New recruiters often think that their time will be spent interviewing prospective candidates and showing new hires the ropes. You know, sexy stuff like that.

In reality, though, many fresh recruiters find that their new roles are more like a telemarketing job. They spend the majority of their days leaving voicemails, playing phone tag, sending emails, rescheduling interviews, and dealing with no-shows.

So what’s a recruiter to do? You only have so many hours in a week. How can you make the best use of them? What activities can you leverage to produce the best results for your employer or client—i.e., unearthing qualified candidates and getting them to sign on?

Here are the three highest-margin activities what we recommend recruiters focus on:

1. Build Proactive Pipelines

Recruitment is a kind of sales job. You’re selling candidates on the merits of the job opportunity you have to offer. Every salesperson needs a “pipeline”—a mechanism that delivers prospects to them.

You can’t sit passively in your office and expect the perfect candidates to fall out of the sky at the right time. But cold-calling the phone book isn’t a good use of time either. Your pipeline should be a happy medium between “sitting on your butt” and “needle in a haystack.”

Job posting boards like Indeed, as well as social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, are obvious platforms on which to build a pipeline, but remember that we’re trying to be proactive. Test different headlines, compensation notes, qualification stacks, and job descriptions to see what gets the most consistent stream of applicants.

2. Follow Up With Warm Prospects

It’s far easier to convert a warm prospect than a cold one. A warm prospect, from a recruiter’s standpoint, is one who knows who you are and has responded positively to you in the past—or at least returned your calls, texts, and emails.

Some of your time should be spent on cold prospects, but more of your time should be spent nurturing the warm prospects. They are far more likely to convert than someone who has never talked to you or answered your email.

As your pipeline fills with prospects, don’t let them go stale. Email or call those prospects even when you don’t have a job to offer them. Stay top-of-mind so that when the right opportunity arises, you have several warm prospects in your pipeline to match with that opportunity quickly.

3. Streamline the Hiring Process

Speed matters in the recruitment process. If fortune smiles and the perfect candidate walks through the door, you don’t want to lose the victory to a slow vetting process. You have to assume that the candidate has an interview immediately after yours. Who do you want to be the first to make them an offer—you? Or a competitor?

Any time you don’t spend communicating directly with candidates should be spent removing friction from the hiring process. Make it easier for candidates to get a quick response to their inquiries, easier for them to book an interview, easier for them to show up for an interview, faster to screen candidates, and get the go-ahead to hire. Agility is everything in recruitment. He who can make the offer first, wins.