Which ATS should a staffing agency choose?
Short answer: A staffing agency ATS has to handle two things a corporate hiring tool does not: multiple clients, and proof of the work done for each of them. Recruitis handles candidates and clients today through client-based filtering, a client landing page with shared candidates and activity statistics, and unlimited users on a flat price. A full client CRM with companies, contacts, job orders and placement tracking launches in early 2027. If you need a sales pipeline and invoicing inside the same system today, Recruitis is not there yet, and we say so openly.
For a staffing agency (or recruitment agency, as it is called in Europe), what matters is team size and way of working, not the length of the feature list. A boutique agency of two or three recruiters doesn't need a robust CRM for managing clients – the core of its system is a strong ATS focused on searching its own talent pool and active sourcing on LinkedIn. Mid-size and large agencies, by contrast, care that ATS costs don't grow disproportionately with the number of recruiters and that the system gives them a technological edge over competitors. Across all sizes, two things hold: LinkedIn integration is a must, including transferring the conversation history with the candidate, and the system has to be able to make the work done visible to both the client and the candidate.
⚙️ Switch the guide to agency mode Unlocks the agency-features section in the catalog above and hides the ones that don't concern agencies.
First, be honest about what kind of agency you are
| Agency type | Core of the system |
|---|---|
| Boutique (2–3 recruiters) |
Talent pool and LinkedIn sourcing. |
| Mid-size (6–15 recruiters) |
Breadth of services for the client and standardized outputs. |
| Large (16+ recruiters) |
Automation and data-driven management. |
Boutique agency: the core is an ATS, not a CRM
An agency of two or three recruiters usually has a handful of chosen clients it cares for over the long term. So it doesn't need a system that can track hundreds of leads and sales opportunities. It knows its clients by name.
What it needs is strong candidate work: quickly searching its own talent pool, actively sourcing on LinkedIn, and getting found profiles into the system without re-typing. From there it shares them directly with the client.
A boutique agency's main competitive advantage is the speed with which it can deliver candidates.
Its ATS selection should aim at exactly that. Look for a system that won't slow the process down – ideally speeds it up – and that keeps that speed even as it grows.
Related features: Full-text search in resumes · Talent micro-pools · LinkedIn plugin · Sharing candidates with the client
Mid-size agency: breadth of services and the ability to sell your own work
A mid-size agency's advantage is that it can offer the client a breadth of services – from candidate longlists through pre-screening to full-process hiring. The goal should therefore be to sell its work to the client well while also improving relationships with candidates.
Toward the client, graphical exports are useful, describing how many candidates were in which round and how much work the agency did. Toward the candidate, you need to continuously measure their satisfaction.
A key feature is also external candidate sharing – for professionalism and so candidates aren't forwarded over email.
Related features: Hiring export · External sharing with the client · Candidate satisfaction measurement · Candidates by stage
Larger agencies: cost and technological edge
Once an agency has more than five recruiters, the economics of the system start to decide the outcome. A pricing model charged per user means every new recruiter makes the software more expensive – and at an agency that grows by hiring people, that adds up fast.
The second question is competitive. Agencies compete on the speed and quality of their shortlist. A system that can automate repetitive steps, standardize outputs and offer a candidate before the competition is a business advantage, not an operating cost.
Related features: CRM for clients and assignments · Filtering by client · Roles and access rights
What holds for everyone: LinkedIn isn't a nice-to-have
For an agency, LinkedIn is the primary hunting ground, so integration with it is a must-have regardless of size. The ATS has to let you download a candidate's profile in a few clicks and create a card from it in the system without manual re-typing.
Ask about one thing separately, because it gets forgotten: can the system also transfer the message history you exchanged with the candidate on LinkedIn? Without it you lose the context of the first contact – and that's exactly the part of the conversation no one remembers six months later.
How things stand with downloading LinkedIn profiles
There's a lot of confusion among recruiters about LinkedIn sourcing, so let's set it straight:
- LinkedIn doesn't allow fully automated scraping. Tools that promise unlimited automatic profile collection act against the network's rules and risk getting accounts blocked.
- The legitimate route is a human-operated plugin. The recruiter opens a profile and transfers it to the ATS with one click – it's not an autonomous bot running on its own.
- LinkedIn caps how many profiles you can export per month. The key one is the limit of 200 profiles per month, per seat via PDF (5,000 via CSV); exhausting it disables profile exports until the following calendar month. This risk sits with LinkedIn itself, not a specific ATS.
