Verity for recruitment
A recruitment agency wins on mandate selection and submission speed, and loses to roles that were never fillable. Verity tracks the pipeline at stage level so effort follows the mandates worth working.
Runs alongside your existing job boards and sourcing tools.
Verity / Desk
LiveOpen mandates
64
Submissions
186
Placements
11
In guarantee
19
Needs attention
Illustrative figures. Verity shows your own desk in this shape.
How the business runs
An agency works many mandates and gets paid on a few. That is not inefficiency — it is the model. What makes an agency profitable is not working harder but working the right mandates, and identifying which ones those are early enough to redirect effort.
Most agencies cannot do that, because the pipeline is held per consultant rather than per mandate and stage. A consultant knows their own roles and candidates. The agency knows the placements. Nobody can see that fourteen mandates have absorbed three weeks of consultant time without a single submission, which is the clearest possible signal that those roles were never fillable at that price.
The second characteristic loss is client silence. A submission sitting ten days without feedback is a candidate going cold, and candidates who go cold take the agency’s only real asset with them. Chasing feedback is nobody’s scheduled task, so it happens when a consultant remembers.
The third is the guarantee period. A placement that falls within its guarantee is a refund, and the early signals — a candidate who did not start, a client who has gone quiet, a first month that went badly — exist and are not tracked. Refund exposure is usually discovered when the client asks for the money back.
Verity holds the mandate, the candidates against it, the submission and interview stages, the placement and its guarantee as one chain of records with owners and ages.
What Verity calls these things
What gets in the way
Recruitment problems come from a pipeline held personally and from silence nobody chases.
Unfillable mandates absorb the desk
A role that will never close at that salary keeps consuming consultant hours because nobody measures effort against submissions per mandate.
In Verity Mandates carry their age, effort and stage progress, so roles producing nothing surface as a list rather than as a vague sense.
Submissions go silent and candidates go cold
A CV sits with a client for ten days. The candidate accepts something else. The agency finds out when it calls to arrange the interview.
In Verity Submissions are workflow steps with an age, so silence is chased on a schedule rather than when someone remembers.
The pipeline leaves with the consultant
Candidates, relationships and mandate context are held personally, so a departure removes a working desk.
In Verity Candidates, mandates and history are agency records assigned to a consultant, so a departure is a reassignment.
Guarantee exposure is unmanaged
Placements inside their guarantee period are a refund liability, and the early warning signs are noticed by the consultant and recorded nowhere.
In Verity Placements carry their guarantee end date and check-in schedule, so risk is visible while it can still be addressed.
Consultant performance is judged on placements alone
The only visible number is fees billed, which says nothing about whether a consultant is working a thin desk well or a rich one badly.
In Verity Submissions per mandate, interview conversion and time-to-submit are recorded, so performance is readable at the stage where it differs.
Client quality is never assessed
Some clients interview slowly, brief badly and rarely hire, and the agency keeps working their roles because the relationship is old.
In Verity Feedback times, interview-to-offer rates and fill rates are recorded per client, so mandate acceptance becomes a decision.
The complete system
One system across mandates, candidates, stages and placements.
Work
Each mandate is work with a client, a specification, a fee basis, an owner, a stage, an age and the effort recorded against it.
Why it matters here The mandate is the unit that either converts or does not, and effort against it is the only way to tell which is which.
In practice Fourteen mandates with no submission in three weeks, ranked by the consultant hours they have consumed.
Relationships
Candidates and clients are records with their history, submissions, interviews, feedback, placements and preferences.
Why it matters here The candidate database is the agency’s asset, and it is worthless if it is personal to a consultant.
In practice A candidate submitted for three roles across two years, with every piece of feedback on their record.
Workflows
Each stage is a defined step with an owner, a date and an age, from submission through interview rounds to offer and acceptance.
Why it matters here Recruitment is a stage business, and every loss happens at a specific stage that can be measured.
In practice Thirty-one submissions with no client feedback in ten days, chased on a schedule.
People
The team is modelled once, and every mandate, submission and placement shows who owns it.
Why it matters here A desk is a person, and the agency needs to see what each desk is carrying and converting.
In practice Submissions per mandate and interview-to-offer conversion by consultant.
Records
Documents and interview notes attach to the candidate, mandate or placement they belong to.
Why it matters here Terms of business and fee agreements decide what is billable, and they surface in disputes months later.
In practice The signed terms and the agreed fee percentage on the client record, referenced at invoicing.
Communication
Notes, reminders and activity attach to the candidate, mandate or submission they concern.
Why it matters here A candidate’s reason for declining is the most useful information the agency will get that week, and it usually stays in a phone.
In practice A candidate’s salary expectation recorded on their record, visible for the next relevant role.
Reports and analytics
Mandate conversion, time-to-submit, submission-to-interview and interview-to-offer rates, client feedback speed, guarantee exposure and consultant performance come from the operational records.
Why it matters here Agencies measure placements and almost nothing else, which means they cannot tell a bad month from a bad mandate mix.
In practice Fill rate by client, which frequently changes which mandates the agency should accept.
Verity AI
Verity AI answers from your own mandate, candidate, submission and placement records, respects permissions, and can create assigned follow-ups.
