Product
How Echo Recruit helps
It helps by removing the retype. One signed quote sets the commercial terms; the requisition, the application, the placement, the timesheet and the invoice all read from it. What follows is what that looks like on each desk, stage by stage, and then module by module.
Who it helps
Four people, four different Mondays
The same record serves all of them, which is the only reason the handovers disappear.
If you lead the team
- Today
- Revenue is a spreadsheet reconciled from three systems, and margin is a monthly surprise.
- With Echo Recruit
- Placements, commission, contract margin and receivables come off the same records the work was done in — and stay admin-only in the database, not merely hidden in the interface.
If you run requisitions
- Today
- Every client wants a slate yesterday, and the bar for each role lives in your head or in an email thread.
- With Echo Recruit
- Each req carries its own brief and rubric. Applications arrive scored, duplicates surface before you call the same person twice, and candidates book their own interview slot.
If you raise the invoices
- Today
- You rebuild each invoice from a timesheet, a fee agreement and somebody’s memory of the rate.
- With Echo Recruit
- An approved timesheet and a recorded placement become invoice lines at the rate the signed quote set. Payments, refunds and credit notes land against the same document.
If you were placed by them
- Today
- You email a contact about your hours, your holiday and where your contract document went.
- With Echo Recruit
- A portal with your timesheets, leave balances, onboarding documents and review — and approvals that reach your manager instead of an inbox.
The through-line
One placement, eleven steps, no re-entry
Each step reads what the previous one wrote. The fee agreed in step one is the fee that reaches step ten.
- 1Quote sent20% contingency, 90-day guarantee, Net 30 — e-signed by both sides.
- 2Terms appliedThe signature writes the fee onto the client account.
- 3Requisition openedIts own sourcing brief, its own rubric, its own public apply link.
- 4Applications scoredParsed, deduped and ranked as they arrive, including the burst after a post.
- 5Slate shortlistedRubric verdicts, then an AI pass that shows its reasoning.
- 6Interviews bookedThe candidate picks a real free slot; invites and links go out.
- 7Offer and placementThe placement inherits the signed fee. Commission is computed, not typed.
- 8Employment startsOnboarding checklist, documents with expiry dates, leave accrual running.
- 9Hours approvedTimesheet approved; billable and payable rates lock onto the line.
- 10Invoice raisedCommission and hours become lines. Reminders schedule themselves.
- 11Payment appliedPart payments allocate across invoices; the balance due is real.
Stage one · Clients and quotes
Win the work on terms the system will enforce
The commercial agreement is usually the only part of a recruitment business that lives entirely outside its software. That is why the fee on the invoice is so often not the fee that was agreed.
- Client accounts with hiring signal, owner, open roles and the business details an invoice needs.
- Quote a contingency percentage, a retainer, a contract markup or a one-off flat fee — with line and document discounts.
- A fee below your floor cannot be sent until someone writes a reason and an admin approves it.
- Dual e-signature, each side confirmed by a six-digit code, with a certificate of completion and a hash of what was signed.
- A sent quote is revised into a linked new draft, expires on its valid-until date, and stops working the moment it is withdrawn.
- Numbering is atomic and configurable — two documents cannot share a number, even under concurrency.
Kestrel Payments · Platform Engineer, SRESigned · countersigned
| Fee model | Contingency — 20% of first-year base |
| Replacement guarantee | 90 days |
| Invoice terms | Net 30 from start date |
On signature these terms applied themselves to the account. The next placement inherits the 20% fee and the 90-day guarantee.
Stage two · Intake and screening
One link per role. One queue for all of them.
A company with four open roles does not have one hiring standard, and a team with nine does not want nine inboxes. Echo Recruit gives every requisition its own front door and puts everything that comes through them in one place.
- A public application link per requisition, plus a careers page listing every open role — no job-board account required.
- Candidates apply with no login. The file goes straight to private storage, never a public URL.
- Résumés parsed on arrival — PDFs read as documents, so the real layout is read rather than guessed at.
- ATS scoring on every application: 50% weighted skills overlap, 25% experience, 25% role match, read from that requisition’s own brief.
- At or above the role’s threshold it moves itself to ATS passed; below it, it waits for review rather than disappearing.
- A shortlisting rubric per requisition, versioned — rules are knockout, scored or manual, and manual rules become screening questions instead of silent penalties.
