Recruitment & HR

Every business in this sector runs on a pipeline of people moving through stages, and on a record of who did what at each stage. A vacancy is briefed, advertised, applied for, shortlisted, interviewed and filled. A leave request is submitted, approved, shown on a calendar and deducted from a balance. A freelance brief attracts proposals, becomes a contract, is delivered in milestones and paid out. In each case the stages are specific to the business, the people who move things between stages are different roles with different views, and the trouble starts when the stages live in email and the record lives in a spreadsheet.

The second thing the sector shares is that one person can appear in several places at once. A candidate is submitted to the same client by two consultants; a driver is approved for leave by one manager and rostered by another; a freelancer is proposed to a brief they are already contracted on. Systems in this sector therefore need a single record per person with ownership, availability and history visible wherever that person appears, and rules that warn before a conflict rather than after it.

Money follows the pipeline rather than leading it. A job board sells posting packages; an agency raises a fee note on a start date and bills temporary hours weekly; a marketplace holds a milestone payment until acceptance and takes a commission. Each of these is an order with a trigger, a calculation and a statement, and each needs to reach the accounting or payroll system the business already uses rather than replace it.

Finally, the sector handles documents and dates that carry weight: right-to-work records, certificates, contracts, offer letters, probation and review dates. Software here records the document, the date it was checked, who checked it and when it expires, and reminds the right people. It does not decide what is required or whether something is acceptable; those decisions rest with the business and its own advisers, and the catalogue describes compliance and employment matters as records and integration opportunities, never as advice. The topics below share these foundations; each adds what makes it distinct, from the job board's taxonomy and feeds to the marketplace's dispute queue.