Five places a handover breaks

Recruitment work is a relay. The baton drop happens at the exchange, not mid-stride.

Nothing breaks in the middle of a tool. It breaks at the exact moment one person hands work to another — the CV moves, the desk changes hands, the rate gets confirmed, the invoice gets cut, the decision gets questioned later.

Here are the five exchanges where it happens, what each one actually costs, and the smallest thing that fixes it.

The CV moves. The context doesn't.

A recruiter spends twenty minutes on a call learning why a candidate is looking, what they will and won't accept, what's already been discussed. When the CV gets forwarded — to a client, or to another desk — what travels is the PDF: name, history, maybe a two-line note.

What doesn't travel is the reasoning behind it. The client asks something already answered on the call. The candidate gets asked to repeat themselves to whoever inherits them. It's small friction, but it's usually the first place trust erodes — and candidates read being asked twice as nobody having read it once.

The fix: a short structured summary attached to the submission rather than to the recruiter — what they want, what they've refused, what's already been covered. Three lines, written once, travelling with the person.

Cover a desk, inherit nothing.

Someone's on leave, or covering another consultant's desk. The pipeline is there — statuses, candidate lists — but the judgment calls that produced those statuses usually aren't.

Why was this candidate parked instead of progressed? Was that client call about a rate concern or a timeline concern? Nothing was hidden on purpose. It just lived in one person's head, a personal notebook, or a direct message nobody else was on.

This is the gap that turns a fortnight's holiday into a fortnight of stalled pipeline, and it is the one that becomes serious when somebody leaves rather than goes away for a week.

The fix: make the reason for a stage change a required part of the stage change, not a note somebody might add. A status without a reason is half a record.

Said on a call. Written down differently.

A rate gets agreed verbally — bill rate, pay rate, standard terms. Somewhere between the call and the paperwork, a number shifts, a term gets dropped, or “standard” gets interpreted differently by whoever types up the contract.

Nobody's lying. Two people just remembered a fifteen-minute conversation slightly differently, and only one version made it onto paper. The other version is still in the client's head, and it will surface at the worst possible moment — usually when the first invoice lands.

The fix: confirm commercial terms in writing the same day, in a form the other side has to respond to. A follow-up email saying “to confirm: 22% of base salary, 90-day sliding rebate, 30 days from invoice” costs two minutes and converts a memory into a record. What a fee agreement has to nail down to survive this trip is a longer subject.

Signed terms. An invoice built from memory.

The contract exists, signed and filed. Weeks later, when it's time to bill, someone opens billing software and rebuilds the invoice from what they think the contract says — sometimes checking the PDF, sometimes not, especially against a deadline.

The two documents can quietly diverge, and the first sign is usually a client querying a line item. By then the person who agreed the terms may have moved on, and the person defending the invoice is reconstructing a conversation they were not part of.

This is the most expensive of the five because it has a currency symbol attached to every occurrence. We took it apart separately in the four times a staffing agency types the same fee.

The fix: the invoice should be assembled from the agreed terms rather than typed against them. Where that is not possible, the person raising it should be reading the executed agreement, not the CRM field somebody transcribed from it.

Rejected. Nobody remembers why.

A candidate gets screened out — a reasonable call, made fast, in the middle of a busy day. Months later, that candidate reapplies, or a client asks why they weren't put forward, or an audit asks for the screening record.

The decision was fine. The problem is it was never written down, so “fine” is now unprovable. And unprovable is the operative word: this is the one gap of the five that can become a legal question rather than a commercial one, because automated and semi-automated screening is now regulated in a growing number of places and the obligation to explain a decision sits with the agency.

The fix: write the bar down before the CVs arrive, so a rejection reason is a reference to a rule rather than a recollection. Writing the bar down costs an hour at intake and is the only version of your judgement that still exists six months later.

The same failure, five times

Read the five back and the pattern is hard to miss. In every case the outcome transfers cleanly — the CV arrives, the status is visible, the contract is signed, the invoice goes out, the candidate is marked rejected. In every case the reasoning stays with the person who had it.

That asymmetry is not an accident of any particular tool. Outcomes are what systems are built to store, because outcomes are structured — a stage, a date, an amount. Reasoning is unstructured, takes effort to write, and benefits somebody other than the person writing it. So it does not get recorded, and it walks out of the building every time a desk changes hands.

Which gives you the one-line test for any process you are about to change: if the person who did this left tomorrow, what would the next person be missing? If the answer is “the why”, you have found a handover worth fixing — and you can fix it without buying anything, by making the reason a required field rather than a courtesy.