- A good tool helps you with this – for example by letting you turn off automatic resume downloads, so you don't touch the limit and transfer only the profile itself.
So ask a vendor not just "do you support LinkedIn?", but above all how you handle it and what risk it carries for your accounts.
Related features: LinkedIn plugin · Importing LinkedIn messages · AI sourcing on LinkedIn
Automation for agencies: from sourced profile to booked interview
The most interesting automation for a staffing agency is in sourcing. When you source a candidate, you can message them right away through LinkedIn Recruiter InMail, without knowing their email address. The message says: if you are interested in this position, book an interview. It contains a scheduling link.
The candidate picks a specific time slot. In the same step they give their data-processing consent and fill in their email address, so the invitation can reach them. The confirmation of the event lands in their calendar.
One message takes a sourced profile to a booked interview, with consent and contact details collected along the way, and no manual back-and-forth.
When it makes sense to bring in AI
AI makes sense earlier for agencies than for companies, because they work with a larger volume of candidates and speed is their product. Two uses are worth attention.
AI recommendations from your own talent pool
When a new role opens, the system itself suggests candidates from past hires who fit it. Especially valuable are those who already went through selection at another client who rejected them for its own reasons. They're not bad – they just didn't fit there.
A candidate rejected by one client is often a fit for another – which is exactly why an agency's own talent pool is so valuable.
AI sourcing on LinkedIn
The system itself suggests candidates on LinkedIn who match the criteria of an open role and offers them right in the ATS. It saves the most laborious part of sourcing – the first pass through the search results.
Related features: Candidate recommendations for a new role · AI search in the talent pool · AI sourcing on LinkedIn · Candidate scoring
Make the agency's invisible work visible
This is a point you won't find in any ATS comparison, yet it decides whether the client sees your price as justified.
An agency's work is partly invisible to the client: they don't see how many candidates you contacted and how many interviews you ran – they see three recommended resumes and an invoice.
A large part of an agency's work is invisible to the client – and often to the candidate too. No one sees how many people you reached out to, how many interviews you ran, and how many profiles you screened out before recommending the top three. A good agency ATS can report this work automatically.
So ask about the outputs:
- A report on the number of candidates contacted and the number of interviews conducted.
- A shortlist presentation – the three best candidates in graphical form that can be sent to the client.
- Graphical offers toward the candidate and support for their start with the client.
Related features: Hiring export · Overview of recommended candidates · Candidates by stage · Job offer generation
The client view: a landing page today, ATS-to-ATS tomorrow
Today, each client gets their own landing page where the agency shares candidates. It can also show statistics: how many candidates were contacted, how many were interviewed, how many were submitted. The client sees the volume of work the agency has done, not only the final shortlist.
What we are prototyping now with a small group of selected agencies is, in my view, revolutionary. It is a new way for an agency and its client to work together.
On one side there is the client's Recruitis ATS. On the other side, the agency's Recruitis ATS. The agency sends a candidate directly into the client's ATS. No email, no export, no portal in between. It goes server to server, ATS to ATS.
The important part is what happens next. It does not just create a copy of the candidate on the client's side. A defined set of information stays shared in real time:
- the agency sees which step of the workflow the candidate is in, and when they are moved
- the agency sees the evaluations from individual hiring managers, and who rated the candidate how
- the client can mark a specific note as shared with the agency
- interview outputs such as records and scorecards can be shared the same way
Today everyone solves how the data gets handed over. Almost nobody solves the interaction that follows. And even when an agency provides a landing page, as we do today, the client still wants the data in their own ATS. That is why we designed this: two instances of Recruitis that simply talk to each other.
We expect to launch it in the first quarter of 2027. If your agency would like to join the testing program before then, contact us or write to usa@recruitis.io.
The complete list of questions for an ATS vendor →
This guide is published by Recruitis.io, an ATS. What of the above we can do:
- The talent pool is built from candidates who responded to you in the past; you can recycle them into new roles and categorize them with custom tags.
- LinkedIn sourcing via a browser plugin – you transfer a profile into the system without re-typing.
- AI sourcing on LinkedIn suggests candidates matching the criteria of an open role.
- AI recommendations from the talent pool – when a new role opens, the system itself suggests suitable candidates from your past hires.
- Sharing candidates with the client including interaction on them, and with hiring managers.
- Working with clients: you create and filter roles and candidates by a specific client.
- Users are included in the price with no limit on their number, so growing the recruiter team doesn't make the software more expensive.
