How long does it take to switch recruitment CRM?

The honest answer to the question in the title is that it depends on how much of your history you insist on bringing, how clean it is, and how much of the work your own team can do rather than wait for. Those three things vary so much between agencies that a published average would be worse than useless, because it would become the date you promised your board.

What does not vary is the shape. Every switch goes through the same phases in the same order, and each phase has a specific thing that governs how long it takes. Work out your own figure for each and you have a timeline that belongs to your agency rather than to a vendor's sales cycle.

What actually takes the time when switching recruitment CRM?

The data, not the software. Setting up a new system is a matter of days, and every vendor is good at that part because it is the part they do repeatedly. Getting twelve years of your records, CVs, notes, call history and pipeline stages out of one system and into another in a shape your consultants recognise is the project.

Inside that, the part that surprises people is mapping rather than moving. Your current system has custom fields somebody added in 2019, status names that mean something only to your team, three ways of recording the same thing because two of them predate a policy, and duplicates. Each of those needs a decision from a person who knows your business. That queue of decisions is usually the longest single item in the plan, and it does not get shorter by paying someone.

What are the phases of a CRM migration?

Extract, map, trial load, check, parallel run, cutover, then cleanup. They have to happen in that order because each one produces the input for the next, and the common way to lose a month is to start a phase before the previous one has genuinely finished.

Extraction is getting a complete copy of your data out of the current system. Mapping is deciding what each field, status and record type becomes in the new one. The trial load puts a full copy into the new system so you can look at real records rather than samples. Checking is your consultants opening the candidates and clients they know best and telling you what is missing. The parallel run is a period where both systems are live. Cutover is the day the old one becomes read-only. Cleanup is the duplicates and the tidying that always follows.

How do you estimate the extraction phase for your own agency?

Ask your current vendor today, in writing, what a full export contains, how it is delivered and how long they take to provide it. That answer is the first real number in your plan, and it is available to you before you have chosen anybody new.

Be specific about categories rather than accepting a yes. Records usually come out cleanly. The things that go missing are CV files and other attachments, notes, call and email history, pipeline history with its dates, and custom fields. If any of those are excluded or charged for, you have found both a cost and a delay, and you have found it early enough to plan around rather than discover mid-project.

While you are waiting for that answer, get your own count of what you hold: records by type, attachments, and how many years back the activity goes. Vendors size migration work off those numbers, so having them ready removes a round trip from every conversation you are about to have.

What is a parallel run, and how long should it be

A parallel run is a period where the new system is live for new work while the old one stays available to read, and it should last until your consultants stop opening the old one. That is a behavioural test rather than a calendar one, and it is the only reliable signal that the new system holds what people need.

Keep it as short as that test allows. Two live systems means two places a note can be written and two versions of the truth, and every extra week of that produces reconciliation work later. The way to shorten it is not discipline but completeness: if the trial load brought the notes and the attachments across, people stop going back within days.

Set the cutover date by the check phase, not by the contract. When your consultants open the twenty records they know best and find nothing missing, you are ready. When they keep finding gaps, the date moves, and moving it is much cheaper than the alternative.

What makes a CRM switch take longer than planned?

Six things, in rough order of how often they are the cause: decisions waiting on one busy person, attachments discovered missing at trial load, duplicate data nobody wanted to own, an old vendor in no hurry to help, custom fields whose meaning is lost, and picking a season when your team has no capacity to check anything.

The last one is worth planning around deliberately. A migration needs several hours of attention from your best consultants, and if you run it through your busiest quarter you will get their name on the plan and none of their time. Pick your quietest period and the check phase happens in a week rather than five.

The custom fields problem is worth pre-empting too. Go through your current field list now with whoever has been there longest, and mark each one keep, drop or unsure. Doing that before you have a vendor waiting on you converts the single most common source of delay into homework you did in advance.

Who does what, and what decides how long it takes

Phase	Who does the work	What governs the length	How to shorten it
Extract	Your current vendor	Their support queue and what they include	Ask in writing before you choose anyone
Map	You	Decisions only your team can make	Audit your fields now, mark keep or drop
Trial load	New vendor	How many rounds you run	Send clean, complete extracts the first time
Check	Your consultants	Their available hours	Run it in your quietest month
Parallel run	Everyone	When people stop opening the old system	Make sure notes and files came across
Cutover	New vendor	Nothing, once the checks pass	Set the date from the checks, not the contract
Cleanup	You	How many duplicates you brought	Deduplicate before the extract, not after

What to do before you have chosen a vendor

Three pieces of homework take the uncertainty out of the whole exercise, and all of them are free. Get the written answer from your current vendor about what an export contains. Count your records, attachments and years of activity. Audit your custom fields with the longest-serving person in the building.

With those three in hand you can ask any new vendor for a timeline based on your actual data rather than an assumption, and you can tell whether their answer is considered or optimistic. It also means that if you decide to stay where you are, you have done a data audit you needed anyway.

The thing I would say to any owner about to start is that the timeline is mostly in your hands, which is not how it feels. Vendors move at a predictable speed and are motivated to be quick. The weeks that go missing are nearly always the ones spent waiting for a decision that one person in your business is the only one who can make, and the way to avoid that is to find those decisions and make them before the project starts.

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Anshika leads Customer Success at Recruitly.