The questions agency owners ask us, answered in the first paragraph rather than the fifth. Mostly the parts of the job that are genuinely fiddly: contracts, cash, and databases that have been running for a decade.
An ATS tracks candidates through a role you are already working. A recruitment CRM tracks the relationships that produce roles in the first place: clients, contacts, prospects and the candidates you have not placed yet. Agencies need both, because winning the role and filling it are different jobs, and a system built only for one leaves the other in a spreadsheet.
A rebate period is the window after a placement starts during which the agency refunds part of its fee if the candidate leaves. In UK permanent recruitment it is typically 8 to 12 weeks, on a sliding scale: a full refund in the first weeks, falling to a partial refund, then nothing once the period ends.
A PSC is a personal service company, a limited company the contractor owns and invoices through. An umbrella company instead employs the contractor and runs them through PAYE, deducting tax before paying them. The choice is usually driven by IR35 status: outside-IR35 work tends to run through a PSC, inside-IR35 work through an umbrella or agency payroll.
Self-billing is where the agency raises the invoice on the contractor's behalf rather than waiting for the contractor to send one. The agency generates a self-bill from approved timesheet data, sends it to the contractor as the record of what they are owed, and pays it. It requires a self-billing agreement in place with each contractor.
A contractor logs hours against a placement, the client approves the timesheet, and those approved hours generate two documents: a sales invoice to the client at the charge rate, and a payment to the contractor at the pay rate. The difference between the two is the agency's margin, and it is only real once the client actually pays.
Vendors commonly quote six to twelve weeks for a basic implementation and three to six months for a complex one. Very little of that is moving data, which is usually a matter of days. Most of the time goes on configuration workshops, field mapping decisions and training, which is why the quote often arrives with a services invoice attached.
Because the same person arrives through several doors. They apply to one advert, get sourced from LinkedIn by a colleague, are imported in a bulk upload, and are added by hand after a call. Unless each of those routes checks against the same rule, you end up with four records for one person, and the history is split across all four.
A spec CV, or spec-out, is sending a strong candidate's profile to a company that has not advertised a role, on the argument that this person is worth a conversation regardless. It still works, but the hit rate depends almost entirely on relevance: the right candidate to the right hiring manager with a specific reason, rather than a good CV sent widely.
