How the right metrics connect recruiting activity to margin, cash flow and profit.
Staffing and recruiting firms have a huge opportunity right at their fingertips. Every placement, bill rate, pay rate, timesheet, invoice and recruiter action generates data that can be used to assess margins, strengthen cash flow and support better decisions.
In practice, most firms stay focused on growth, service delivery and day-to-day operations, which leaves little time to pull data together across systems or translate it into staffing-specific key performance indicators (KPIs). As a result, valuable insight stays fragmented, and leaders wind up basing decisions from incomplete data and reports.
“Staffing firms face a complex and ever-evolving landscape of technological demands. From the shifting ways in which talent accesses work opportunities, to rising client expectations for smarter, faster service, to the transformative impact of artificial intelligence, firms must continually decide what to invest in and when,” writes Kevin O’Neill of Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA). “These demands often conflict, and prioritizing them amid economic uncertainty is no small feat.”
The challenges tend to compound for small to mid-sized staffing firms that lack dedicated IT leadership and full-time CIOs. “Instead, operational staff wearing multiple hats are left to manage the procurement and deployment of new systems,” O’Neill points out. “This often leads to fragmented decision-making and short-term fixes.”
Don’t Let Silos Kill Your Data
Recruitment data rarely lives in one place, and that fragmentation creates real operational drag. Metrics meant to guide hiring decisions and flag issues often sit across multiple platforms or remain accessible only to managers. As Adrie Smith writes in The recruitment data silos that are killing your hiring, that structure makes it harder for teams to respond when problems surface and nearly impossible to see a complete picture of performance. These recruitment data silos create several familiar problems for staffing and recruiting firms, including:
- Metrics scatter across systems. Recruiting data lives in ATS platforms, spreadsheets and reporting tools, making reconciliation slow and data confidence difficult to maintain.
- Visibility stays limited. When managers control access to recruiting metrics, individual recruiters lose insight into their own performance and outcomes.
- Issues linger longer. Without regular access to reporting, recruiters struggle to act on early warning signs, even when metrics point to problems in the hiring process.
- Accountability weakens. Fragmented data makes it difficult for teams to connect daily activity to results or fully own the hiring process.
Smith notes that when firms collect recruitment data across multiple platforms, teams struggle to “reconcile the numbers and provide a comprehensive overview of activities,” a gap that ultimately limits accountability and slows improvement. Without shared, staffing-specific KPIs, firms struggle to link recruiting activity to financial results. This leads to even more roadblocks, including:
- Revenue without clarity
- Margin erosion
- Cash flow surprises
- Incorrect recruiter performance
- Delayed course correction
- Overvalued placement volume
- Unprofitable client relationships
- Hidden cost leakage
- Inconsistent pricing discipline
“Without regular access to reporting and recruitment metrics,” says Smith, “responding to lurking problems highlighted by your recruitment metrics will be challenging for individual recruiters. Additionally, if you collect information across several platforms, it will be difficult to reconcile the numbers and provide a comprehensive overview of activities to your team.”
Bringing Staffing KPIs Into NetSuite
NetSuite does a good job of managing the financial backbone of staffing firms. It centralizes billing, payroll, vendor payments and revenue in one system, giving leadership a reliable view of the numbers that matter most. For many firms, that alone represents a major step forward from disconnected accounting tools and spreadsheets.
Vursor’s StaffingSuite takes that foundation to the next level by layering in staffing-specific insight. Built natively inside NetSuite, the solution focuses on KPIs like margin by resource, full profit and loss by recruiter and cash timing tied directly to collections. “NetSuite gives staffing firms a solid financial core,” says Drew Preiner, VP of Sales at Vursor. “StaffingSuite builds on that by connecting recruiting decisions directly to margin and cash flow.”
Vursor's StaffingSuite keeps financial and operational data connected inside NetSuite, which makes staffing-specific KPIs possible without the need for manual reconciliation. Billing, payroll, vendor costs and revenue stay aligned, giving leaders a clearer view of margin, cash flow and recruiter performance as work happens.
Finally, NetSuite integrates seamlessly with ATS platforms like Bullhorn, Avionte, JobDiva and TargetRecruit keeping recruiters in familiar systems while leadership gains timely, usable performance insight. “Seeing margin by resource and P&L by recruiter in the same system as cash timing removes a lot of guesswork,” Preiner says. “It gives leaders the confidence to make decisions earlier, while the information still has real value.”
To learn more about NetSuite, Vursor's StaffingSuite and our approach to staffing KPIs, contact us.