Recruitment

Recruitment is the only trade on this site where the business has two entirely separate populations of relationship, both large, both essential, and where the same person moves between them. Consonas holds both populations in one organisation, as relationship types a person can carry more than one of at the same time.

A candidate you placed in 2021 becomes a team leader in 2023 and a hiring manager in 2025. At that point they are a client, and their record as a candidate, including what they were paid, what they said about their previous employer and why a placement did not work out, is both extremely valuable and extremely sensitive.

Systems built around one contact type handle this badly in one of two ways. Either the person becomes two records, which means neither has the whole history and the addresses disagree. Or they are relabelled, which loses the candidate history at the exact moment it became commercially interesting.

Holding relationship types you name, several of which one person can carry, with connections that carry dates, is what expresses it. They were a candidate. They were placed at that client for that period. They are now a hiring manager at this one. All of it is true simultaneously and none of it requires deleting anything.

And the people you did not place

Every agency has a large population of candidates who were nearly right, were right but the timing was wrong, or came second. They are qualified, they know you, and they are frequently the best person for a role that appears eighteen months later.

In most agencies they are effectively invisible, buried in a system organised around vacancies rather than people, or deleted in a tidying exercise. Recording what someone was looking for, what happened and why, with consent recorded properly, turns that population from an archive into a resource.

The obligation nobody enjoys

Recruitment handles personal data on a scale most small businesses never approach, about people who are not customers and who did not necessarily initiate the relationship. A subject access request from a candidate is a routine event rather than a hypothetical one, and the deadline for answering it is the one the Information Commissioner's Office sets instead of one you choose. The obligations themselves sit in the Data Protection Act 2018.

One organisation with one search, consent held per channel with dates and sources, an audit trail no one can edit, and erasure that reaches every place someone appears, is the difference between answering that in an afternoon and answering it across three systems with no certainty the answer is complete.

What is absent

No CV parsing. No extraction of skills or history into fields. No searching inside uploaded documents. No job board posting or multi posting. No candidate scoring against a specification. No structured skills matching. No integration with any job board or assessment provider.

Those are the core of applicant tracking software. They are genuinely difficult and this is not that product. If searchable CV content is central to how your agency works, you need one.

What agencies use this for alongside one

The relationships, which applicant tracking systems handle poorly because they are organised around vacancies. The hiring manager you have known for six years. The client conversation before there is a brief. The candidate who came second and is now perfect for something else. The reason a client stopped giving you roles.

The limit you will meet first

The relationship allowance, and faster than any other trade on this site, because candidates accumulate in a way clients do not. Every allowance can be raised for an individual organisation without a release, so ask rather than deleting candidates to stay under a number.

Decide the sensitivity rule before you import a single candidate

You are about to hold two populations in one system, and one of them must not be readable by the wrong person. Sensitivity is decided separately from ownership here, which is exactly the property that makes this possible, and it needs to be set up before there is anything in the system rather than afterwards.

Write down who may read a candidate record and who may not, in a sentence, and configure that. Doing it later means auditing what has already been visible.

Import clients first, candidates second

Two separate imports with two different decisions behind them. Doing them together is how an agency ends up with candidates visible on the client side, and that is the mistake that costs the most and is discovered by somebody else.

Record where the candidate came from

Referral, application, approach, board, a previous placement. It is a source in the same sense a lead has one, and it answers the question that decides where an agency spends money: which channels produce placements rather than which produce applications.

Connect placements as connections with dates

A candidate placed at a client in 2021 is a connection with a start date. That is not record keeping for its own sake. It is what makes the single most valuable query in this trade possible: people you placed who are now senior enough to be hiring.

Almost every agency knows this happens and almost none of them can produce the list, because the placement was recorded as an event rather than as a relationship.

Get your consent records right on the candidate side

This is the half of the business where consent actually bites. Consent is recorded here as a fact with a date and a source, per channel, and importing a column marked yes carries an assertion you may not be able to support. What that assertion commits you to is summarised plainly in the government's guide to data protection.

