Taking a vacancy brief and signed terms of business
How the Recruiting pack takes a vacancy brief, requests the job description, gets the client's terms of business signed online and sends a shortlist.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Recruitment businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
A hiring manager phones with an urgent role. The consultant, keen to help, starts sourcing that afternoon and sends a handful of CVs by the end of the week. The client interviews, likes one candidate, and hires them. Then the fee dispute begins: the client says it never agreed to the agency's terms, or that it had already seen that candidate through another route.
Many fee disputes in recruitment trace back to the start of the assignment, not the end. The brief was vague, the terms were never signed, or a candidate was put forward without their agreement. Fixing the intake prevents much of what goes wrong later.
The Recruiting & staffing pack in Achekam's Industry CRM runs every new vacancy through the same intake: take the brief, request the job description, have the client sign the terms of business, and only then send a shortlist. This article walks through each step.
Vacancies, candidates and placements
The pack keeps three kinds of record: Vacancies, Candidates with their interviews, and Placements, which are followed through the guarantee period. A vacancy is where the client's need lives; candidates are the people you might put forward; a placement is the result when someone is hired.
Each candidate is a customer of their own, never filed under a client. That separation shapes the intake, as the shortlist step below explains.
Step one: take the brief
The intake starts with the brief. A good brief call covers more than the job title:
- what the person will actually do in their first months;
- the skills that are essential and those that are merely nice to have;
- the salary range and benefits, so you do not waste anyone's time;
- the interview process and who decides;
- the timeline, and whether the client is using other agencies.
Record the brief on the vacancy while it is fresh. A brief that lives in one consultant's notebook cannot be picked up by a colleague when that consultant is on leave.
Step two: request the job description
Next, the workflow requests the job description from the client. A workflow step in the Industry CRM can send the customer a request for documents, and the customer's answer moves the task on, so nobody has to remember to chase it.
The written job description protects both sides. It is what you screen candidates against, and if the role later changes, it shows what was originally asked for. If the client has no written description, offer to draft one from the brief and ask them to confirm it.
Step three: terms of business signed electronically
Before any candidate is put forward, the client signs your terms of business electronically. You place the signature and initials fields where your terms need them. If the client needs two people to sign, say an HR manager and a finance director, they can sign one after the other or at the same time, and an expiry date and reminders keep the request from going stale. Once the last signature is in, the signed copy and a completion certificate are filed in Documents.
That certificate is your evidence. It records, for every signer, the e-mail address used, when they signed, their IP address and browser, and a fingerprint of the document itself. If the client later says it never agreed to your fee, you can show which terms were signed, by whom and when, and the conversation tends to end there. Where it does not, and the agency and client are in South Africa, APSO's fee disputes service resolves fee disputes between recruitment agencies and their clients, and its page explains when it will adjudicate.
The terms in the pack are starter wording. Every contract or agreement in the industry packs is marked as starter wording that the business must review before use, so have your own terms of business, with your fee basis, payment terms, guarantee period and rebate scale, reviewed and loaded before the first live vacancy.
Step four: a shortlist of candidates who agreed
The intake ends by sending the client a shortlist, and the shortlist contains screened candidates who agreed to be put forward.
Both conditions matter. Screening means you have read each CV against the job description and checked what the role needs, so the client sees candidates worth interviewing rather than a pile of CVs. Agreement means each candidate knows their details are going to this client for this role. Sending a CV without the candidate's consent can embarrass the candidate, especially if their current employer hears about it, and it weakens your claim to a fee if the client has seen them elsewhere.
What the client receives
From the client's side, the intake is simple: a call to take the brief, a request for the job description, a document to sign, and then a shortlist. The rest of your candidate pool stays in your own records. Because each candidate is their own customer rather than an entry under the client's name, the candidates you did not shortlist are not part of what you send.
An intake checklist
- Brief recorded on the vacancy, including timeline and other agencies.
- Job description received, or drafted and confirmed.
- Terms of business signed, with the completion certificate filed.
- Each shortlisted candidate screened against the job description.
- Each shortlisted candidate's agreement to be put forward recorded.
How candidates are kept separate from clients is explained in why each candidate is a customer of their own. What happens after a candidate starts is covered in following a placement after the start date.
Before your next new vacancy, have your terms of business reviewed and ready to send, so that no CV leaves the agency before they are signed.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
