Some guys will hit the doors and crush it consistently starting week one, and it doesn't take very long to realize they're a winner. But you can also have a month or two of recruiting where there aren't any shining stars, and that's where it becomes easy to question the whole process based on the people you brought in during that stretch.
It could be a group of lesser recruits, a management issue, a weather issue, or just the law of averages not leaning in your favor that month. Some of those things are within your control and some aren't, but measuring your return from that group alone may leave you looking at too small a group over too short a period to see the full picture.
That's why it's useful to look at recruiting as a marathon rather than a sprint. It's the collective process of recruiting over a year, bringing in new groups month after month, that can give you an advantage in the market. When you look across those months and the people you've brought in throughout the year, it becomes much clearer what your recruiting investment is actually producing.
Recruiting Is a Game of Large Numbers
Recruiting is a game of large numbers, just like knocking on doors. You wouldn't judge a neighborhood after knocking on two doors, and you need a large enough group of recruits to get a useful picture of your recruiting results and accurately measure your return on investment.
If you hire two people, both might quit. Even if your program typically keeps one or two people out of every ten who launch, it's still possible for all ten in a particular group to quit. When you get into twenty or thirty launches, you have a better chance of seeing how your program usually performs. You might have three, four, or five people make it through your ninety-day, six-month, or one-year benchmark, depending on the quality of your program and which benchmark you're measuring.
Those numbers will vary from business to business, but the point is to look at enough recruits that a handful of outcomes doesn't drive your whole conclusion. From there, you can look at what it cost to recruit and launch the entire group and what that group produced for the business.
What Is a Productive Rep Worth?
Once you have enough recruiting activity to get a meaningful picture, the next question is what the people who stay and produce are worth to your business. If you've launched thirty people and five are still producing, knowing that twenty-five left tells you something about retention, but it doesn't tell you whether the investment paid off. You need to look at what those five have produced, along with any production from the people who left, and compare that with what you spent bringing all thirty onto the team.
A keeper who stays a year can be worth many multiples of what it cost to find him, and one keeper can pay for a whole recruiting campaign. That's why the cost of the people who quit has to be considered alongside the value of the people who make it. You paid to recruit the entire group, and the return comes from what that investment produces as a whole.
It's useful to understand your net margin, but when you're evaluating recruiting and expanding the team, it's often more valuable to look at your gross margin after commissions, labor, and materials. In many cases, you can bring on more reps and more production without increasing your office overhead, so applying your current net margin to that additional revenue can understate what those reps contribute to the business.
If your existing team and infrastructure can support that growth, the margin left after those direct costs is what you have available to recover the recruiting investment and increase profit. If the growth does require another manager, more office space, or additional support, those added costs belong in the calculation too.
On the recruiting side, include the advertising, recruiting fees, your team's time, onboarding, and the training and support it takes to get people productive. Include those costs for the people who never produce too, and count each cost only once. That gives you an honest comparison between what you invested and what the recruiting process actually returned.
What the Return Looks Like in Practice
Let's say you recruit and launch thirty reps and invest $20,000 in recruiting, onboarding, and getting that group into the field. Some companies bring on that many people every month, some every quarter, and some over an entire year. The pace will depend on your business, but the calculation works the same way: look at the full investment and what those reps have produced through the point you're measuring.
For this example, five are still producing, and across everyone you brought on, including the people who eventually left, the company has collected $300,000 in revenue. After $225,000 in commissions, labor, materials, and other direct costs associated with that work, you have $75,000 left before recruiting costs and office overhead.
Subtract the $20,000 you invested in recruiting and launching those reps, and you're left with $55,000 before overhead and taxes. Assuming the additional production didn't require more overhead, the recruiting ROI is:
($75,000 − $20,000) ÷ $20,000 = 275%
For every dollar you put into recruiting and getting people productive, you got that dollar back plus $2.75. You still had twenty-five people leave, but the production from the entire group more than paid for the investment. That's a very different picture from simply saying, "We hired thirty people and only kept five."
You also want to know how long it took to recover that investment, because the same return earned over three months means something different for your cash flow than a return earned over a year. And the five reps still producing can continue adding value, with their future production and any additional costs counted as they happen.
