A Recruiting CRM for Agencies That Win Mandates Through Relationships

A recruiting CRM keeps the relationships a recruitment business lives on: the client companies that give you mandates, the hiring managers inside them, and the candidates you place. Customermates fits the business-development side of that work for small agencies, executive search boutiques and independent recruiters. Clients, hiring managers and candidates sit in one contact base, each search mandate is a deal on a board, and from the Pro plan the email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp conversations around them land in one inbox. It is not an applicant tracking system: no job postings, no career page, no application forms and no per-candidate hiring pipeline. If those are what you need, the comparison further down names tools built for them.

CRM or ATS: decide which job you are buying for

Most products sold as a "recruiting CRM" are an applicant tracking system with a CRM attached. The ATS half handles open roles: it posts the job, collects applications, parses CVs and moves each applicant through screening, interviews and offer. The CRM half handles relationships that outlast any one role: winning clients, staying in touch with passive candidates and knowing who spoke to whom last.

What a recruitment agency needs from a CRM

• Two kinds of people in one network. A hiring manager at a client today is a candidate in two years, and a placed candidate becomes a client contact. Keeping them in separate systems loses that history.
• Mandates move like deals. A search goes from first conversation to briefing, signed mandate, shortlist, interviews and placement or loss. The fee depends on how far it gets.
• Candidates go quiet for months. The person who turned you down in spring may be ready in autumn. Your talent pool needs a list sorted by last contact, not memory.
• Conversations happen on LinkedIn. Sourcing and first contact often run through LinkedIn messages or InMail, follow-ups by email and phone, and a few candidates prefer WhatsApp.
• Off-limits rules. If you promise clients not to approach their employees, you need to see whether a candidate's current employer is a client before you write to them.

A recruiting setup in Customermates

A new workspace starts without lists: you create the lists you need (contacts, organizations, deals or your own) in Configure, or let AI setup build them in the cloud. You can name a list Jobs instead of Deals or Companies instead of Organizations, and rename any list later in Configure under General. Every field name below is an example; custom fields can be text, single or multiple choice, date, money, web address, file and more. Phone numbers and email addresses go into the Contact details field.

A candidate is linked to their current employer as an organization and to every job they are shortlisted for. The job is linked to the client and the hiring manager. Open a candidate and you see every mandate they were part of; open a client and you see every job and every person you know there. The assigned users on a contact show which recruiter owns the relationship.

Mandate stages and fee value

The stage is a single choice field you define, and each option gets a win probability. A starting point: Conversation 10%, Briefing 25%, Mandate signed 50%, Shortlist sent 65%, Final interviews 80%, Placed 100%, Lost 0%.

A deal's value is the sum of its line items, each a service times quantity. Fees vary per search, so one workable pattern is a service "Placement fee" priced at €1,000 per unit, with the quantity set to the expected fee in thousands. A €27,000 fee is quantity 27, and at Shortlist sent the weighted value is €17,550. That is arithmetic from your own probabilities, not a prediction.

Saved views for shortlists and the Monday call list

1. Shortlist for one job: contacts with Contact type Candidate linked to that job, grouped by Availability.
2. Warm candidates: candidates with Availability Open to move whose record has not been updated for 60 days, oldest first.
3. Mandates by shortlist date: jobs in Mandate signed, sorted by Shortlist due.
4. Retention review: contacts whose Retention until date has passed.

Saved views are personal, so each colleague sets the same filters and saves their own view. More on filters and views is in the records guide.

Candidate and client conversations in one inbox (Pro and above)

In Customermates Cloud on Pro, Business and Enterprise, the unified inbox brings together email from Gmail, Outlook or IMAP, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram. For LinkedIn you can connect a Classic account, or Classic with Recruiter if you hold a LinkedIn Recruiter seat; when you write from a contact, Send as then offers Recruiter InMail. Link a participant to a contact once and the conversations show on that contact's timeline. The LinkedIn integration page has the details.

Two details decide the plan. Pro includes 1 connected account per user, so a recruiter who wants a mailbox and LinkedIn in the inbox needs Business, which includes 3. And conversations from your own accounts stay private: colleagues see a thread only after you share it, or after you share the whole account on Business and above. If two recruiters must see who last wrote to a candidate, agree to share those threads.

