The recruitment pipeline dies at offer out.

One person’s memory. Unowned offers. Forgotten clients.

Three stages, in your vocabulary. I use your terms on the first call; you shouldn’t have to translate your own business for me.

1. Whoever’s running it

   The process is a person.

   You call it: “Brief taken” · “I’ll train them myself”

   The founder closes at a rate the market would envy, and every brief lives in their head. Fine at one consultant. A hard ceiling at two, and three months of ramp for every hire. Most agencies train the second consultant the same way: the best recruiter shows them informally, until the best recruiter is busy, promoted or gone. “Brief taken” usually means talked about. A brief belongs on the board when the role, the rate and the interview slots exist in writing; and contingent and retained are two pipelines with two cadences, not one board and a fiction for a forecast.

   The fixStages with entry evidence the client has to supply, and the founder’s method written down as a playbook a new consultant runs in week one.

2. Offer out

   Nobody owns the next touch.

   You call it: “Waiting on the candidate” · fall-through · counter-offer

   The most expensive stage in the agency. The candidate is weighing it, the client is waiting, the consultant is on the next brief, and nothing in the system notices until one side phones. Across 230,000 offers tracked by one hiring platform, candidates who accepted had been in the offer stage about two days; candidates who declined, closer to six. Every day an offer ages without an owner is a day the counter-offer gets cheaper; half of candidates who accepted an offer in a recent Gartner survey stayed open to other opportunities afterwards. Accepted is not placed. And a fall-through is rarely bad luck: it’s a stage that advanced without evidence, a candidate who never confirmed, a client who never committed a slot.

   The fixAn owner and a dated next touch on every live offer, with a scripted cadence at day 0, 1, 2 and 5.

3. Repeat

   The pipeline ends at “placed”.

   You call it: “We’re great once we’re in” · rebate period · repeat brief

   A placed client has a second brief within the year, for somebody. Two in five clients don’t return to the same agency for a second job, and the main cause, in Bullhorn’s data as Greg Savage reported it, is that nobody kept the relationship up after the order closed. The rebate period is ninety days you’re still exposed to, so a placement shouldn’t close on the board until it clears; and the repeat brief is the cheapest revenue in the agency, on the one stage most boards don’t have at all. Acquiring a new client costs five to twenty-five times what keeping one does. That estimate is HBR’s, and it’s conservative for recruitment.

   The fixA stage after “placed”: day 30 check-in, day 90 rebate clear, next brief asked for.

Two pipelines, one owner per record.

The client pipeline drawn with the evidence a client has to give before a brief advances (a partner has committed an interview slot, not “the call went well”). A candidate pipeline that meets it in the middle. An owner and a next-step date on every record. A follow-up cadence on every offer out, because that’s where placements were quietly dying. A weekly review on one screen: offers older than seven days, brief-to-placement time, repeat briefs per client.

Then the founder’s method written down as a playbook a new consultant runs in week one, and the team trained with me in the room.

Nothing gets ripped out that already works. If the ATS is doing the candidate side well, I build the client side beside it.

Three numbers you’d watch afterwards. Not a dashboard nobody opens.

Proof. Built it inside an agency, then ran the team on it.

Built on relationships. Which is the problem.

Asked most often by owners with one consultant and a second one coming.

1. Tracking

   What should a recruitment CRM actually track?

   Two pipelines that meet in the middle: the client pipeline (brief, shortlist, interview, offer out, placement, repeat) and the candidate pipeline, with an owner and a next-step date on every record in both. Then three numbers: offers older than seven days, time from brief to placement, and repeat briefs per client per year.

   → Free CRM setup checklist: three numbers, not a dashboard nobody opens.

2. Your stack

   We use an ATS. Do we need a CRM as well?

   Usually the ATS is the candidate pipeline and is fine at that. The client side — briefs, offers, repeat business — is what tends to live in email and memory. That’s the half I build, in whatever tool fits beside the ATS.

   → CRM problem, or process problem? Nothing gets ripped out that already works.

3. Counter-offers

   Isn’t the counter-offer just the market?

   Partly. Gartner puts offer acceptance at 48% in late 2025, down from 85% two years before, so yes, the market got harder. But an offer that sits for six days loses to a counter-offer that an offer touched on day two would have survived. You can’t control the market. You can control the six days.

   → Why deals go quiet after a proposal: the counter-offer isn’t waiting.

4. Timing

   Does this work for a one-consultant agency?

   It works best the quarter before you hire the second one. Build the system while it’s still one person’s method, and the hire inherits a process instead of a head — which is the difference between a first placement in month one and month three.

   → Hiring soon? Build our playbook: fine at one consultant. A hard ceiling at two.