Your fill rate won't improve just because you send more CVs.

Open the jobs you lost before opening the activity report

Pick ten recently closed jobs that ended without a placement. Read what happened. Did you fail to find suitable people? Did the client reject the shortlist? Did a good candidate walk away while everyone waited for feedback?

Those are different problems. Asking for more calls makes sense if you haven't reached enough relevant people. It makes much less sense when the hiring manager has already had three suitable CVs for a week.

Give each lost job a reason specific enough to do something about. 'Client difficult' won't help you next time. 'No interview dates agreed, and feedback took nine days' gives you something to discuss before accepting the next brief.

Where the record doesn't explain the loss, ask the recruiter who worked it. That conversation may tell you more than another required field in the CRM.

Be clear about which fill rate you mean

For this exercise, use job fill rate: the proportion of accepted jobs that resulted in a placement. Follow a group of jobs through to their final outcomes, so you're counting placements against the jobs they came from.

Say you accepted 20 single-vacancy jobs and filled 12. Your fill rate for that group is 60%. If five jobs are still live, keep them visible as open work; you don't yet know the group's final result.

For a temporary order with ten openings and six starts, you're measuring positions filled. Keep that separate from whether the order produced any placement at all.

A job order is also a commitment from the client

Before the search starts, ask what will happen when you find the right person. Who reviews the shortlist? Who can book an interview? When can they do it? What would make them reject someone who meets the brief?

The answers tell you how much of the process is ready. A client can be keen to receive CVs while still being undecided about salary, reporting lines or whether the hire has approval.

Try a direct question: 'If I put two people in front of you who meet these requirements, what needs to happen for you to interview them next week?' Follow up on any conditions you haven't discussed.

You may decide to work the job anyway. At least you'll know whether you're running a search or helping the client work out what they want.

Find out why candidates are saying no

If you're getting interviews but losing people before offer, revisit the conversations before submission. What did they want to change? Which parts of this role addressed that? What other processes were they in?

A CV can fit a job the candidate has no reason to take. Sending it faster doesn't resolve that. Nor does quoting a salary expectation from a conversation six months ago.

When someone declines, keep the explanation. A commute, a counteroffer and a role that changed during the process each suggest a different adjustment to the next search.

Take one decision into Friday's job review

Choose the most repeated reason in your ten lost jobs. Then change something in the next set of live work. If feedback was the issue, agree review times before sending another shortlist. If the search was thin, revisit where you looked.

For each live job, ask: what decision is holding this up, who can make it, and what are we doing to get an answer? Keep the discussion there until someone can name the call they're going to make.

Track the affected stage as well as the final fill rate. Faster feedback is visible before the job closes. So is a higher proportion of submitted candidates reaching interview.

More activity may still be the right answer. By this point, you should be able to explain which activity, on which jobs, and why.