The Problem
A UK recruitment agency placing across several specialisms was running its pipeline across a generic ATS, two LinkedIn instances, a shared spreadsheet that nobody admitted to owning, and individual consultants’ personal Excel files. The ATS held candidate records. The spreadsheet held the actual state of each role — who was being put forward, where each candidate was in interview, what the client had said last. The personal Excel files held everything the consultant did not want to put into a system that other consultants could see.
The visible problem was duplication of effort. Candidates were entered in the ATS, then re-entered in the spreadsheet with the additional status fields that mattered. Updates happened in one place and not the other. Managers running portfolio meetings would ask “what is the status of this role” and get one answer from the ATS, a different answer from the spreadsheet, and a third answer from the consultant who had not synced any of it from their personal file.
The less visible problem was that the agency could not answer basic questions about its own performance. Time-to-fill, conversion rates between stages, candidate fall-out reasons — all of these required the data to live in one place, and it did not. Managers were running the business by anecdote because the systems would not yield the data needed to do it any other way.
The Approach
We built a single pipeline platform replacing all three of the layers — ATS, shared spreadsheet, personal Excel — with one place. The non-negotiable design decision was that the platform had to accommodate the things the personal Excel files existed to do, or consultants would keep them. We spent meaningful time with consultants understanding what their personal files held that the ATS could not. Mostly it was free-text notes that felt too informal for an ATS, contact-cadence reminders, and a handful of soft-flag categorisations consultants did not want clients to see.
The new platform absorbed all of that. Private notes that consultants can keep or share. Configurable reminders per candidate. Soft flags that are visible to the consultant and their manager but not in any client-facing view. Once consultants saw their actual workflow reflected, the personal files were not needed and adoption took care of itself.
The System We Built
A custom recruitment pipeline platform built on Laravel, replacing the ATS, the shared spreadsheet, and the personal Excel files. Candidate records with structured stage tracking per role. Private and shared notes, with explicit per-note visibility. Configurable reminders and contact cadences per candidate and per role. Soft flagging that is visible to the agency but not to clients. A reporting layer producing time-to-fill, stage conversion, source attribution, and fall-out analysis on the data the platform now holds in one place. Integration with LinkedIn and email for candidate sourcing and communication.
The Outcome
Within the first quarter, portfolio meetings stopped containing the “wait, which version is correct” exchange because there was only one version. Managers started running them from the platform’s live view rather than asking consultants to read out their numbers.
The performance metrics the agency had been guessing at became visible. Time-to-fill turned out to vary much more between specialisms than the leadership team had assumed, and that observation alone has changed how roles are weighted in the consultant assignment process. Source attribution showed that a couple of channels the agency was paying for were producing very little, and that spend has been redirected.
What We Learned
The reason the personal Excel files existed was the real problem. Building a platform that did not accommodate the work those files were doing would have produced one more layer alongside them, not a replacement. Sitting with consultants and absorbing those needs into the platform’s design was unglamorous and took longer than the technical build, and it is the reason the adoption was not a fight.
Same Pipeline Mess?
If your recruitment agency is running across an ATS plus spreadsheets plus the things consultants keep in their own files, get in touch to talk through what a single pipeline platform could look like for your business.