At twenty placements a week, the manual handoffs between a recruitment agency’s systems are an irritation. At two hundred, they are a weekly bottleneck. That is when Manchester’s growing desks start looking for custom software. Manchester carries a deep and varied recruitment sector: the national majors run regional offices around Spinningfields and Quay Street, while professional-services and high-volume staffing specialists work out of Deansgate, Piccadilly and the Northern Quarter. Sellick Partnership, the professional-services recruitment specialist, even keeps its head office here, having moved more than 60 staff into the Tootal Buildings on Oxford Street. This page is about the integration, automation and reporting work that lets those desks keep growing without growing their admin headcount at the same rate.
The Software Running a Manchester Desk
Few agencies here are building from scratch. Most already pay for a packaged ATS or CRM and want to keep it. The platforms that recur across the city’s desks each lean a slightly different way:
- Bullhorn: the dominant staffing ATS and CRM for agencies at scale, with a REST API over candidates, jobs, placements and submissions and a marketplace of 300-plus pre-integrated technology partners.
- Firefish: a Glasgow-built recruitment CRM with a strong temp and contract module covering candidate availability, shift scheduling, pay-and-charge rates, AWR rules and timesheets, and a documented API integration with Timesheet Portal for pay and bill.
- Access Vincere Evo: formerly Vincere, now part of The Access Group; a combined CRM and ATS favoured by mid-size and multi-country operations.
- RDB ProNet: a long-established recruitment CRM from First Choice Software (now Access Recruitment), which reports more than 550 UK recruitment businesses on its products.
- JobAdder: an ATS and CRM aimed at temp and on-demand recruitment.
None of these needs ripping out. The development work lives in the gaps between them: the ATS, the job boards, the shift and timesheet layer, payroll, and the accounting package such as Xero, Sage or ADP.
Why Volume Is the Thing That Breaks
On a permanent desk a clunky handoff is an irritation. On a high-volume temp or contract desk it is a structural cost, because every weekly cycle multiplies the same manual step across hundreds of live workers. The places it bites in Manchester:
- Availability and shift scheduling drift out of the CRM into spreadsheets and group chats, so the wrong worker gets booked and a shift goes unfilled while the data sits in three places.
- Timesheet sign-offs arrive by email, photo and PDF, and someone keys them into pay and bill before Friday: the hour that decides whether temps are paid on time and clients are invoiced that week.
- Pay-and-charge rates, AWR parity, overtime and holiday accrual are tracked by hand, so a single rate error repeats across an entire cohort before anyone catches it.
- Right-to-work and contractor compliance checks live in fragile spreadsheets, which is a real exposure when a desk is onboarding workers faster than it can audit them.
- Leadership has no live read on fill rate, margin per placement or consultant performance without someone stitching a report together at month-end.
Volume turns each of these from a minor task into a recurring tax on the desk, and it is the layer that gets worse as the agency wins more work.
What We Build Around the Stack
The engagements for Manchester agencies are consistent, and they wrap the platform you already run rather than competing with it:
- Pay-and-bill integrations that wire Bullhorn, Firefish or Vincere through to timesheets, payroll and accounting, so a placement and its hours flow once instead of being rekeyed at every weekly cycle. This is our core API integration work, well-trodden ground given Bullhorn’s REST API and Firefish’s documented Timesheet Portal hook.
- Shift and availability tooling that keeps scheduling inside the system of record, so bookings, confirmations and timesheets stop scattering across inboxes and chat.
- Rate and compliance automation that moves pay-and-charge logic, AWR parity and right-to-work checks out of spreadsheets and into something auditable that holds up under volume.
- A single desk dashboard showing live roles, fill rate, margin and consultant performance, built around how your temp and perm desks actually run rather than a generic report layout.
This is recurring, operational custom software work: the plumbing that lets a busy desk add placements without adding rekeying.
Portals on Top of the Platform You Bought
The second recurring ask is a self-service layer the packaged ATS does not give you. Consultants on a high-volume desk lose hours to status-update emails and re-sent documents because clients and candidates have nowhere to look things up themselves. A bespoke portal (a single-page web app built on your ATS or CRM API) lets a client approve timesheets and watch submissions move, and lets a temp confirm availability, view shifts and upload compliance documents once, with everything written back to the system of record. Styled as your agency rather than a bolt-on, it removes a whole tier of inbound admin from the desk.
Recruiting in Manchester?
If your desk is winning the work but the weekly cycle is the thing slowing you down (shifts scheduled in spreadsheets, timesheets keyed by hand, rates checked one cohort at a time), that is a build problem with a clear first move. Send us the step your team repeats every Friday and we will scope the integration that takes it off the desk. Recruitment is one of several Manchester sectors we build for. The full set is on the Manchester page.
