Project management for recruitment agencies, a week at a time

Monday, 9am. Eleven live searches on the board, three shortlists due Friday, one researcher, and a pair of consultants already out on Thursday. In the pipeline meeting the partner goes stage by stage: three mandates at longlist, one waiting on a calibration call, one contingency role that has gone quiet since the CVs went over last week. Everyone in the room can already tell two of those searches are going to slip, but nobody wants to be the one who says which two.

A search is a project wearing a different name

A search is project management for recruitment agencies whether the desk calls it that or not: a retained mandate opens with a kick-off, a position spec signed off by the client, a market map running to two or three hundred names, then 40 to 80 of them approached before the slate goes over at week three to five. Then interviews, references, offer, notice period, start date, and a guarantee window running three to twelve months past the placement. The fee lands in tranches, commonly a third on engagement, a third on shortlist delivery, the balance on placement, which is why shortlist day is a cash event. Contingency runs the same spine faster and hotter, with the brief taken on a call, a resourcer working the sourcing legwork, and CVs out inside 48 to 72 hours, though if another agency gets there first you get nothing at all.

A full retained engagement takes 60 to 120 days, while a contingency role is live for two to six weeks or it falls through, and either way the underlying rhythm is weekly. Every live mandate owes the client a progress update on whatever day that client's cadence lands, carrying the counts that prove motion (contacted 34, 19 declined, 6 progressing, 2 for the slate). A consultant carries three to six retained mandates, or ten and up on a contingency desk, all running at once, so the real planning question most weeks is which of them gets Tuesday.

Planning the recruitment week on one grid

ToDoing puts a task on a person and a day, and treats the week as the unit. My Week is the consultant's own view, and Overview is the whole desk on one grid, rows by people or by projects. They are the same data seen two ways, so the partner's plan and the consultant's plan cannot quietly drift apart.

In the pipeline meeting, you actually move the week instead of just talking through it: drag the CFO market map off an overloaded Tuesday, hand two approach blocks to the researcher, push calibration prep to Wednesday, and put the quiet contingency role back on Thursday. Edits show up on everyone's screen in under a second, including the consultant dialling in from a client site, and anything left unfinished rolls forward to today the next working morning, because that is what happens in real life anyway. A Someday column holds whatever isn't happening this week, so you don't have to delete it to get it out of the way.

Shortlist Friday, and the nine days before it

Milestones sit on the same calendar as tasks, so a shortlist delivery, a calibration call, an offer deadline and the end of a rebate window all live where the work lives. Three shortlist flags landing on the same Friday, all under one researcher, become visible three weeks out, which gives you time to act before the Thursday scramble of calling the client for an extension nobody wants to grant. Drag the flag and the date moves, and only that flag moves, so nothing behind it reshuffles itself while you are looking elsewhere. Each search carries its own colour, a timeline and a workplan with sections, list or board, so kick-off, mapping, approach, slate and interview rounds sit in the order you actually run them.

Resource planning when there is one researcher

Overview by person answers the questions the pipeline meeting usually avoids: who is carrying six live mandates and who is carrying three, how many of the researcher's days last week went to which search, and whether the new exclusive can start Monday or has to wait for mapping on the other two. The researcher, though, is still just one person, and more than one mandate wants their Tuesday at once, so the partner settles that contention in the room instead of leaving it to whoever happened to ask first on Slack.

Leave in the week a slate is due

On the Pro plan, ToDoing books time off with half days, one approver, running balances, and public holidays by country and by region, and leave sits alongside the week's work. The team wall chart puts a consultant's week in Lisbon right next to the Friday slate, so you see straightaway if one of them has to move. Feeds go out to a personal calendar, or you can mirror a leave calendar you already run, so the coordinator rebuilding the week around everyone else's changes sees all of it in one place.

What a search costs you in desk days

Most agencies bill a fee, not hours, so plenty of desks never need this part at all. On the Enterprise plan, ticking a task done logs its planned time automatically, with a one-tap adjust, per project in days or hours, which is why the desk never needs anyone to start a timer or fill in a timesheet. Set a budget on a retained search and a burn bar shows what the desk has spent against it, split by person and by task type, exportable as CSV, rates visible to admins only. Estimation reads your own completed history for a median and a p80 per task type, which is how you learn a mid-cap financial services search eats eight researcher days rather than five, and can decide whether the next one at that fee is worth the desk.

What ToDoing will not do for you

ToDoing is not an applicant tracking system and it is not a recruitment CRM. It holds no candidate records, no CV parsing, no Boolean or LinkedIn sourcing, no outreach sequences, no consent log, no GDPR or POPIA record-keeping, and no right-to-work document store. It also has no client portal for presenting a slate, and no fee, commission or invoicing engine. It does not move a candidate through stages either. That is the exact job Bullhorn and its Invenias search product, Loxo, Clockwork, Recruit CRM and Vincere already do well, so keep using them for the pipeline and let ToDoing handle the week.

Three questions recruitment teams ask

Is ToDoing good for a small recruitment agency?

Three to fifteen people covers a partner, three or four consultants, a researcher or two and a coordinator. The free plan stops at 3 people and 3 projects, so a two-person desk running more than three live searches at once will want Pro. Above fifteen the grid gets crowded and a resource management tool suits you better, so read the comparison with Float or Resource Guru first.

Can ToDoing replace our ATS?

No, and you should not try. Your ATS holds candidates, stages, consent records and compliance, while ToDoing holds who is doing what this week. Teams run both, and the handover point is simple: when a search needs someone's Tuesday, it becomes a task here.

Is ToDoing better than Asana for a recruitment agency?

Asana and Monday are built around backlogs and boards that keep growing. ToDoing is built around the working week, so a search with no work scheduled this week is visibly quiet, and that gap between the two approaches is explained more fully in plan the week, not the backlog and in the comparisons with Asana, Monday and ClickUp.

At the time of writing, July 2026, ToDoing is free for 3 people and 3 projects and takes no card, Pro is $2 per person per month or $20 per person per year, and Enterprise is $6 per person per month or $60 per person per year. The 14-day trial opens the full thing, so you can try it on a week that looks like the one at the top of this page: eleven live searches, one researcher, three shortlists due Friday, two of them already headed for trouble. You will just find out which two earlier in the week than you are used to.

ToDoing also works for accounting firms, architects, consulting firms, creative agencies, engineering consultancies, event planners, interior design studios, law firms, pr agencies, software studios, video production.