Odyn vs. manual prospecting: how much time and money each method takes

What do the five steps of manual prospecting take?

For each company you approach, the work repeats the same way. Our estimates, per hiring manager, at a steady pace:

1. Read the posting and decide whether it deserves a message: about 2 minutes. Plenty of postings get dropped (placed by another agency, already filled, outside your niche).
2. Find the person who makes the decision and verify their email: about 4 minutes, more if the address is nowhere to be found.
3. Write a message built on the posting: 5 to 10 minutes. Sales-tool guides give that range for a properly personalized email (SendIQ, 2025; Leadriver, September 24, 2026).
4. Send it, then schedule two follow-ups: about 3 minutes.
5. Track, file, reply: about 2 minutes on average, because most hiring managers do not answer.

That is 16 to 21 minutes per hiring manager. These are estimates, not measurements. They are on the low side, and a firm that writes long, truly custom messages will go over them. At 20 minutes each, five hours a week buys you about fifteen hiring managers. Odyn's subscription covers 450 decision-makers a month.

And in dollars?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage of human resources specialists, the category that includes recruiters, at $75,940 a year in May 2025, or $36.51 an hour. At that rate, 30 hours of prospecting is about $1,100 of paid time before benefits, to compare with Odyn's €290 a month per consultant, excluding VAT.

The number that counts sits elsewhere. US sources put contingency fees at 20 to 25% of first-year base salary (Eden Capital, 2026). A 20% fee on a $90,000 placement is $18,000. A week spent prospecting is a week in which a job order does not move and a candidate does not get a call back. By hand, the real bill is what did not get done.

One benchmark on selling time: Salesforce's State of Sales survey (7,775 respondents, December 2022) found that sales reps spend only 28% of their week actually selling. A recruiter who prospects on top of recruiting and billing has even less room.

What the hand does badly, and what it does better

By hand, follow-ups are the first thing to slip. Nothing presses on them: the first message went out, a search needs attention, the second follow-up waits until next week, then never goes. And you prospect when you have time, which is often when the pipeline is already empty.

The other weakness is quieter: choosing the recipient. The reflex is to write to HR. Among more than 2,000 decision-makers Odyn contacted between June and September 2026 (mostly French companies), operations leaders and company heads gave about four times as many interested replies as in-house recruiters, at equal numbers. The guide on finding the hiring decision-maker covers how to choose.

The hand has real strengths too. A message you write after reading the company's website and the founder's profile beats a message produced in bulk, for the twenty clients you dream of. Your network, your former clients, a call to a VP you already know: none of that goes through a tool. In a firm that works on exclusive terms, or on executive searches, most of the development happens in the relationship anyway, not in a cold message.

What Odyn takes over

Odyn takes over the five steps, starting from published job postings. It finds the companies hiring in your target (roles, locations, industry) and sets aside postings of no interest to a recruiting firm. It finds the decision-maker for each opening, writes a message based on the posting and on your specialty in your own style, sends it from your email address and LinkedIn account, and follows up until someone replies. It stops as soon as the hiring manager answers; it never replies for you.

What Odyn does not take: the conversation with the hiring manager, the call, the intake, the negotiation of your fee. When a decision-maker replies or accepts the LinkedIn invitation, you pick up, and Odyn suggests that you call. Your time stays in the hands where it pays, the ones that talk to people.

The subscription is €290 a month per consultant, excluding VAT, with no long-term commitment, no success fee and no charge per meeting; see pricing and how an AI prospecting agent works. You start with a 15-minute demo. Odyn started in France and its track record is on French postings, so if your firm works in the US or the UK, ask during the demo how it covers your market.

By hand and with Odyn, point by point

When prospecting by hand is enough

If you target a handful of very specific companies, if your network already fills your job orders, if the phone is your strength and you enjoy it, or if you are starting with no budget and a lot of free time, keep doing it by hand. In those cases, adding an agent costs more settings than it saves hours.

When Odyn fits better

Odyn fits better for the firm that prospects in bursts. If your business development stops as soon as a search takes off, regularity is what you lack, and a machine that writes on business days supplies it. It also fits when one person prospects, recruits and bills, as in a solo practice (see finding clients as a freelance recruiter). The most effective setup is often a mix: the hand for your twenty high-stakes accounts, Odyn for all the companies you would never have had time to find.

If you are thinking instead of paying someone else to do it, Odyn compared with an outsourced SDR sets the prices side by side. The general method is in the guide to business development for a recruitment firm, and the other options are in the comparison index.

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