Stepstone’s labor-market briefing from May 2026 found that applications per IT job advert more than doubled between early 2023 and early 2026. Bitkom’s 2026 survey of German employers found nearly all firms still reporting difficulty filling IT roles, even though the number of open IT positions has fallen since 2023, and the association’s 2025 study put the average time to fill one at more than half a year.

Stepstone puts part of that surge down to AI-assisted applications and a generally high willingness among German employees to change jobs.

A hiring team can now receive far more CVs than it did three years ago for a role it still struggles to fill, which makes application volume a weak guide to whether a search is working.

Current demand gives the problem its urgency. SAPinsider’s 2026 migration research found just over half of the organizations it surveyed had deployed S/4HANA or SAP cloud ERP and only around a third had fully transitioned, while DSAG’s 2026 investment report shows a smaller share of member companies planning to raise SAP spending than in 2024.

Clients still need delivery capacity and are watching closely what they pay for it, which leaves a consultancy little room for either a slow hire or a poor fit.

The metrics to consider are the ones that predict billable capacity, and the rest of this article works through them from the first requisition to the end of a new hire’s first year.

The Time-to-Fill Metric

Published time-to-fill figures start and stop measuring in different places: some begin at requisition approval and others at first contact, some end at acceptance and others at the start date.

That makes benchmarking between firms unreliable, and it obscures the point that matters commercially. For a consultancy, a more useful measure runs from requisition approval to the new hire’s first billable day, and it breaks into three parts: the time it takes to reach an accepted offer, the notice period, and the gap between start date and first client assignment.

Notice is where the arithmetic tends to surprise people. German law sets a statutory minimum of four weeks for an employee’s resignation, and many consulting employment contracts run longer: three months to the end of a quarter is a clause many experienced consultants will recognize.

Under that clause, a resignation handed in during November takes effect at the end of March, so the new hire starts in April at the earliest. The recruiting team can close the search inside a month while the client seat sits empty for many more months, which is why agreeing a realistic start date should be a fundamental part of the hiring process.

Putting a Price on the Empty Seat

Cost of vacancy turns that delay into the financial terminology partners use. A simple version of the calculation multiplies the working days the role stays empty by the firm’s own day rate, its contribution margin and the share of the role that would have been billable, before indirect costs such as overtime elsewhere in the team are added.

A stronger offer, an additional sourcing channel or one fewer interview round each carries a visible cost, and cost of vacancy puts the cost of waiting on the same scale, so decisions often argued on instinct can be weighed on the same terms.

Speed Problems in Specific Stages

An average time-to-hire can show that a process is slow, and stage-level measures show where the time goes.

Time to first qualified shortlist is the earliest warning sign: when it runs long, the brief, the sourcing channel or the assumed availability of the skill deserves a second look, and those weeks are lost however fast the later stages run.

Further along, in our experience, consultancy hiring most often stalls at two points: finding a slot in a senior practice lead’s calendar for the final interview, and internal sign-off on the offer.

Stepstone’s 2025 research indicates candidates expect a hiring process to take a few weeks. Experienced SAP consultants frequently run more than one process at a time, so each extra week of internal waiting gives more time for a competing offer to arrive.

The last speed metric applies after the contract is signed. Acceptance-to-start conversion measures how many accepted candidates actually arrive, and a long notice period gives the current employer months to respond; in a 2023 Robert Half survey, around three-quarters of German HR managers said their organization makes counteroffers to staff who resign. Logging each withdrawal during notice, with its reason and the length of notice involved, shows whether the firm’s contact with new joiners during that period is working.

Where Good Candidates Leave the Funnel

Conversion rates between stages become useful once they are split by module and seniority.
An overall interview-to-offer ratio can look healthy while the funnel for a scarce skill such as EWM or MDG fails, because high-volume roles dominate the average. When interview-to-offer runs low for a particular role, two internal explanations are worth checking first: a role profile that different interviewers interpreted in different ways, and interviewers applying different standards to the same candidate.

Offer acceptance becomes more useful once decline reasons are coded into fixed categories. Bitkom’s 2025 and 2026 surveys of German employers give a practical starting set, since candidates’ salary expectations, internal pay structures that cap what can be offered, and applicants’ German language skills rank among the hiring difficulties employers report most often. Each points somewhere different: to offer ranges, to pay architecture, or to where the firm is looking.

Source quality is best judged by outcomes: conversion to offer, then retention at twelve months and first-year utilization, recorded against the channel each hire came through. Among the channels compared this way, returning former employees deserve a category of their own, given the restructuring programs SAP and some of its partners have run in recent years.