Bring the date and the source if you have them. If you do not, find out now rather than after somebody asks.

The agency below was invented for this page: three consultants, one permanent role, filled on contingency. Its only purpose is to show what is written down at each step and what it costs afterwards when it is not.

Monday: the call that is not yet a vacancy

A hiring manager rings a consultant to ask, informally, what somebody with a particular background is paid at the moment. There is no brief, no terms and no role. Most agencies record nothing at all here, because there is nothing yet to record it against.

What already exists is the relationship and the conversation, so the note goes on the person rather than on a vacancy that does not exist. Three weeks later the same role is briefed to three agencies at once, and the date of that first call is the only evidence anywhere that you heard about it before the other two. It is also, quite often, the only thing that persuades a client to give you the role exclusively.

The hiring manager in this example is somebody the agency placed as a candidate several years ago. Because that placement was recorded as a connection with a period rather than as an event, the consultant who takes the call can see it while the call is still going on. In most agencies that fact is either known by one person or known by nobody.

Thursday: the brief arrives, and the vacancy pipeline starts

Now there is a vacancy, and it moves through the process of winning it: introduced, briefed, terms agreed, instructed. Terms agreed is the stage that agencies most often neglect to record and the only one that decides whether the eventual placement is billable at the fee you think it is.

What is worth writing down at this stage is small and specific. The fee basis. The rebate arrangement. Who at the client actually signs an offer, which is frequently not the hiring manager. Whether anybody else is working the same role. None of that is interesting on the day and all of it is decisive later.

The week after: four candidates, one of whom must not be visible

The candidate pipeline is a separate process with separate stages: submitted, shortlisted, interviewed, offered, placed. Four people enter it. One of them currently works for another client of the same agency and cannot be seen to be looking.

Sensitivity is a grant on that specific record, held separately from the role, and it is decided at this moment rather than after a shortlist has already been sent round the office. The existence of the search is the confidential part, which is why a restricted record is absent from search rather than showing as a locked row.

The interview that moves twice

A panel member is away and the first date moves. Then a second interviewer is added and it moves again. Nothing has gone wrong, and this is the point at which a candidate who is also talking to two other agencies decides how interested you actually are.

The record that matters here is dull: who was told, when, and what they were told. A candidate who hears on the day that the date has moved and why is a candidate who is still available a fortnight later. The cost of not writing it down is not an audit failure. It is a person who stopped answering.

Offer, counter offer, and a start date that belongs to somebody else

The offer is accepted, the current employer counters, and the candidate takes several days to decide. Whatever is said in those days is the most valuable thing anybody at the agency will learn that month, about the candidate and about what their employer pays to keep people. Almost none of it survives in most agencies, because it is said on the telephone during a difficult week.

The candidate resigns and the start date is set by their notice period, which is somebody else's contract and not negotiable by you. That date, not the date the offer was accepted, is what the vacancy actually resolves on.

Twelve weeks later, when the rebate period ends

Take twelve weeks as the rebate arrangement in this invented example. Until it expires the fee is not really yours, and the only thing that protects it is someone knowing that the person is still in post and still content. That is a dated task, set at the point of placement, not a thing to remember.

Two records are created at the end. The candidate now has a connection to the client with a start date, which is what makes them findable in four years when they are hiring. And three people were interviewed and not placed. They are qualified, they know the agency, and they are the most valuable output of the whole exercise after the fee.

What each absent record cost

The unrecorded first call cost the chance of an exclusive brief. The unrecorded terms cost an argument about the fee. The unrecorded reschedule cost a candidate. The unrecorded counter offer cost everything the agency could have learned about that client's retention. The unrecorded placement cost a hiring manager in four years time. The three unrecorded runners up cost the next role.

Not one of those is a fee lost this month, which is exactly why they go unrecorded.

