Applicant tracking that carries the compliance fields

The moment that decides whether a desk bills is the submission, and most systems treat it as a status change. Here it is a record: which candidate, to which client contact, against which job, with which documents, at what rate or salary, on what date, and what came back.

That makes the two questions an owner actually asks answerable. How many submissions did this desk send last week, and what is the submission-to-interview rate per client? Both become reports rather than a spreadsheet somebody maintains on Friday afternoon.

It also protects the fee. A disputed introduction is a much shorter conversation when the record shows the date, the contact, the documents sent and the client's reply.

This is where an Australian agency pipeline differs from a generic one. Labour-hire licensing is state-based, so a firm placing across borders may sit inside more than one scheme, and a licence has an expiry that nobody notices until it has passed.

Licences are stored with jurisdiction, number, holder, issue date and expiry, with reminders ahead of the date. Working rights are recorded on the candidate as visa class, the conditions that matter, the expiry, and the date and outcome of the check you ran through the government verification service.

Both can be wired into the stage machine as required-at-stage rules: a candidate cannot be moved to placed until the working-rights check is on file, and a placement cannot close without a current licence for the relevant jurisdiction. That converts a policy into a field somebody has to complete, which is the only version of a control that actually holds under pressure.

When a candidate is rejected, the reason comes from a fixed list: failed technical screen, salary above budget, a better-qualified candidate selected, candidate declined, candidate accepted a counter-offer, role withdrawn. Free-text notes are still allowed; the coded reason is mandatory.

That is partly analysis and partly defence. Coded outcomes show you that one client rejects on salary in most cases, which is a conversation about the brief rather than about the candidates. And if a hiring decision is ever questioned, the record reconstructs what happened rather than offering an empty field and a vague memory.

Demographic data captured for equal-opportunity monitoring is held separately from the hiring record and is not visible to consultants, so it cannot influence a decision it exists to measure.

Interview scheduling reads the panel's calendars, proposes slots, holds them, and sends the candidate a link. Reschedules update everyone rather than starting a new email thread. Reminders go out at a configurable interval before the slot through whichever channel the candidate agreed to, which on an Australian desk is frequently SMS or WhatsApp rather than email.

Feedback is captured on a scorecard rather than in a reply. Structured feedback is the only kind that compares across a panel and the only kind that supports a defensible decision afterwards. Interview kits give each interviewer the questions and the criteria rather than leaving the conversation to improvisation.

Board-led applicant flow produces volume, and volume is where a tracking system either builds a database or buries one. Bulk resume import parses a folder into structured records with duplicate detection running during the import. The Resume Screener normalises skills, seniority and location on the way in. AutoShortlist ranks an applicant list against the job with visible reasoning so a consultant reviews a ranked list rather than an inbox.

The Seek connector is in development rather than live, so today applicants arrive by email capture and bulk import. Posting to LinkedIn and Indeed ships now, and multi-board posting from a single form is in build for the Wave 1 release.

Every stage change is immutable: who moved it, when, from what to what, and with which coded outcome. Notes can be edited; the stage history cannot be rewritten. Licence and working-rights fields carry their own change history with dates.

For agencies supplying government, health or resources clients, that trail is often exactly what procurement asks about. It is also what turns a disputed placement fee into a two-minute conversation instead of a fortnight of email archaeology.

Surhires is not an HRIS, a payroll system, a pay and bill engine, a background-check provider or an assessment platform. It records the placement, the rate, the margin and the fee and raises the placement invoice. Timesheets, award interpretation, superannuation and payroll run elsewhere.

The client portal, where a client reviews and dispositions submitted candidates themselves, is in build for the Wave 1 release rather than live. So is the Chrome extension. Australia is a supported market rather than a launch market: support runs on US Eastern hours, and Australian dollar pricing is an unconfirmed conversion.