Candidates and clients: what Recruitis does today, and what launches in early 2027
Today. Clients are managed through filter fields. Every position is tagged to a client, so you can distinguish and filter roles and candidates by client. That is client management at the level of the ATS, not a CRM.
From early 2027. We are building the part of Recruitis that is based on companies, the contacts at those companies, job orders and placements. A job order is the envelope for positions. A placement is the envelope for the candidates you submitted. Together they make Recruitis a full-fledged client CRM in a single platform with the ATS, with the option to connect invoicing, so it is clear which placements have already been invoiced, and to what extent.
Permanent placement, temporary staffing, or both. Temporary staffing will be handled inside the same CRM. A temporary placement sits in the job order as one candidate invoiced over time, connected to recurring invoicing for that specific person.
On LinkedIn, straight up: even when AI suggests candidates, the profile transfer itself is initiated by the recruiter via the plugin – it's not an automatic bot. Our plugin doesn't track any limits itself; but because a human operates it and it doesn't behave autonomously, that's not a problem – except for one thing. LinkedIn itself caps the number of profiles you can export per month, and exhausting it disables exports until the following calendar month. The plugin therefore offers the option to turn off automatic resume downloads. If someone promises you unlimited, fully automatic LinkedIn sourcing, you risk getting your accounts blocked – this risk applies to every honest tool on the market, not just to us.
Frequently asked questions
Which ATS should a small staffing agency choose?
A boutique agency of two or three recruiters usually has a handful of chosen clients it knows by name, so it doesn't need a robust CRM for tracking leads and sales opportunities. The core of its system should be strong candidate work: fast search across its own talent pool, active sourcing on LinkedIn, and transferring found profiles into the ATS without re-typing, from where they can be shared directly with the client. A boutique agency's main competitive advantage is the speed with which it can deliver candidates. Its ATS selection should aim at exactly that: find a system that won't slow the process down — ideally speeds it up — and that keeps that speed even as it grows.
Which ATS should a mid-size staffing agency choose?
A mid-size agency's advantage is that it can offer clients a breadth of services: from candidate longlists through pre-screening to full-process hiring. The goal should therefore be to sell its work to the client well while also improving relationships with candidates. Toward the client, graphical exports that describe how many candidates were in which round and how much work the agency did are useful. Toward the candidate, you need to measure satisfaction continuously. A key feature is also external candidate sharing — for professionalism and so candidates aren't forwarded over email.
How can an ATS make a staffing agency's work visible to the client?
A large part of an agency's work is invisible to the client: the client doesn't see how many candidates the agency reached out to, how many interviews it ran, and how many profiles it screened out before recommending the top three. A good agency ATS reports this work automatically. So ask about a report on the number of candidates contacted and interviews conducted, a graphical presentation of a shortlist of the three best candidates that can be sent to the client, and graphical job offers toward the candidate. These outputs decide whether the client sees the agency's price as justified.
What is the difference between an ATS for a company and for a staffing agency?
An ATS for a company handles internal hiring within a single organization. An ATS for an agency must additionally handle multiple clients, sharing candidates across assignments, and shared views for clients. When choosing for an agency, working with client assignments and quickly retrieving history is therefore essential.
What is the best ATS for a staffing agency?
It depends on what kind of agency you are. A boutique agency needs a fast ATS with strong LinkedIn sourcing. A mid-size agency needs to show clients the work it has done. A large agency needs a price that does not grow per user, and automation. Recruitis covers all three, with a full client CRM launching in early 2027.
Does Recruitis handle both candidates and clients?
Yes, at ATS level today: positions and candidates are tagged and filtered by client, and each client gets a landing page with shared candidates and activity statistics. A full client CRM with companies, contacts, job orders and placements launches in early 2027.
Does Recruitis include client management and placement tracking?
Client management through filter fields is available now. Job orders, placement tracking and a connection to invoicing launch in early 2027.
Does Recruitis support temporary staffing?
It will, as part of the CRM launching in early 2027: a temporary placement is invoiced over time through recurring invoicing tied to the specific person.
Can an agency send candidates directly into a client's ATS?
We are prototyping exactly that with selected agencies: ATS-to-ATS sharing between the agency's Recruitis and the client's Recruitis, with workflow steps and evaluations shared in real time. The expected launch is the first quarter of 2027, and agencies can ask to join the testing program.
Do agencies pay per recruiter?
No. Recruitis is flat-priced with unlimited users, so adding recruiters does not change the price.