The word that causes the most confusion is client

To a consultant, the client is a person: the hiring manager who gives briefs and takes calls. To whoever raises the invoice, the client is a company with a purchase order number. Both are correct and they are not the same record.

Holding the organisation and holding a hiring manager relationship connected to it, with a period on the connection, is what lets both meanings be true. It is also the only arrangement that survives the hiring manager changing employer, which in this trade happens more often than the client company changes anything.

Interview means two different events

Your own conversation with a candidate and the client's interview are both called an interview by everyone in the building. They belong to different processes: one is qualification and the other is a stage in the vacancy being filled.

Agencies that run one set of stages for both end up unable to answer the question they most want answered, which is whether candidates drop out at your screening or at the client's. Those two answers point at completely different problems and the same word hides which one you have.

Temporary, contract and interim are three trades in one vocabulary

They differ in duration, in who employs the worker, in how often you are paid and in what happens when the assignment ends. An agency that does two of the three should expect to model them as separate pipelines for the same reason temporary and permanent are separate: the stages are not the same stages and the probabilities are not comparable.

Nothing in the product depends on any of these words

You name the relationship types and you name the stages. If your agency says requisition and this page says vacancy, or you say submit and this page says shortlisted, the shape underneath is identical. The reason for setting the words out at all is that in this trade the ambiguity is genuine rather than cosmetic, and two consultants using the same word differently produces a pipeline neither of them trusts.

Nothing bills when it closes

A permanent placement agreed in one month starts in another, because the start date is set by a notice period in a contract you are not party to. A month of accepted offers and a month of billing are different months, and in a business of this size the gap between them is the difference between comfortable and not.

Notice period is one of the few custom fields genuinely worth having on a candidate for exactly this reason. It is not decoration. It is the field that turns a pipeline into a statement about when money arrives, and it is knowable at the first conversation rather than at the offer.

The candidate side has a season and the client side has a different one

Candidates move after bonuses are paid and at the start of a year, and a candidate who says they will look once a bonus lands is not a dead lead. They are a dated task with a month on it. Recorded that way, the agency starts a year with a list rather than with a feeling.

Clients hire against budgets and headcount that reset on their own financial year, not on yours and not on each other's. Roles appear the week a budget opens and roles become urgent the week one is about to close unspent. Which month each client's year turns is worth knowing about your largest accounts, and it is the kind of fact that lives in one consultant's head until they leave.

The month when nothing can be decided

Every summer, and again over Christmas, interviews stall because one member of a panel is away and then another. Nothing has died. Everything simply cannot move, and the instinct that tells you whether a role is alive stops working exactly when you need it, because waiting and dead feel identical.

The stage history is what replaces the instinct. A vacancy that has been at the same stage since before the holidays with a reason recorded is different from one that has been there since before the holidays with nothing recorded, and only one of those is worth a call.

Temporary work runs on a week, not a year

Availability decays in days. A candidate marked available three weeks ago is not old information, it is wrong information, and an agency that treats the two the same eventually sends someone who started elsewhere a fortnight ago.

If you hold availability as a custom field, hold the date it was last confirmed alongside it and treat anything beyond a short window as unknown. This is the one place in this trade where a field with no date on it is actively worse than an empty field.

The population to review once a cycle

Once a year, and the start of a year is the obvious moment, work through the candidates who were interviewed and not placed. Some are now placeable, some have moved and are now potential clients, and some should be erased because you have held them for long enough without a reason.

That single exercise does three jobs at once: it finds business, it corrects the record, and it is the honest answer to the retention question everyone in this trade would rather not be asked.

Where the modelling advice on this page comes from

The two pipelines and the weighted forecast are set out on sales pipelines and forecasting, the relationship types and dated connections on people, organisations and connections, and the consent record on marketing and automation. An agency selling retained search will recognise the small slow pipeline described on consultancy, and the client half of this page is the same buyer described on professional services and technology.