Submit first, price the margin, and never miss an extension

Contingent means you are paid on success and you are not the only one trying. A client releases a requirement to a panel at nine in the morning and a hiring manager who is already busy will look seriously at the first two or three profiles that arrive and skim the rest. The candidate quality difference between agency one and agency four is usually smaller than the attention difference.

That makes the hour after intake the most valuable hour on the desk, and almost all of it is normally lost to mechanics: searching, formatting a CV to the client's template, writing a summary, finding the right contact, attaching the rate. Surhires removes the mechanics. The sourcing agent searches your own database against the brief first and returns candidates who already match, formatted profiles are generated to your template rather than rebuilt in a word processor, and a submittal is a record you create in one action with candidate, contact, requisition, documents and rate attached.

The most common way a contract desk loses money is not a bad placement. It is a placement whose economics nobody looked at closely because the two rates lived in different places: the charge rate in the client agreement, the pay rate in a message thread with the contractor, and the margin in a recruiter's head.

A contract placement in Surhires carries pay rate, charge rate, the unit both are quoted in, the currency, the assignment start and end dates, and any agreed uplift for overtime. Margin is derived rather than typed. Because it is derived, it can be reported: margin by client, by recruiter, by role type, and against the desk's own average. A recruiter about to agree a rate can see where it sits before they agree it rather than after the invoice.

Rates can also be versioned within an assignment. A contractor who negotiates an increase at extension does not overwrite the history, so the placement shows what was earned across each period rather than only what is true today.

Every contract placement has an end date, and every end date is a decision that somebody has to make before it arrives. If the conversation happens in week ten of a twelve-week assignment, the extension is usually straightforward. If it happens in week twelve, the contractor has already taken a call from somebody else, and if it happens in week thirteen, the assignment has ended and the revenue with it.

Surhires tracks the extension as its own object rather than as an edit to the end date. Each assignment shows the current end, the notice terms, the extension history and a countdown, and the desk gets a task at a lead time you set. Extensions are visible on the same pipeline the desk already works, so a book of two hundred contractors does not need a separate tracker to stay honest.

The reporting consequence matters as much as the reminder. A desk can see its extension rate by client and by recruiter, which is a much better predictor of next quarter's revenue than new-placement volume is.

Onboarding compliance is the easy half. A contractor starts with a right-to-work document, an insurance certificate, a background check, an NDA, a signed schedule and whatever else the client requires. Six months into a twelve-month assignment, the professional indemnity certificate expires, the visa approaches its end date, and the background check passes the client's stated validity window.

Documents are typed records on the contractor and on the assignment, each with an issue date, an expiry date and the file. Expiry generates a reminder at a lead time you configure, and a document required by a specific client can be marked as such so the requirement travels with the assignment rather than living in one recruiter's memory. Where an IR35 or worker-status determination applies, the status flag and the determination record sit on the placement.

None of this is a compliance guarantee and the page will not pretend otherwise. The product captures documents, stores determinations and reminds you before dates pass. Deciding what is required, verifying it and standing behind it remain yours.

The contractor finishing on Friday is the best-qualified person on your database for a similar role starting Monday. They are proven, they are known to you, they are available on a date you can predict, and they cost nothing to source. On most desks this is handled by whoever happens to remember.

Redeployment in Surhires works from availability dates. Every contractor on assignment has a known end date, so a search for a role starting in three weeks can include people who are technically still working. Contractors approaching an end date without a confirmed extension appear on a redeployment view, and their skills, rate history and client history are already structured for matching.

The same data drives the honest version of a contractor pool: not a tag someone applied in 2024, but people whose last assignment ended recently, whose rate expectation is recorded, and whose availability is a date rather than a guess.

The Placement Pipeline Command Centre shows submittals out by client and by recruiter, interviews booked and slipped, offers live, placements closed and revenue booked against revenue invoiced. On a contract desk the two panels that earn their place are contractors currently on assignment and assignments approaching their end date.

Recruiter performance is measured on the things a contingent desk actually controls: submittals sent, submittal-to-interview conversion by client, time from intake to first submittal, and extension rate. Placement volume alone rewards the recruiter who starts the most contractors, not the one who keeps them running.

Surhires raises the placement record and the first invoice. It is not a back-office system: it does not run contractor self-billing, timesheet approval, weekly pay cycles, or the reconciliation between what a client was invoiced and what a contractor was paid. Those belong in a pay-and-bill or accounting system, and integrations with QuickBooks and Xero exist to move the invoice across.

It is also not an employer of record. Where you need a legal employer for a contractor in a country you have no entity in, that is a partner relationship, and the product's job is to hold the placement data cleanly so the handover to that partner is not a re-keying exercise.