Nobody sits down and calculates what reference chasing costs them. They know it takes time. They know it causes delays. But most agencies never work out the actual number. How many hours per week, across the whole team, and what that converts to in lost revenue.
We ran this calculation before building PassQ. The number surprised us, and we'd been doing it manually for seven years.
Here's how to do it for your agency.
The inputs you need
Four numbers:
- How many consultants on your team are actively placing candidates?
- How many hours per week does each consultant spend on reference admin? Sending requests, chasing non-responders, logging replies, flagging outstanding.
- What is a consultant's time worth to you? Hourly cost, or hourly billing value. Both work depending on how you want to frame it.
- How often does a delayed reference cause a placement to fall through, or cause you to lose a candidate to another agency?
The fourth is the hardest to quantify precisely, but it matters. Start with the first three.
The calculation
Step 1: Total reference admin hours per week
Take the number of active consultants and multiply by their average weekly time on reference admin.
Most consultants we speak to put this at somewhere between 2 and 5 hours per week when they think about it honestly. That includes drafting and sending initial requests, following up with non-responders, calling referees who haven't responded to emails, logging incoming references back into their system, and chasing anything that's still outstanding at end-of-week.
If you're not sure, ask your consultants to track it for a week. The number is usually higher than they'd initially estimate.
Example: 8 consultants x 3 hours/week = 24 hours/week
Step 2: Convert hours to cost
Multiply total weekly hours by the value of a consultant's time. You can use either:
- Hourly cost (salary + on-costs, divided by working hours): what the admin is costing you to provide
- Hourly billing value (fee revenue divided by working hours): the revenue you're forgoing when consultants do admin instead of billing work
Using billing value gives a bigger number, but it's also the more honest framing. A consultant spending 3 hours on reference admin isn't available to source candidates, nurture clients, or work placements that generate revenue.
A mid-level consultant billing £30,000 to £50,000 in fees per year has an hourly billing value of roughly £15 to £25/hour. A stronger biller at £80,000+ puts that closer to £40/hour.
Example: 24 hours x £20/hour = £480/week in diverted capacity
Step 3: Annualise it
Multiply by the number of working weeks in a year. Using 46 (allowing for holidays and slower periods) is reasonable.
Example: £480 x 46 = £22,080/year
What that number means
For an 8-consultant team, £22,000/year is the rough cost of running a manual reference workflow in lost consultant capacity alone. That's before you factor in delays or dropped placements.
For a smaller team, the number is lower but the ratio is the same. If reference admin takes 3 hours out of a 40-hour week, that's 7.5% of a consultant's productive time, every week. Not because they're slow or inefficient. Because the manual process is structurally slow.
Scale the numbers for your team:
| Consultants | Hours/week (estimate) | Billing rate | Weekly cost | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 2 hrs each = 6 hrs | £20/hr | £120 | £5,520 |
| 6 | 3 hrs each = 18 hrs | £20/hr | £360 | £16,560 |
| 10 | 3 hrs each = 30 hrs | £25/hr | £750 | £34,500 |
| 20 | 2 hrs each = 40 hrs | £25/hr | £1,000 | £46,000 |
These are conservative estimates. Agencies that have tracked this closely tend to find the real number sits toward the higher end.
References are one slice of the desk
Reference chasing is the admin agencies feel most. It isn't the only admin costing them the same way. Bookings need confirming and filling. Timesheets need collecting, checking and querying. Candidates and clients need chasing for the dozen small things that keep a placement moving. Each is a version of the same problem: repetitive work that sits in an inbox and quietly eats hours that could go into placing people.
Run the calculation above for references and you get a real number. Run it across the whole desk and it's a much bigger one. There's a fuller breakdown of what that admin costs, and where it hides, in our guide to recruitment desk admin.
The delayed placement cost
The second part of the cost is harder to quantify but worth considering.
In education supply, placements move fast. A school calls on Monday for someone to start Tuesday. If your candidate's reference isn't back, you either delay the placement or risk starting without it.
Delaying a placement costs revenue directly. The days the teacher isn't placed are days not billed. It also risks the relationship. The school calls another agency if you can't deliver.
In seven years of running an education supply desk, the reference delay was the most common single reason we lost a placement we'd already won. We don't have a formula for that cost. But most agency directors can remember specific placements where it happened.
Where the time actually goes
Reference admin isn't one task. It's several small tasks that accumulate.
The initial request. Finding the right email for the referee, drafting a request, attaching the form. If this isn't templated, it takes 10-15 minutes per candidate.
The first chase. Most referees don't respond immediately. The first follow-up typically goes out 3-5 days after the original request. Another 5-10 minutes.
The second and third chase. For non-responders, this is where the time mounts. Phone calls, trying a different contact, checking with the candidate to prompt the referee. Some references take 4-6 touchpoints.
Logging and tracking. Marking references as received, filing them, flagging what's outstanding, updating the candidate's record.
None of these tasks is complicated. Together, across a busy desk, they add up to hours. There's a more detailed breakdown of the chase process in our guide to reference chasing.
The automation case
PassQ is a full agentic CRM for temp recruitment: you run your relationships, it runs your desk. Compliance clearing is the strongest part today. It sends reference requests, chases non-responders on a schedule, and logs everything: when the request went out, when it was chased, when it came back. Its voice agent even makes the calls, on a real phone, in any language. Consultants don't touch the workflow unless there's something to review. Bookings, timesheets and pay follow as they're ready.
Put the recovered time next to the cost of the admin and the case makes itself, and that's before the rest of the desk comes into view. Pricing is at passq.io/pricing, and we're at founding-partner stage, so early agencies help shape it with us.
There's more on how the process works in our guide to automating reference checks.
If you want to see what it looks like for an agency your size, get in touch.
The short version
Manual reference checking costs more than most agencies realise. Consultant time goes to admin instead of billing. Placements get delayed. Sometimes they fall through entirely. The number is easy to calculate and almost always justifies automation at any meaningful team size.
Do the calculation for your agency. If it surprises you, it's probably worth a conversation.