- The pool is matched against each new requisition, and likely duplicates surface before two recruiters call one person.
| Candidate | Applied to | ATS | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Priya Anand | Platform Engineer | 84% | ATS passed |
| Nadia Haddad | Detection Engineer | 71% | ATS passed |
| Tom Ferreira | Platform Engineer | 58% | Needs review |
| Wei Zhang | Senior Controls | 41% | Below bar |
Each row scored against the bar for its own requisition — 58% passes one role and not another.
Then forward, counted at every step
Three links, one queue, a score before anybody opens a CV — and the funnel each one feeds.
Stage three · Running the desk
Manage the slate, not a spreadsheet of it
Between a scored application and an offer there are weeks of moving people along, chasing replies and not losing anybody. This is the screen a recruiter actually lives in.
- A board per requisition — applied, ATS passed, screening, interview, offer — each column carrying the real total rather than the cards on screen.
- Candidates carry their history: the parsed résumé, every application, the ATS breakdown and the message thread.
- Duplicate detection across the pool, so one person is not worked twice under two spellings of a name.
- One shared inbox: client and candidate replies filed against the person they are about, with CVs lifted out of attachments.
- Sequences that send from your own mailbox inside your send window, and stop on a reply.
- Tasks grouped overdue-first, and a dashboard that reports what changed this week rather than what exists.
+45 more
+16 more
+4 more
Across the desk today 4 tasks due 3 unread replies 2 possible duplicates 1 sequence paused on a reply
Stage four · Interviews
Interviews that schedule themselves and score honestly
Two things ruin an interview process: three days of email to find a time, and a panel that quietly agrees with whoever spoke first.
- Availability windows and a booking link — the candidate picks a slot that is genuinely free on the panel’s calendars.
- One calendar invite per interview from whichever connected platform is calendar-capable, with a Zoom, Teams or Meet link attached.
- Structured scorecards per stage, and the panel’s ratings stay hidden from each other until submitted.
- Interviewer names are deliberately absent from the candidate’s page — a leaked booking link should not hand out an org chart.
- Stage transitions are recorded, so a rejected candidate does not erase the fact that they reached final interview.
Second-stage interview · Platform Engineer
45 minutes · Google Meet · no login required
Tue 22 Sep
09:30
11:00
Wed 23 Sep
10:00
14:00
Thu 24 Sep
09:00
16:00
| Mira Chandra | 3.8 | Strong yes |
| Sasha Idris | 3.0 | Yes |
| Devon Reyes | 2.3 | No |
None of this was visible until your own scorecard was in.
Stage five · Employment
Employ the person you placed
For contract and project placements the relationship starts, rather than ends, at the offer. Most teams discover this when the first timesheet arrives.
- Employee records with effective-dated assignments and pay — history stays true when a rate changes mid-contract.
- Onboarding templates and checklists with document expiry, so a lapsing right-to-work document becomes a task.
- Leave as an append-only accrual ledger, with holiday calendars, balances and an approval chain.
- Schedules, attendance and timesheets, with contract margin computed from the rates on the approved line.
- Performance: competencies, goals, feedback, review cycles and calibration.
- Exits: notice, clearance, alumni records, attrition reporting and data-rights requests.
- An employee portal where the placed person does all of this themselves.
| Contractor | Hours | Bill | Pay | Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leila Haddad | 40.0 | $135 | $98 | 27% |
| Yusuf Karim | 38.5 | $120 | $92 | 23% |
| Wei Zhang | 32.0 | $110 | $88 | 20% |
Stage six · Money
Bill for it without retyping any of it
An invoice is a statement about work that has already happened. If your software knows the work, it should know the invoice.
- Placements and commission, with the fee inherited from the signed quote and frozen at the terms that applied that day.
- Invoices generated from commissions and approved hours — or typed by hand for the genuinely one-off charge.
- Payments and allocations across invoices, part payments, refunds, and credit notes a client can open and read.
- Due-date reminders on a 15/7/5/3/2/1/0-day schedule, and receivables sorted by how late they are.
- Which mailbox each kind of document sends from, and who gets copied, set once in settings.
- Multi-currency quotes and invoices, with rates you set — a manual rate you control beats a live feed that silently re-prices a signed contract.
| Line | Source | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Placement — Elena Vasquez | Commission · 22% of $198,000 | $43,560.00 |
| Contract hours — week 37 | Timesheet · 38.5h approved | $5,197.50 |
| Contract hours — week 38 | Timesheet · 40h approved | $5,400.00 |
| Payment received 28 Sep | −$30,000.00 | |
| Balance due | $24,157.50 | |
Each line points back at the commission or approved timesheet it came from, at the rate the signed quote set.