Why it matters here The valuable questions are about silence and about effort with nothing to show for it.
In practice "Which submissions have had no feedback in ten days?" returns thirty-one, with chases assigned by client.
Control
One permission model and one audit trail across every record.
Why it matters here Candidate data is personal information and consultants compete internally, so access needs to be deliberate.
In practice Consultants see their own desks and the shared candidate pool; every access is on the trail.
Locations
Organisational units roll into the agency, with permissions and reporting following the same structure.
Why it matters here Multi-desk agencies only learn from comparison if every desk records the same stages.
In practice Conversion by stage across desks and offices.
Work in motion
These already run. As records with ages, the silences become visible.
Declining a mandate with a recorded reason is how an agency learns which clients and roles are worth working.
Time-to-first-submission is the earliest reliable predictor of whether a mandate will close.
This is the cheapest thing an agency can fix and the one most often left to memory.
Recording decline reasons is what turns a lost placement into a usable signal.
Refund exposure is manageable only if the guarantee period is a tracked window rather than a date in a contract.
Redirecting effort is the entire management job in recruitment, and it needs stage data to do at all.
Verity AI
Verity AI reads the same mandate, candidate, submission and placement records the agency runs on. It answers from your own desks, respects permissions, and can turn an answer into chases and reassignments.
Verity / Ask
Verity AI only returns what the person asking has permission to see.
Without chasing
Each runs from the pipeline records at the point the condition is met.
When
A submission passes its feedback threshold
When
A mandate ages without a submission
When
A placement enters its guarantee period
When
A candidate declines an offer
When
A placement invoice passes its terms
When
A consultant leaves or is reassigned
What you can understand
Conversion at each stage, from the records consultants create as they work.
All of this comes from recording the mandate, the submission and the stage outcome, which the desk already does informally.
One system, different ways of seeing it
Everyone works from the same records, and each role opens on what they need.
Agency owner
Where is effort going and what is it converting?
Mandate conversion, effort per mandate, guarantee exposure, client fill rates, fees against pipeline.
Desk manager
What needs redirecting this week?
Mandates producing nothing, submissions awaiting feedback, stage conversion by consultant.
Consultant
Who do I need to move today?
Own mandates by stage, submissions to chase, interviews scheduled, candidates to keep warm.
Accounts
What is billed and what is at risk?
Placement invoices, balances ageing, guarantee exposure, refunds issued.
Where it is used
Effort and stage progress recorded per mandate, so roles that were never fillable are identified before they absorb a month of desk time.
Submissions aged from the date sent, with chases scheduled rather than remembered, which is the cheapest loss an agency can fix.
Candidates and mandates as agency records assigned to a consultant, so a departure is a reassignment rather than a lost desk.
Placements carrying guarantee end dates and check-in schedules, so refund risk is visible while it can still be addressed.
Submission-to-interview and interview-to-offer rates by consultant and client, so performance is readable where it actually differs.
Feedback speed, fill rate and time to fill per client, so accepting a mandate becomes a decision rather than a reflex.
Reasons recorded against candidate and mandate, turning a lost placement into a signal about salary, brief or process.
Plain-language questions across mandates, submissions, stages and placements, with chases assigned in the same step.
Getting there
Job boards, sourcing tools and your billing arrangement continue to run and are mapped during implementation. Clients, candidates, open mandates and active submissions are brought across, and Verity is introduced as the pipeline and operations layer.
Implementation runs about four weeks: discovery and mapping, configuration, migration, then an ongoing operations partnership.
Questions
Verity AI answers questions from your own mandate, candidate, submission and placement records: which submissions have had no client feedback in ten days, which mandates have consumed effort without producing a submission, which placements inside guarantee show risk signals, what interview-to-offer conversion looks like by consultant. Each answer can become a chase or a reassignment.
It covers what an agency needs from one — candidates, mandates, submissions, interview stages, placements and their history — and holds the commercial side alongside it: effort per mandate, fee terms, guarantee exposure and collections. Job boards and sourcing tools continue to run and are mapped during implementation.
Candidates, mandates and their full history are agency records assigned to a consultant rather than personal contact lists, so a departure is a reassignment with continuity rather than the loss of a working desk.
Effort, age and stage progress are recorded per mandate, and fill rate, feedback speed and time to fill are recorded per client. Together those make mandate acceptance a decision based on evidence rather than on the age of the relationship.
A placement carries its guarantee end date with a check-in schedule across the period, and risk signals from candidate or client contact are recorded, so refund exposure is visible while something can still be done about it.
Submissions per mandate, time to first submission and conversion at each stage are all recorded, so a consultant working a thin desk well is distinguishable from one working a rich desk badly.
Verity has one permission model and one audit trail. Access to candidates and desks is set deliberately, and every access is recorded.
A four-consultant agency has the same silent losses — unfillable mandates, unchased submissions, unmanaged guarantees — with less capacity to notice them.
About four weeks: discovery and mapping of how the desks work, configuration of stages and fee terms, migration of clients, candidates and open mandates, then an ongoing operations partnership.
Those are candidates going cold on roles you have already worked. Tell us how your pipeline is tracked today.