One system for a mixed perm and contract desk

An applicant tracking system is organised around a vacancy. That is fine for an employer with one hiring process. An agency lives on the client side: which contacts are warm, which accounts have gone quiet, which vacancies you were not told about, what your fill rate is per client, and what terms were agreed and when.

Clients and contacts are first-class records here, each with its own activity stream. Every vacancy opened, CV sent, interview arranged and placement made sits on the client record, alongside terms, agreed fee percentages and rebate periods. The Client Health Agent watches last touch, open vacancies and fill rate, and raises accounts that are drifting before a quarterly review does.

This is the difference the word CRM is meant to carry, and it is the part that most cheap applicant trackers do not have at all.

The UK market is dense and repetitive. In most disciplines, the same population of candidates circulates between a handful of employers over a decade, and a good agency database already contains the person the new brief describes. The problem is finding them.

The Candidate Sourcing Agent searches your own database first, before you spend anything on new sourcing, and surfaces rediscovered candidates who match the live brief. That only works if the records are structured, which is why parsing writes normalised fields rather than a blob of text, and why availability, notice period and salary expectation are typed fields rather than notes.

The practical effect on a desk is that a Monday morning brief starts with a shortlist from people you already know, several of whom have spoken to you before and will take your call.

Three things sit on a UK contract placement that a US-built system typically has no field for. Off-payroll status: inside or outside scope, who determined it, when, and where the statement is filed. Right to Work: document type, issue date, expiry date and the check that was performed. Retention: the lawful basis for holding a candidate record and how long you intend to hold it.

All three are recorded in the product as structured, reportable fields with an audit trail on change. All three remain your responsibility to get right. The product supports the workflow; it does not perform the determination, run the check or decide your retention policy. We publish that split explicitly rather than allowing a compliance page to imply otherwise.

There are twelve named agents in the product, each with one job. Job Intake turns a client brief or a forwarded email into a structured vacancy with must-haves, nice-to-haves, salary band and interview stages. Match Scorer scores a candidate against a live vacancy and shows which requirement drove each point, so you can argue with it. Outreach Personaliser drafts a first message from the candidate's actual history rather than a merge field. Reply Handler classifies inbound replies and moves the record or raises a task.

Placement Risk watches notice-period signals and flags an offer drifting toward a drop-out, which on a permanent desk is the difference between a placement and a rebate. Recruiter Coaching compares a desk's conversion rates against the team and suggests the next action.

AI matching sits on the Professional plan with a monthly credit allowance per user. AI interview calls and custom prompts sit on Enterprise. None of it is sold as a replacement for a recruiter's judgement, and every score shows its reasoning.

Surhires is not an HRIS, a payroll system, a pay and bill engine, a background-check provider or an assessment platform. On a contract desk that boundary matters: the CRM records the placement, the rate, the margin and the fee, and raises the placement invoice. Timesheets, umbrella arrangements, self-billing and PAYE run elsewhere.

Saying so is not modesty. Recruitment software that pretends to be a back office is usually bad at both, and the integration points into an existing finance system are more useful than a weak imitation of one.

Posting to LinkedIn and Indeed ships today. The CV-Library connector is in development. Reed is not built and has no dated commitment. Multi-board posting from a single form is in build for the Wave 1 release. The client portal and the Chrome extension are both in build rather than live.

Everything above is stated the same way on the individual integration pages, with the state next to each name. When a connector goes live we date it. That is the whole policy, and it is the reason there is no wall of logos on this page.

The United States is the commercial launch market for Surhires and the United Kingdom is supported inbound. Support runs Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm Eastern Time, which covers a UK afternoon and evening but not a UK morning. Sterling pricing is a conversion from the USD list price and is flagged as unconfirmed. There is no UK entity and no UK phone number.

For a lot of agencies that is a perfectly workable arrangement, particularly where the buying decision is made by the owner rather than a procurement function. For some it is not. Weigh it before the trial rather than during it.