Every module
What is in the subscription
Twelve areas, all included. If your evaluation is a checklist, this is the section to send.
Clients & contracts
Accounts with hiring signal and owner, contract terms and fee models, business details for invoicing, and a clean way to end an engagement.
Jobs & criteria
Requisitions with slate coverage, a per-req sourcing brief, and a versioned shortlisting rubric with a builder that drafts one for you.
Applications & ATS
Public apply links, a careers page, résumé parsing, deterministic scoring on arrival, and a funnel from applied to hired.
Candidates & matching
The talent pool with filters, pool-to-requisition matching, duplicate detection, and AI ranking with written reasoning.
Interviews
Stages and panels, candidate self-scheduling, calendar invites, meeting links, and scorecards the panel cannot read until they submit.
Outreach
Sequences that send from your mailbox with send windows and stop-on-reply, a shared inbox, templates, tasks, and CVs lifted out of email.
People & HR
Employee records, onboarding, leave, time and attendance, performance and exits — for the people you placed, not just your own staff.
Employee portal
A separate front door for placed workers: timesheets, leave requests, documents, directory, team view and reviews.
Revenue
Placements, commission status, and the revenue summary — admin-only, refused by the database for anyone else.
Billing
Quotes with e-signature and approvals, invoices, payments and refunds, credit notes, reminders, numbering and receivables ageing.
Analytics
Weekly volume, pipeline conversion, sourcing and recruiter performance, and requisition health.
Administration
Team invitations and roles, connected mailboxes and meeting providers, send settings, document numbering, currency rates, audit log and support tickets.
Straight answers
Where the edges are
Four things it does not do. Better to read them now than to find them in week two of a trial.
It does not run payroll
Pay rates, approved hours and margin are here; paying people is not. That is a payroll integration, and a half-built one is worse than none.
It does not post to job boards
You get a careers page and a public application link per requisition. Syndication to external boards needs a per-board account and is not built.
SAML and SCIM are not built
Sign-in is email and password, Google, or Microsoft. Enterprise single sign-on and directory provisioning are not there yet.
Scanned résumés need text
A PDF with embedded text parses well. A photograph of a CV has nothing to read, and there is no OCR step — it says so rather than returning an empty profile.
Questions
What buyers ask on the second call
How long does it take to get running?
A workspace exists the moment you sign up, and the parts that need nothing from you — apply links, scoring, the careers page — work immediately. The work is in what you bring: client accounts and their fee terms, open requisitions, and the people currently on contract.
Can we import our existing candidates and clients?
Bring what you have and we will look at it on the call. Candidates deduplicate on email, so an import that overlaps your existing pool merges rather than doubling it. Résumé files can follow the records they belong to.
Does it handle contract placements as well as permanent?
Contract is the harder case and the one the system is shaped around: markup or rate-based fees, timesheets with approval, contract margin, and invoices that bill approved hours week after week. Permanent placements are a commission against a signed fee.
Does the AI make hiring decisions?
No. It scores, ranks and explains; a person decides. Rules that cannot be read off a profile are excluded from scoring and asked as screening questions, the ranking prompt is told the numeric score is evidence rather than verdict, and every evaluation is stored append-only against the rubric version that produced it.
Who can see salaries, fees and margin?
Admins. The restriction is in the database, not the interface: revenue and margin functions raise for a non-admin caller, so hitting the API directly returns the same refusal as clicking the page.
What happens to résumés we no longer need?
They live in a private bucket, are read only through five-minute signed links, and are swept after a retention window that defaults to two years and is yours to change. The sweep deletes the file first and clears the pointer second.
Is it priced per seat?
No. One annual subscription per workspace, with unlimited seats — add recruiters, coordinators and finance without the subscription moving. We do not publish the figure; ask on the call and you will have it alongside what it covers. What is included is listed on the homepage.
Resources
The longer version
The blog goes further into the same problems: where work goes missing in a handover, whether a screening decision still makes sense six months later, how contract margin leaks, what a fee agreement needs to reach the invoice, and what you owe the people whose CVs you hold. No borrowed statistics. Any number is arithmetic you can redo with your own figures.
Bring a live requisition to the demo
One real role and one real fee agreement is all it takes to see whether this fits the way your desk already works.
One annual subscription per workspace — not per seat. Unlimited seats.