Cost per channel only makes sense next to yield. Specialist recruiters typically charge a percentage of first-year salary and referral schemes pay a bonus, yet a cheaper channel that takes months longer to deliver can cost more once the cost of the empty seat is counted.

Quality of Hire Is Already in the Timesheets

LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting 2025 report found a large majority of talent acquisition professionals expecting quality of hire to matter more, and only around a quarter highly confident in their organization’s ability to measure it. Consultancies have an easier job here than many employers, because much of the outcome data already sits in their own systems.

A workable score draws on five sources.

The first is utilization over the first six and twelve months, adjusted for any bench time the firm itself caused, so a slow staffing decision stays off the new hire’s record.

Client signals add a second view: feedback, an extension to the consultant’s assignment, or a client asking for them by name. A hiring manager rating at around ninety days, scored against the criteria written into the requisition, gives the internal view, and probation outcome and regretted departures within the first year complete the picture.

The score becomes far more valuable once it is set against interview records. Comparing interview ratings with first-year results tests whether the selection process predicts anything, and the evidence favors structure: Sackett and colleagues’ 2022 revision of the research on selection methods, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, placed structured interviews among the strongest predictors of job performance. Scored, consistent interviews also produce the data that the comparison needs.

For first-year leavers, checking whether each one got the module, client and travel pattern discussed at interview, and how long they waited for a first assignment, shows where the hiring conversation and the activity during first months in the job drifted apart.

Hiring Forecasts Belong Next to the Sales Pipeline

The practices we see quickly filling scarce roles tend to track pipeline coverage for the skills they sell most, meaning the number of qualified, contactable candidates per forecast opening. The strongest ratios we see give a firm more than one realistic candidate for each forecast role.

The forecast itself works best as a weighted view of sales opportunities, each adjusted for win probability and expected start date, then converted into roles by module and seniority and reviewed monthly.

Comparing planned hires with actual hires each quarter shows how reliable that forecast is, and error in either direction costs the firm, as bench time or as rushed hiring. The measure clients notice is the share of client-committed roles filled by the promised start date.

Talent pools come with a legal limit that needs to be taken into account. Data protection rules restrict how long a rejected applicant’s details can be kept, with guidance usually tying the period to the window for discrimination claims, and holding someone for future roles needs their agreement. The share of candidates who give it becomes a metric in its own right. Internal mobility, the proportion of openings filled by consultants the firm already employs, belongs on the same list, since a redeployment skips the notice period entirely.

The Rules That Shape the Dashboard

Where a works council exists, German co-determination law gives it a say over personnel questionnaires and assessment criteria, over selection guidelines, including those drawn up with AI, and over technical systems capable of monitoring staff. Designing the metrics framework with the works council from the outset tends to make rollout smoother.

EU rules amended in July 2026 moved the AI Act‘s high-risk obligations for recruitment AI to December 2027, while transparency duties toward people interacting with AI systems already apply.

Firms screening with AI can get ahead of the deadline by tracking how many strong candidates the tool rejects. Pay transparency rules are further off in Germany, where the EU directive’s June 2026 transposition deadline has passed and, as of mid-2026, no implementing bill had entered the legislative process, although Stepstone’s surveys suggest job seekers are more likely to apply to adverts that show salary.

Five metrics are enough for a monthly review: time-to-billable, time to first shortlist, conversion by segment, acceptance-to-start conversion and twelve-month quality of hire. Reading them side by side, speed next to quality in particular, makes it obvious when one improves at the other’s expense, and everything else covered here can stay diagnostic until a core number changes.

What a Stable Pipeline Requires

A stable talent pipeline is one where the gap between a project’s start date and a suitable consultant’s availability is short, predictable and measured.

The practices we see holding their pipelines steady each map to one of the metrics above: consented talent pools for the handful of skills the firm sells most, contacted regularly; pre-agreed offer ranges for scarce skills, set against cost of vacancy so that approval adds as little time as possible; a planned contact routine for accepted candidates throughout their notice; and a check for redeployment options before any external requisition opens.

Early leavers reopen the vacancy and restart the whole lead time, so quality of hire, first-year retention and the onboarding that supports both go a long way to deciding whether a pipeline stays stable once it is built. Hiring, sales and delivery each contribute part of that lead time, which is a strong argument for reviewing these numbers together.

A hiring lead who reports cost of vacancy and time-to-billable in the firm’s own margin terms is speaking the same language as the partners who set budgets. One more cost is worth adding to that conversation, if it is missing: work the firm declined or lost because it could not staff it.

IgniteSAP works with SAP consultancies on exactly this kind of resilient talent pipeline, matching them with consultants who bring the depth a role needs at the point the project needs them. If that kind of staffing support would help your firm, contact us on LinkedIn.