Candidate briefings and a weekly check-in with Mate (Customermates Cloud)

Mate is the assistant in Customermates Cloud. It runs on hosted AI credits included per active user on every cloud plan; reading inbox conversations needs Pro or higher. Before a client call, ask in the chat:

For a weekly check-in, set up a routine, a saved instruction Mate runs on a schedule or when a record changes. Choose Every week under Repeats, Monday at 08:00, with instructions like these. Each run has a credit cap, so keep the list of candidates per run short; the routine limits are in the docs.

Find contacts with Contact type Candidate and Availability Open to move
that were last updated more than 60 days ago. For each one, read the latest
inbox conversation. If it exists, save a short, personal check-in as a
draft reply in that conversation. Do not send anything and do not delete
anything. End with a list: name, practice area, days since the last update,
draft saved yes or no.

A second routine can react to an event: when a job's Stage changes to Shortlist sent, create a task "Collect interview feedback" linked to that job and assigned to the same recruiter. Starter includes 1 routine per user and Pro includes 5.

Prefer your own AI client? Connect Claude, ChatGPT or another client through MCP. It works on every plan and on self-hosted installations, with model use billed by your AI provider.

What Customermates does not do for recruiting

• No job postings, job board distribution, career page or application forms.
• No CV parsing. A CV that arrives by email stays as an attachment in the inbox thread; to keep it with the candidate, add it to a File field on the contact.
• No per-candidate stage inside a job. A job has one stage; whether a candidate is submitted, interviewing or rejected for that job is not a field on the link. Note it in the job's notes, or use an ATS when you run many candidates per role.
• No interview scheduling or calendar booking. Pro adds read-only calendar access.
• No email sequences or bulk outreach, no candidate scoring or data enrichment, no mobile app.
• Tasks have no due dates or reminders. Add a date field and a saved view.

Recruiting suites to compare

If you need the ATS side, look at a product built for it. Customermates publishes this page. Vendor details and prices were checked on 8 October 2026 on each vendor's own pricing page, in US dollars as listed; billing terms differ by vendor. These suites include ATS features Customermates does not have, so the prices are not like for like.

A common split for a boutique firm is Customermates for clients, mandates and candidate relationships, and a light ATS only when a role is advertised. Webhooks fire when a job changes, so an n8n workflow you run separately can pass data to another tool that has an API.

What it costs

Customermates prices are per active user per month, billed monthly. Every plan includes REST, webhooks and MCP.

Each cloud plan adds monthly hosted AI credits per active user for Mate; see pricing. Running the open-source core on your own server costs no licence fee, but a self-hosted installation has no inbox, no Mate and no routines.

Moving in from a spreadsheet or another system

1. Export to Excel

   The import reads Excel workbooks (.xlsx) and CSV files, one record type at a time. A CSV file from your old system can be imported as it is.

2. Import companies first

   On the Organizations list, open More actions, choose Add from file and map your columns, including the Relationship and Off-limits fields.

3. Import hiring managers and candidates

   Include each person's company name so the import links them to that organization, and fill Contact type for every row.

4. Add open mandates as jobs

   Create open searches as jobs, link the client, hiring manager and shortlisted candidates, and set the stage.

5. Connect the inbox and save the views

   On Pro or higher, connect your mailbox or LinkedIn under Settings › Channels, then save the views above.

Candidate data and GDPR

Candidate records are personal data, and in the EU you need a legal basis, a retention period and a way to delete on request. Customermates gives you the building blocks, not a compliance process.

• In Customermates Cloud the application database is configured in the AWS Frankfurt region. Hosting and other subprocessors, US providers among them, are on the subprocessors page, and a data processing agreement is available.
• A Retention until date and the retention view above show whom to review. Deleting is a manual step: Mate asks for approval before each deletion, and unattended routines cannot delete.
• A custom role with Assigned read access limits a researcher or freelance recruiter to the records assigned to them.
• Customermates holds no certification such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2.

Frequently asked questions

Competitor details checked on 8 October 2026 against Recruit CRM pricing, Bullhorn pricing, Crelate pricing, Loxo pricing and Manatal pricing.