Is Recruitly right for a small agency?
Often yes, and there are three kinds of small agency we are plainly the wrong choice for. This is the version of the answer I give on a first call, including the part where I tell people not to buy.
Ask AI about this
Most of the agencies I work with are between two and twenty consultants, so this question comes up almost daily. The useful answer is not a pitch, because a small agency that buys the wrong system pays for it twice and I end up on the call where that gets unpicked. What actually decides fit is a handful of things about how you work, and you can check all of them before you speak to anybody.
Who Recruitly suits
We suit an agency that runs the whole recruitment cycle and wants it in one place. If your week includes finding people, calling and messaging them, sending CVs to clients, arranging interviews, getting documents signed and keeping track of what was promised to whom, then the value of having those in one system is real, because the alternative is four tools and somebody retyping between them.
We suit agencies that are growing or expect to. Small agencies often buy for the size they are and then spend year two discovering that the cheap system has no reporting, no permissions worth the name and no way to run two desks differently. Buying for eighteen months ahead is the only version of this decision that does not need redoing.
We suit agencies in the UK, Europe and the Gulf first, because that is where we built the product and where the details are right: the way pay and rates are handled, the compliance habits, the working week in the Gulf, the languages and the time zones our support runs in. Agencies elsewhere use us perfectly happily, and I would be straight with you that you are not the first case we designed for.
And we suit owners who want fewer suppliers. We build our own phone system, video recording and narration, e-signature, sourcing, campaigns, portals and our desktop and mobile apps rather than reselling other people's, so a small agency ends up with one bill, one login and one place to complain to. For a business where the owner is also the operations department, that is worth more than any individual feature.
Who we are not right for
Three kinds of small agency should not buy this, and I would rather say so on the first call than in month four.
A one-person desk that wants a CV database and nothing else. If your requirement is somewhere to keep candidates and search them, and you have no intention of running sequences, pipelines, portals or a phone system through it, then you are buying a large product to use a small corner of it. A simple contact database will serve you better and cost less, and the honest test is whether anyone other than you will ever log in.
An in-house talent team. We are an agency CRM. The model underneath everything is clients, jobs, placements and fees, and an internal team has hiring managers, requisitions, headcount and approval chains instead. You can force the one into the other and people have, and it is a daily tax on every person using it. Buy something built for internal hiring.
Anyone who needs software that does not change. We ship every week and publish a dated public changelog, and that suits agencies who like the product getting better and dislike waiting a year for anything. It does not suit an agency that has written procedures against exact screens, or a team that finds any change to a familiar layout genuinely disruptive. That is a real preference and not a foolish one, and a slower-moving vendor is a better match for it.
What a small agency should be careful about with any all-in-one
The fair criticism of one-supplier systems is concentration, and it applies to us as much as anyone. Everything in one place means one outage affects several things at once, one contract covers most of your operation, and leaving is a bigger project than swapping a single tool. Those are real trade-offs and the right response is to check them rather than to be reassured about them.
The second thing to check is depth in the corner that matters most to you. An all-in-one gives you good coverage everywhere, and if your entire business is built on one specialised activity, a dedicated tool for that activity may still beat the module. The test is whether the thing you do most is a first-class part of the product or a box someone ticked.
The third is your data on the way out. Ask what an export contains before you sign, specifically whether notes, emails, files and CVs come with the records or only the records come. Any vendor worth buying from answers that without hesitation, and a small agency is exactly the customer for whom a bad answer there is most expensive.
| Your situation | Our honest answer |
|---|---|
| Two to twenty consultants, whole cycle, growing | This is the case we build for |
| UK, Europe or Gulf, multi-currency or contract work | Good fit, the details are already right |
| Sick of five tools and the retyping between them | Good fit, that is what the product is for |
| One person wanting only a searchable CV database | Buy something simpler and cheaper |
| In-house or internal talent team | Wrong product, buy for internal hiring |
| Procedures written against exact screens | Weekly releases will irritate you |
| One highly specialised activity is the whole business | Check depth there before anything else |
What small agencies usually worry about, and what actually happens
The most common worry is that a full CRM will be too heavy for a small team, and the thing that decides that is configuration rather than size. A system set up with your stages, your templates and your fields is quick for two people; the same system left in its default state is heavy for anybody. Budget a day for setting it up properly and a second session three months later, and most of the weight complaint disappears.
The second worry is migration, and it is more manageable than its reputation. The work that matters is deciding what is worth bringing, because most agencies are carrying years of duplicates and dead records they have no reason to move. Doing that thinking before the technical work is what separates a switch that takes a fortnight from one that drags.
The third is support, and the question to ask any vendor is who answers and how long it takes, with your own trial ticket as the evidence. Send a real question during your evaluation and watch what happens. That single test tells a small agency more about the next three years than any feature demonstration.
How to decide without a long process
Write down the five things your consultants do most, take them into a demo, and insist on doing each one yourself with your own data rather than watching. Then price your real headcount and last month's real volumes against the quote, and ask what happens when the AI is unsure. Ours reports how sure it is and hands anything below three-quarters confidence back to a recruiter instead of writing it to the record, and the answer a vendor gives to that question tells you how much checking your team is about to inherit.
My own opinion is that small agencies get sold to badly, and the damage is done by vendors who will not say no. The best outcome of a first call is often that the buyer walks away knowing precisely why, because the second-best system bought with clear eyes beats the best one bought on a story. If the three cases above describe you, I would tell you the same thing on the phone that I have written here.
Anshika leads Customer Success at Recruitly.