What This Looks Like on a Real Team
One roofing company in Georgia had more than twenty reps on its team that we'd helped recruit over the preceding year, following a six-figure recruiting investment. The company reported nearly a million dollars in revenue over a recent couple of months. There were people who quit along the way, but if you only focused on those people, you'd miss the value of the team that recruiting had helped build.
Those figures alone aren't a clean ROI calculation, and I wouldn't credit recruiting with every dollar the company sold. But they bring you back to the question that matters: what have those reps contributed to the business, and what can they continue contributing? The people who left are part of the cost of getting there, but they aren't the whole story.
On the other end of the timeline, one rookie selling windows reportedly earned around $20,000 in his first week. That's an exceptional result, but it illustrates why you don't always have to wait months to recognize a winner. From the owner's perspective, you'd still need to look at what the company kept after commissions and delivering the work to know the return.
The challenge is that you can't plan on every recruiting month delivering someone like that. Recruiting consistently gives you more opportunities to find productive people and build a team around them, rather than making your entire judgment from the best or worst group you brought in. You can see fuller versions of these team-building stories in our case studies.
How You Support the Team Changes the Return
Once you start looking at recruiting this way, it becomes easier to see why what happens after someone says yes matters to the investment. Recruiting consistently gives you more opportunities to find good people, but what they experience when they join your team affects how many of those opportunities turn into production.
Some reps will show up and start producing almost immediately, while others will need more coaching and support to find their footing. Even a strong recruit can get lost in a poor handoff, show up without a clear plan, or struggle under a manager who doesn't have time to help. The quality of the person matters, but so does the opportunity you give that person to succeed.
That's where training, leadership, and the connection to your team become part of the ROI conversation. You've already invested in finding these people, so helping more of them get into the field, become productive, and stay longer can improve the return on that investment. The additional support has a cost, but it also has the potential to produce more value from the recruiting you're already doing.
You're still going to lose people, even with a strong program. The useful question is where you're losing them and what you can influence at each stage, because someone who never makes it to an interview is leaving for different reasons than someone who has been producing for six months.
Where You Lose People Matters
I look at attrition in four stages, because each one gives you a different opportunity to improve the return on your recruiting.
- Application to interview. Before someone ever meets your team, you can lose them through slow follow-up, unclear expectations, or a process that makes it difficult to take the next step. They may be considering several opportunities at once, so how you communicate and how quickly you move can affect whether you get a chance to talk to them at all.
- Accepted offer to launch. Getting a yes doesn't mean someone is going to show up and knock on doors. There's still a handoff between accepting the opportunity and becoming part of the team, and the relationship with the local leader matters during that stretch. A clear start date, a clear plan, and someone who takes ownership of bringing them in can help turn that commitment into an actual launch. (I go deeper on that handoff in Recruiting Doesn't End When a Candidate Says Yes.)
- The first month in the field. Now they're finding out what the job is really like. The pitch, the product, the territory, the coaching, and their ability to see a path to earning money all affect whether they keep going. Some people will decide the work isn't for them, but others could become productive if they get the right help through that first difficult stretch.
- Longer-term retention. Once someone is producing, the reasons they stay can be different from the reasons they joined. Their relationship with their leader, trust in the company, connection to the team, and opportunity to grow all become part of the decision. Keeping a productive rep gives you more time to earn a return on the investment you already made in finding and developing that person.
You can influence each of these stages without expecting to eliminate attrition. Understanding where people leave helps you decide whether the next improvement needs to happen in recruiting, the handoff, training, or the experience of being on your team.
Look at the Team You're Building
You're going to have people quit, and you're going to have recruiting months that are better than others. The question is whether the people you bring in collectively produce enough value to justify what you're investing, and whether you're improving the parts of the process that help more of them succeed.
That becomes much easier to see when you look at recruiting across enough people and enough months, rather than letting one disappointing group or one exceptional hire define your expectations. Count the full investment, understand what the production contributes after commissions, labor, and materials, and give yourself a clear picture of what the process is returning to the business.
If the numbers aren't working, you need to understand why and make changes. But if they are working and your team has the capacity to support more people, the cost of recruiting has to be considered alongside the value of the productive reps you could be adding. Over a year, consistently finding and supporting those people can change the size and strength of your team and your position in the market.
That's why it's useful to look at recruiting as a marathon rather than a sprint. You're building a team through a continuous process, and the return needs to be measured with that bigger picture in mind.