing them a disservice. There's a lot of work that goes into every single hire.”

The framework he’s built surfaces input signals too — how many roles are stuck at “5”? How long have they been there? Where’s the real drag: candidate supply or hiring team readiness?

That kind of granularity lets TA leaders coach in the right places — whether that’s recalibrating the brief, unblocking hiring panels, or adjusting role complexity scores.

📊 Why conversion rates are the only metric that matters

According to Stephen, conversion rates are the most powerful lens for understanding recruiter performance and process health.

Whether it’s:

• Sourcer → Screen pass-through (are we aiming too wide?)
• Screen → HM1 (is the brief aligned?)
• HM1 → HM2 or Offer (are hiring managers calibrated?)

With conversion data over time, you stop reacting to gut feel and start diagnosing the actual bottlenecks — recruiter performance, misaligned JD, inefficient process, or unrealistic role specs.

🔍 Sourcing = market signal

Another highlight: sourcing isn’t just about filling pipelines.

Done right, it’s your fastest, most accurate form of talent intelligence.

Stephen breaks it down:

• How many of your ideal profiles actually exist in this market?
• What’s the candidate response rate to your current pitch?
• Why are top profiles rejecting the role?
• Are your competitors solving the same problems — and how?

These are signals that help shape the hiring plan — not just service it.

He also made the point that most teams cut sourcing first because “sources don’t make hires.” But that’s short-sighted. A good sourcer can:

• Shorten time-to-fill by pre-building pools
• Improve offer acceptance by shaping better positioning
• Guide workforce planning with real-time market insight

💡 Other gold nuggets from the episode

• Coordinator and tooling support massively impact recruiter output. Even 0.5 FTE of scheduling help or a strong CRM can increase recruiter capacity dramatically.
• Capacity should be planned with hiring team time in mind. You can’t hire 30 engineers if your hiring panel can only spare 2 hours a week.
• Great capacity modeling enables career growth. When you know where a recruiter’s time is going, you can carve out space for stretch projects, learning, or progression — not just keep them treading water.
• TA leaders need to slow down. Rushing to fix broken processes without context leads to rework. Build relationships, gather inputs, then act.

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