One record for the person who is a candidate now and a client next year

The problem

The firm was doing what almost every search firm does: running a CRM for relationships and an ATS for candidates, and entering the same human into both. The two never agreed. A finalist who did not get the role in March was a hiring executive by the following spring, and nothing in either system knew that. Relationships went cold silently because nobody was tracking who had not been spoken to. Placement was treated as the finish line even though the firm sells the months after it. And the person doing the work lives in meetings, so every minute of data entry came directly out of the thing clients actually pay for.

What we built

We built one system around a single People graph, where roles are derived from real activity rather than typed in: the same record carries Candidate, Client contact, Referral and Placed as it earns them, on one timeline. Companies move through lead to prospect to active to past client. Business development runs on a drag-and-drop board, and a won deal converts to a search in one click. Each search carries its candidate pipeline, the position spec, scorecards scored against that spec, the engagement fee with its invoice milestones, and the assigned team. A placement automatically generates the 30, 60 and 90 day, six month and one year integration check-ins. The home screen is an action queue rather than a dashboard: what is due, what is overdue, who needs a check-in. Meeting transcripts, recorder webhooks and forwarded email arrive as drafted interactions, with a scanner that spots participants and offers unknown people as create-on-save chips. A per-search client portal shares a no-login link showing only the candidates the firm has explicitly made visible, with assessments, a comparison table and a feedback box that lands back on the pipeline; internal notes, votes and fees never leave the building.

The outcome

The firm's actual asset, its network, compounds in one place instead of fragmenting across two systems. Adding a candidate searches the existing relationships first, and past finalists surface as a warm pool on new searches. Stay-in-touch cadences flag who has gone quiet, with the last conversation summary one click away. The post-placement integration care the firm sells is now generated and enforced by the system rather than remembered. And the system drafts but never sends: every outbound message needs a human to approve it and a human to send it, which is an architectural rule rather than a setting, written that way after too many stories about a rejection landing next to an offer.