How AdvisorWorks Cut Time to Hire by 14 Days Using Lighthouse

AdvisorWorks — same role, same employer, two approaches

The recruiting experts who couldn't recruit for themselves

AdvisorWorks runs managed recruiting for other companies. Their whole model is built on the premise that hiring shouldn't be a manual grind — it should be systematic, consistent, and fast. They tell clients: "Let us handle your recruiting funnel." Job postings, candidate screening, shortlisting, first-round interviews — they do it all.

But when AdvisorWorks posted a role for their own team the traditional way, 700+ candidates applied. And despite being recruiting professionals, they were immediately underwater. Screening alone took 16 days. Only 43% of applicants even got reviewed before the role was filled. The other 57% — nearly 400 people — applied and heard nothing. The irony wasn't lost on them: they were selling a solution to a problem they hadn't solved for themselves.

The experiment: same role, two ways

AdvisorWorks decided to settle it with data. They ran the same role — same title, same requirements — twice. Once manually. Once with Lighthouse handling screening, scoring, and communication. The results weren't close.

Every resume took roughly 2 minutes to review manually. Every promising candidate (about 20% of applicants) needed another 3+ minutes for outreach and scheduling. On a 700-applicant post, that's roughly 30 hours of manual work — nearly a full work week — before a single interview happened. With Lighthouse, screening dropped to zero manual hours. Every applicant was scored the moment they applied. The hiring manager opened their dashboard to a ranked pipeline instead of a pile of PDFs.

From proof of concept to proof point

The experiment did more than fix AdvisorWorks' own hiring — it became a sales asset. When they tell clients "we can manage your recruiting funnel better than you can," they're not speculating. They ran the numbers on themselves. Same role. Two approaches. One took 16 days and screened less than half the applicants. The other took 2.1 days and screened everyone.

For a company whose entire value proposition is "Done For You" people operations, credibility is everything. AdvisorWorks can now walk into any client conversation and say: we didn't just build a better process — we tested it against the old one, on ourselves, with real applicants. The gap wasn't marginal. It was 14 days and 57% of candidates.

If you're in the business of fixing other people's hiring, you'd better have fixed your own first. AdvisorWorks did — and the side-by-side numbers make the case better than any pitch deck ever could.