How to tell if your recruitment CRM is still being built

Recruitment software does not fail loudly. It sits there doing what it did last year, the release notes dry up, support starts saying that is how it works, and one day you realise the thing you run your agency on has not changed since you bought it. By then you are three years of data deep and switching feels worse than staying.

The demo cannot warn you about this, because a demo is a tour of the finished parts. What you actually want to know is whether the company behind it is still building, and that is a question about the last few weeks rather than the last few years. Here are five questions that get you the answer, and our own answers to each one, taken from the week of 13 to 20 September 2026.

1. How often does the vendor actually ship?

Ask for the changelog and look at the dates. A product with a real team behind it changes every week, in small pieces, in public. A product being run for cash changes twice a year and calls it a major release.

In that week we made 537 changes across 1,778 files, from seventeen people. Every one of them is written up before it lands, which is why we can tell you what they were rather than telling you there were a lot.

2. Can they change one thing everywhere at once?

You can ask this one without knowing anything technical. Think of the last small change you asked your vendor for, the kind that would save your team ten minutes a day, and remember how long it took. The reason it took a quarter is almost never the change itself. It is that the same thing is written by hand into two hundred separate screens, so a small change is two hundred small changes, and you pay that tax on every request you will ever make.

We changed our brand colour twice in the same week, and it took one edit. It took one edit because the colour is stored in a single place that every screen reads from, and because 292 hand-written copies of it were tracked down and pointed at that place first. The build now refuses to run if anyone pastes a loose copy back in, which is the part that keeps it true a year from now when whoever set it up has moved on to something else.

3. How fast do they get new AI into production?

Everyone in this market says they are an AI company. The test is not whether they have AI, it is how long it takes them to use something that did not exist last month, because that is the gap you will be living in for the next five years.

TypeSafe released Jev on 18 September. It is not a chatbot, it answers a typed question about a situation and tells you how sure it is, which is exactly what software needs when it has to choose between real options. We had it running against live customer work the same day, and by the end of the week it was sorting every reply to your outreach, reading the sentiment of your calls and meetings, and filling in seven fields on a job from your own lists rather than guessing at names. Hats off to the TypeSafe team, and the reason one day was possible is that the framework it plugs into was built long before Jev existed.

4. Can they prove where the AI is, or only claim it?

Your candidates' details go through this software, and somewhere inside it a model is reading them. Ask the vendor to tell you every place that happens. Most cannot, because nobody ever counted, and a list somebody typed two years ago is a memory rather than a count.

Ours is counted by a program that reads every line of code we have written, here and in the sixty other systems we run, and it stops and complains if it finds a file that touches AI and does not match anything it recognises. The last count was 433 places across 221 files with nothing unexplained. The first time we ran it, it found more than forty places our hand-written list had quietly missed, which is the whole reason we stopped keeping one by hand.

If a vendor cannot tell you where their AI runs, they cannot tell you what it does with a candidate's CV, and they cannot tell you what quietly starts behaving differently the next time a model is updated underneath them.

5. Do they fix the small things nobody demos?

This is the one that decides whether your consultants like the software, and it never appears in a sales conversation. Nobody demos a menu closing properly. You only meet it at four o'clock on a Thursday when it covers the thing you were trying to read.

Five real ones from that same week. The kebab menu on a contact now closes when you pick something, so it stops sitting on top of the window it just opened. Selecting every row in a list no longer loses your count when more rows load underneath. Deleting a job takes you to the next job instead of dumping you back at the grid. Adding a contact as a candidate carries their title, date of birth, skills and referrer across so you do not type them again. And a window that was opened by another window now has a way back to where you came from.

Eighty-seven of the 160 pieces of work that week were of that kind. It is the least glamorous bar on the chart and it is the reason people stay.

What a no costs you

The question	What a bad answer means for you
How often do you ship?	The gaps in the product today are the gaps in three years
Can you change one thing everywhere?	Everything you ask for is quoted in months, so you stop asking
How fast does new AI reach us?	You buy whatever the market had in the year you signed
Where is AI used in your product?	Nobody can tell you what happens to your candidates' data
Who fixes the small things?	Your consultants work around the software instead of using it

Ask us the same five

Our changelog is public and dated, our engineering write-ups name the people who did the work, and the numbers in this piece came out of the same records rather than out of a marketing meeting. Ask any vendor you are talking to for the equivalent, and notice how few of them have it.

I have watched this industry ship software that stopped moving years ago and still charges per seat for it. That is why I say Recruitly is the best recruiting CRM in the world, and the week above is the only argument I want to make for it.

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Gowri is the CEO of Recruitly. Every figure in this piece covers 13 to 20 September 2026 and comes out of our own change records.