Maple & Hart Recruitment

“Pipedrive treated candidates and clients as the same kind of contact. They are not. Once we had two proper pipelines that actually talk to each other, our placement time dropped by a third.”

— Priya Hart, Co-founder, Maple & Hart Recruitment

$5.2K saved per year

2 pipelines (client + candidate)

30% faster placement

Maple & Hart Recruitment places mid-senior product and design talent across UK SaaS companies. Their previous CRM treated candidates and clients identically, which forced workarounds. Tonic Desk's dual-pipeline support let them model the actual recruitment workflow and cut average placement time by 30%.

01

Before — one pipeline, two jobs

Maple & Hart had been on Pipedrive for three years. The team had built a working system using a single pipeline with custom labels to distinguish client deals from candidate deals — but every report needed filtering, every automation needed conditional logic, and new hires took three weeks to understand the convention. The founders quietly accepted that a chunk of every onboarding was teaching the CRM's idiosyncrasies rather than the recruitment workflow.

Worse, the candidate-to-client matching workflow lived in a separate Notion database glued together with three Zapier automations. Anyone could update either side. Nobody trusted that the candidate data in Pipedrive matched the candidate data in Notion, so reconciliation was a Friday-afternoon ritual that nobody enjoyed.

02

The switch — keeping the data, fixing the model

The migration ran on a Sunday. The team imported the Pipedrive deals CSV twice — once mapped to a new Client engagements pipeline, once mapped to a new Candidate placements pipeline. The custom label field on each Pipedrive deal decided which import each row went into, so the team did not have to re-classify anything manually.

Existing tasks, notes, and email threads attached cleanly to either pipeline via the imported deal ID. The Notion database exported as a CSV and imported into a new Matches custom object that bridged the two pipelines. The whole import was finished by lunchtime. Total disruption to live recruitment work: zero, because the team agreed to freeze Pipedrive updates for a 36-hour window and run with the Notion-as-source for any urgent matching during the cutover.

03

The workflow — two pipelines that talk

The Client engagements pipeline tracks vacancies from brief to placement. The Candidate placements pipeline tracks candidates from sourcing through interview to start date. The two are linked by a Match record — a many-to-many relationship that holds the interview stage, the salary band, the recruiter notes, and the feedback from both sides.

Recruiters now see, on a single candidate record, every active client engagement they are being considered for, with the current stage of each match. On the client side, every vacancy shows the active candidate slate with current interview stage, last-touched date, and the recruiter responsible. The Notion database is gone. The Friday reconciliation ritual is also gone, replaced by a Friday afternoon that the team mostly spends on actual recruitment.

04

Results — faster placements, cleaner data

Average time-from-brief-to-placement dropped 30% in the first quarter on Tonic Desk. The team attributes this to two things: candidates no longer fall out of pipeline because of admin gaps, and matching is now a one-click operation rather than a Notion-and-spreadsheet expedition. Onboarding for the team's two new junior recruiters took six working days rather than the three weeks it took on Pipedrive.

Annual licence cost dropped from $13,000 on Pipedrive Power (plus the Notion Team plan and the Zapier subscription) to $7,800 on Tonic Desk Professional — a $5,200 saving once everything is in one tool, with two extra seats available for the team's planned hire.

Maple & Hart Recruitment

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