Recruitment is two pipelines running in parallel — the client roster you are filling roles for, and the candidate bench you are placing. Tonic Desk gives you both, with interview scheduling, fee tracking, and a clean line from offer accepted to invoice paid.
A generic sales CRM models the client side fine — Job opened, Shortlist sent, Offer made, Placed. It cannot model the candidate side at the same time — Sourced, Screened, Submitted, Interviewing, Offer. Force both into one funnel and the dashboard becomes meaningless.
You have 8,000 candidates in an ATS your last consultant set up. The notes are inconsistent. The salary expectations are out of date. Half of them have unsubscribed and you do not know which half. Re-engaging the bench means three days of cleanup before you can even send an email.
Three-way scheduling between the client hiring manager, the candidate, and your consultant. Calendar Tetris by email. The slot lands. The client moves it. The candidate cannot do Wednesday. The whole thing happens in DMs that no one else on the team can see.
Placement made on the 14th. Start date is the 1st of next month. Invoice should go out on day 1 of employment. Six weeks later finance asks why MRR is light, and someone realises the invoice was never raised because the start date was buried in a candidate record nobody re-opened.
Create a Client-side jobs pipeline (Brief taken, Roles open, Shortlist sent, Offer made, Placed, Closed) and a Candidate-side placements pipeline (Sourced, Screened, Submitted, Interview 1, Interview 2, Offer accepted, Onboarded). A candidate deal links to one or more job deals. Reports roll up by consultant, by client, by role type — without the two sides bleeding into one another.
Every candidate is a contact with custom fields for current salary, salary expectation, notice period, right-to-work status, languages, and a structured "open to" lifecycle stage. Segment dynamically — "Senior backend engineers, London, open to offers, notice ≤4 weeks" updates as the data changes, so when a role lands you query the bench in seconds.
Calendar-linked scheduling pulls the consultant's, client's, and candidate's availability into one booking link. Confirmed interviews log automatically against both the job deal and the candidate deal. Reschedules trigger a workflow that notifies the consultant and the client in one stroke — no more triple-thread email chaos.
Capture placed salary, fee percentage, and start date on the candidate deal. When the deal moves to Placed, a workflow schedules the invoice for the start date, raises it via the Stripe integration, and starts the rebate-clause timer. If the candidate leaves inside the guarantee period, a flag fires on day 89 reminding the consultant to confirm or refund.