With recruiting, billing, and reporting in one system, staffing firms can manage longer placement cycles with better visibility, control and confidence.
Staffing and recruiting firms feel pressure from every direction. Clients expect faster placements, candidates move cautiously, and teams juggle more systems than ever. Many firms are using artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to screen candidates and handle routine tasks, yet the time from job request to placement continues to grow.
According to Staffing Industry Analysts, firms aren’t expecting relief any time soon. In its Hiring Outlook 2026 coverage, the group says most recruiters don’t anticipate hiring timelines improving this year, reinforcing that placement speed remains a persistent challenge for these organizations.
Broader labor market conditions play a role. Ongoing skills gaps, cautious hiring behavior, and extended decision-making on the client side continue to slow placements, even as firms invest in tools designed to increase efficiency.
“AI and automation can speed up screening, but without an underlying system that ties recruiting to operations and finance, those gains don’t lead to faster placements,” says Drew Preiner, VP of sales at Vursor, a NetSuite Alliance Partner that works frequently with staffing and recruiting firms.
Addressing the Key Pain Points
Longer placement cycles create cascading problems for staffing firms. When it takes weeks or months to fill positions, operational and financial pressure compounds quickly. Common challenges include:
- Wide cash flow gaps. Extended placement timelines delay billing cycles and push revenue further out while payroll and vendor costs continue.
- Poor margin visibility. When placements stretch across multiple periods, it becomes harder to track true profitability by recruiter or resource without manual reconciliation.
- Weaker client relationships. Clients expect speed and when timelines extend, trust erodes and competitors gain ground.
- Fewer recruiter performance insights. Activity metrics lose meaning when placements take months instead of weeks and firms struggle to separate productivity from market conditions.
- System fragmentation that slows decisions. Data lives across ATS platforms, billing systems and spreadsheets, making it difficult to see the full picture when leadership needs it most.
The fragmentation goes deeper than most firms realize. When placement data lives in an ATS, payroll runs through one system, billing happens in another, and financial reporting sits somewhere else entirely, leadership winds up making decisions from incomplete information. That gap between activity and financial insight creates operational drag, especially as placements take longer and clients expect faster results.
"Staffing firms can't afford to treat longer placement cycles as temporary friction," Preiner cautions. "When time-to-fill stretches into months instead of weeks, margin erodes, cash flow tightens, and client relationships suffer. Firms need systems that connect recruiting activity directly to financial performance so they can act before problems compound."
Building a Strong Foundation
As a leading cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, NetSuite gives staffing firms a solid financial core by centralizing billing, payroll, vendor payments and revenue in one system. This is a big step forward from disconnected accounting tools and spreadsheets, but financial accuracy is just the starting point for staffing firms dealing with extended placement cycles.
Vursor's StaffingSuite builds on NetSuite's foundation by connecting recruiting decisions directly to staffing-specific KPIs. Built natively inside NetSuite, the StaffingSuite includes three core components:
- Pay-When-Paid, the flagship feature that aligns cash collection with vendor payments.
- P&L by Recruiter, which shows true profitability at the individual level.
- Margin by Resource, for tracking contributions by placement in real time.
Combined, these components connect recruiting activity directly to cash flow, profitability and performance in real time.
"NetSuite gives firms a strong financial foundation, but staffing-specific metrics like margin by resource or full P&L by recruiter require custom work or manual reporting," Preiner says. "Vursor's StaffingSuite adds the operational layer staffing firms need. When margin, cash timing, and recruiter performance are all in one place, leaders can make decisions earlier—while the data still has real value."
Ready to Close the Gap?
Longer time-to-place isn’t going away—but smart staffing and recruiting firms are taking steps now to speed up placements. By streamlining workflows, leveraging AI for candidate sourcing and matching, and automating repetitive tasks, firms can reduce bottlenecks and get the right candidates in front of clients faster. Closing the gap means turning slow, disconnected processes into a seamless, efficient recruiting pipeline that keeps your clients—and your business—moving.
Learn more about Vursor's StaffingSuite here.