The numbers
| Measure | Talent Acquisition Leads | Dataset average | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prospects contacted | 16,100 | – | – |
| Reply rate | 30.4% | 32.3% | 9th of 14 |
| Meeting rate | 4.1% | 4.7% | 11th of 14 |
| Average deal size | €26,800 | €39,006 | 12th of 14 |
| Pipeline per 1,000 prospects | €1,099,000 | – | 11th of 14 |
Reply rate is 1.9 points below the dataset average and meeting rate is 0.6 points below it.
What the data says about this persona
Talent acquisition leads reply at 30.4 percent and book at 4.1 percent, with the second lowest deal size in the dataset at €26,800. They are the persona most likely to reply politely and least likely to hold budget.
That is not an argument against targeting them, but it is an argument for what you do with the meeting. In our programmes the TA lead was frequently the route to the HR director rather than the buyer themselves, and the sequences that worked accepted that and asked for the introduction rather than the purchase.
They are also the persona most exposed to outbound volume. Recruiters live in LinkedIn, receive more automated messages than anyone except founders, and can spot a merge field from the preview pane. Message length matters more here than almost anywhere: the 240 to 420 character band replied at 38.6 percent across the dataset, and under 150 characters at 21.4 percent, and recruiters are the group most likely to read a short generic message as a bot.
What to put in the message
Something about a specific role they are hiring for or a team they are scaling. One question about the process.
What to leave out
Anything that could be another recruitment tool pitch. They receive several a day.
The format itself does not change by persona. Across every segment we tested, the winning first message was two and a half sentences, ended in a question, named something of theirs, said nothing about us and landed between 240 and 420 characters. That version replied at 44.5% against 18.6% for the same message with solution detail added.
Method
Figures for this persona come from 16,100 prospects inside a wider dataset of 389,890 prospects and 15,018 meetings, run for 17 clients across 41 programmes between 2018 and 2026. Prospects were split at random inside each client account, so industry, geography, seniority and company size are held constant on both sides of every controlled test. Meetings are counted at the point one was accepted in the client’s calendar; we do not track what happens after that.
Full method, all fifteen tests and the breakdowns by company size and region are on the 2026 outbound benchmarks page.
Benchmark your own campaign against this segment, with the figures above pre-loaded. No sign-up.
Cite this page as: Prospectio.ai, Outbound benchmarks for Talent Acquisition Leads, 16,100 prospects, 2018 to 2026.