CRM for Recruitment and Staffing Firms

Two relationship types: clients and candidates

Clients and candidates behave differently. A client relationship is long, commercial and managed by a salesperson or account manager. A candidate relationship can be short or come back after years, and it involves personal data with strict rules. Putting both in the same generic contact list mixes the two and makes GDPR retention nearly impossible to manage.

Assignment and placement pipelines

The assignment is the object that ties everything together. It belongs to a client, has a role description, a start date and a price, and it has its own candidate pipeline. When a candidate moves to ”presented”, the client contact should see the same status as your recruiter. When an assignment is filled, the placement should trigger the next steps: contract, onboarding, invoicing basis.

• Sales pipeline: lead, meeting, offer, framework agreement
• Assignment pipeline: need received, sourcing, shortlist, presented, placed or lost
• Candidate stages inside each assignment, with reasons for rejection
• Automatic reminders when an assignment has not moved for a set number of days
• Placement triggers contract and invoicing tasks

CV retention under GDPR

This is where most staffing firms are exposed. Keeping every CV forever ”in case something comes up” is not allowed. You need a legal basis for keeping candidate data — often consent for a talent pool, or legitimate interest for an active recruitment — and a defined retention period stated in your privacy notice. When that period ends, the data must be deleted or the candidate asked to renew consent. IMY has criticised employers for keeping applicant data too long, and the same logic applies to recruiters.

Job boards and integrations

Recruitment runs on integrations: publishing jobs to your career page, LinkedIn, Indeed and Platsbanken; receiving applications into the right assignment; signing contracts digitally; and passing placements to payroll and invoicing in Fortnox or Visma. Swedish recruitment systems such as Teamtailor handle the job board side well, and international staffing platforms such as Bullhorn cover more of the sales side. Many small firms combine a recruitment system with HubSpot for clients, synced on company and assignment.

When you do not need a custom setup: a small recruitment firm with a few active assignments can often run on a recruitment system's built-in client features. The case for a CRM implementation grows when you have a separate sales team, framework agreements with many clients, or staffing with time reporting and invoicing. Our guide to CRM implementation costs explains what drives the budget.

Reporting on fill rate

The reports that matter for a staffing firm follow the assignment: how many assignments are won, how many are filled, how long it takes, and where candidates drop out. Fill rate — the share of assignments you actually fill — is the core measure, but it only means something if every assignment is registered, including those lost. Other useful reports are time to shortlist, presented-to-placed ratio per recruiter and revenue per client.

• Assignments received, filled and lost per month
• Time from need received to first shortlist
• Presented candidates per placement
• Revenue and margin per client and per recruiter
• Candidates due for GDPR renewal or deletion

• CRM implementationCRM set up for clients, candidates and assignments, with integrations.
• CRM setup auditA review of your current system and data before you change anything.
• Book a callTell us how you recruit and sell, and we suggest a setup.

Frequently asked questions