A CRM for recruitment on the client side

A recruitment agency sells on two sides. On one side you find candidates, and that work lives in your ATS. On the other side you win and keep clients: companies with vacancies, hiring managers who call you when they need someone, and procurement teams who decide whether you are on the preferred supplier list. That side is the sales work, and at many agencies it has no proper home.

The client side cycle looks like this. You approach a company, get an intro with an HR manager or a hiring manager, send your terms with the fee percentage or the hourly rate, and get onto the supplier list. Then the vacancies arrive. Each vacancy is a small deal: an intake, candidates submitted, interviews, an offer and a placement. In permanent recruitment the revenue is one-off, a fee on placement. In contract staffing it repeats: hours per week for as long as the assignment runs, with an extension you need to arrange on time.

You will know this one. A consultant has a strong relationship with a hiring manager at a large client. That hiring manager moves to another company. The consultant only finds out when he calls about a new vacancy. At the new company the agency is not on the list, and a competitor is. Or a contractor's assignment ends in four weeks and nobody has discussed an extension with the client, because the end date only lives in a back office spreadsheet.

The problem is that an ATS is built for candidates. Companies, contacts and commercial agreements are an afterthought there, if they are there at all.

Lumo is for that client side. A client is an organization, with every hiring manager as a person. A person can belong to several organizations, so a hiring manager who moves comes with you. Each vacancy is a deal in the pipeline. A contract placement is a deal with a weekly line and a number of cycles. And your consultants' calls are activities in one calendar. The candidates stay in your ATS.

Automations react to a new deal, a stage change, a won or lost deal, a new lead, person or organization, a completed activity, or a deal or lead that has been stale for a number of days. They create an activity or note, update a field, assign an owner or add a label. They do not send email. A dry run shows what would happen first.

Rules agencies often switch on:

• Deal created in Vacancies: create a task Schedule intake for the consultant, due today.
• Deal stale for seven days in Candidates submitted: create a call with the hiring manager.
• Deal won: create a task Check in after 30 days with the client.
• Deal lost with reason Other agency: add the label Competitor active to the deal.

In reports you build the numbers an agency steers by. Vacancies per client and per discipline. The share of vacancies that become placements, per consultant. Average time from intake to placement, from stage history. Lost reasons per quarter. And a list of contract placements ending in the next six weeks. Every chart drills down to the deals behind it. Calls and meetings per consultant come from the activities.

Say a recruitment and staffing agency in finance and IT with eight consultants, two account managers and a back office. For this example we call it Talentline. About half its revenue comes from permanent placements, the other half from contractors. The candidates live in the ATS.

Talentline creates two pipelines. Accounts with the stages Intro, Terms sent and On supplier list. And Vacancies with the stages from the example above. Each client is an organization, with every hiring manager and HR contact as a person.

A new vacancy usually arrives by email or phone. The consultant creates a deal in Vacancies, and a rule immediately creates a task Schedule intake. The vacancy ID from the ATS sits in a custom field. A small script from the internal IT team moves the stage in Lumo to Candidates submitted through the API as soon as a candidate is submitted in the ATS.

The consultants connect Gmail, so mail with hiring managers lands on the right deal. The two account managers work in Outlook and put the BCC address on their emails. Calls are logged as activities, so the team lead sees who talks to which client.

For a contract placement the consultant adds a weekly line of 36 hours at the hourly rate, with 26 cycles for a six month assignment. The back office fills in the end date. Every Monday the director reviews a dashboard with placements per consultant, open vacancies per client and contractors ending within six weeks. An extension becomes a conversation the consultant has on time.