Get the fee agreement signed before the shortlist goes out

A recruiter takes a brief on a Tuesday, sources over the weekend, submits three candidates on the Monday, and the terms of business were never signed. Most of the time it does not matter. Occasionally the client places the candidate directly, disputes the introduction, or applies its own standard terms at a lower percentage, and the agency discovers it is arguing about a fee it cannot evidence.

Tracking the signature state against the client is what prevents that, and it is genuinely a CRM concern rather than a legal one. Which clients have signed, at what percentage, on what rebate terms, with what expiry, is information the desk needs before a submittal goes out, not after a placement is disputed.

It is also the field that quietly decides margin. An agency that renegotiated a client to twenty percent two years ago and never updated the record will keep invoicing at eighteen, because the recruiter raising the invoice types what they remember. Holding the agreed percentage against the signed agreement, and carrying it into the invoice, removes an error nobody notices because it always errs in the client's favour.

On the candidate side the same pattern repeats. An offer is verbally accepted, the paperwork takes four days to produce, and in those four days a counter-offer arrives. The offer document itself is generated from the placement details, and the time between acceptance and signature is the window in which placements are lost.

Surhires already generates offer letters from the placement record. What the integration would add is routing them for signature and knowing, without asking anyone, whether the candidate has signed. The Placement Risk Agent watches notice-period signals and flags an offer drifting toward a drop-out; an unsigned offer sitting for five days is exactly that signal.

It would send a document from Surhires through your own DocuSign account, track envelope state, and file the executed copy and its completion date against the client, candidate or placement. Signature order, reminders and the audit certificate remain features of DocuSign, which does them well and does not need a CRM reimplementing them.

It would not draft your terms of business, advise on enforceability, or tell you whether an electronic signature is appropriate for a given document in a given jurisdiction. Those are questions for your counsel. Surhires is recruitment software: candidate relationships, outbound sourcing, client submittals and the placement pipeline through to the first invoice.

Generate the offer letter or fee agreement in Surhires, download it, and send it from your own DocuSign account as you do now. When it comes back executed, attach the signed copy to the client or candidate record, record the signature date and the signing contact, and set the review date if the agreement carries one.

The important habit is recording the state rather than only storing the file. A client record that says signed on this date at this percentage with a twelve-week rebate answers the question a recruiter has before they submit. A folder containing a PDF does not, because nobody opens it at the moment the answer is needed.

An unsigned agreement and an unsigned offer are both blocking states, and blocking states should appear where the work happens. The pipeline surfaces offers past their response deadline and placements inside a guarantee window; an offer sent for signature and not returned belongs in the same list.

That is the argument for integrating rather than leaving signature entirely in a separate product. Not that the CRM signs anything, but that the CRM is where somebody notices nothing has been signed. A document waiting in a signature platform is only visible to whoever thinks to open that platform, and on a busy desk that is nobody until the client asks where the paperwork is.