Software for a search that runs for months

A retained mandate is usually billed in thirds: an engagement fee on signature, a second stage on shortlist delivery, a completion fee on placement. Variations are endless. Some clients pay a fixed engagement plus a percentage on completion, some tie the middle payment to a specific number of qualified candidates presented, some pay a container fee that is credited against the final invoice.

Surhires records the fee structure on the mandate when it is signed and raises each stage as its own billing event when its trigger condition is met. The trigger is a real event in the system, not a note: shortlist delivered means the shortlist document was shared with the named client contact on a date the record can show.

That matters most on the awkward conversations. When a client disputes a second-stage invoice, the answer is a timestamped record of what was delivered and when. When a search is cancelled, the system knows which stages were invoiced, which are due and what the mandate says about cancellation.

Exclusivity looks like a contract clause and behaves like an operational risk. A firm that has a six-week exclusive on a role needs to know when it expires, because the commercial position on day forty-three is completely different from the one on day forty-one. A firm working a contingent role alongside three competitors needs its recruiters to know that too, because it changes how much unpaid work is sensible.

The mandate carries its engagement type, its exclusivity period and its expiry date, and the pipeline view shows both. An exclusive that is running out generates a task before it lapses so somebody can have the extension conversation rather than discovering the position changed.

Off-limits agreements are recorded against client organisations for their duration, so a recruiter searching a market sees which employers are protected and why before making an approach rather than after.

The core intellectual work of a search firm is the map: a structured picture of who does this job, where, at what level, and how they got there. That map is an asset that outlives the mandate, and in most firms it lives in a researcher's spreadsheet, gets emailed as a PDF, and is rebuilt from scratch the next time a similar brief arrives.

Surhires holds the map as records. A target organisation is an entity with people mapped against it and a note on why it matters to this brief. A mapped individual becomes a candidate record with the source of the intelligence, the approach status and the outcome. The next search into the same market starts from what you already know, which is the compounding advantage a firm is supposed to build.

The Candidate Sourcing Agent searches that internal map before it goes anywhere else, so a person your researcher spoke to eighteen months ago surfaces before you pay for the same discovery twice.

Retained clients pay early and wait. What keeps a mandate healthy through the quiet middle is a report that shows work: how many organisations mapped, how many individuals identified, how many approached, how many engaged, how many declined and for what reason, and what the market is saying about the compensation the client has offered.

In most firms that report is built by hand in a slide deck every fortnight, which means it is expensive, inconsistent and late when the search is going badly, which is exactly when it is most needed. Surhires derives it from the mandate record. The counts are real, the decline reasons are coded, and the compensation feedback is what candidates actually said.

The client can be given a portal view of the same data rather than a document, without seeing anything else in your database and without consuming a seat.

A contingent desk can be managed on weekly submittal counts. A search that runs sixteen weeks cannot: there will be weeks with no submittals in which the search is going well, and weeks with three submittals in which it is going badly. Measuring a search consultant on the contingent metric is how firms end up with rushed shortlists.

Surhires tracks the search's own progression: universe defined, mapping complete, approaches made, engaged conversations, longlist assembled, shortlist presented, client interviews, offer, placed. Ageing is measured against your own history for that discipline, so a mandate that is genuinely slow becomes visible without penalising the ones that are simply long.

Forecasting works the same way, from mandate stage and your own conversion history rather than from a percentage typed into a field by a consultant who wants the number to look reasonable.

Very few firms are purely one or the other. Most run a retained practice alongside contingent work, sometimes for the same client, occasionally on the same role after a contingent search stalls. The two need different workflows and the same database.

Surhires keeps one candidate database and one client record, and lets the mandate decide the process. A contingent role runs a short stage set and bills once on placement. A retained mandate runs the research stages and bills on milestones. An owner sees both in the same revenue view, with retained revenue split between invoiced and contracted-but-unbilled, because those are not the same money.