Fix your CRM data hygiene, fix your pipeline

“Can I just confirm you’ve got 8,000 open jobs?”

That’s the question Holly Langley, CEO of Re:Stack, recently put to a new client.

The answer: they didn’t. Consultants had been logging leads spotted on LinkedIn as live jobs, with no terms and no conversation. They were also leaving real jobs open long after they’d stopped moving.

It’s CRM hygiene issues like this that trip up agencies and hamper growth. In this post, we look at some of the insights Holly shared in her recent webinar with Paiger CEO Darren Westall: why recruitment CRM data goes bad, what it costs your business development, and what you can do about it in the next 30 days.

How a recruitment CRM fills up with data nobody can use

Bad CRM data rarely comes from carelessness. More often it comes from targets that reward volume over usefulness.

Picture a team of consultants, each told to add a hundred new sales contacts a week. The numbers get hit. Years later, someone opens one of those records and finds Joe Bloggs at Amazon, with hello@amazon.com as his email and the customer service line as his number.

“That is not valuable data,” says Holly. “You know there’s someone called Joe Bloggs who works there, but you’ve got no way of contacting them.”

The same thinking fills a CRM with jobs that were never really jobs. Speculative leads get logged as live vacancies, real vacancies never get closed, and the pipeline looks far healthier on screen than it is.

“I’d rather have ten jobs that are actually going to go through than a hundred, most of which weren’t even going to happen,” Holly explains.

Then there are the records nobody can find. Candidates and contacts with no phone number, email or location, and no skills or industry coded, never come up when someone searches for them.

“This is my biggest bugbear,” says Holly. “Phones, emails, locations.”

None of this happens overnight. “It’s not that an agency has woken up and all the data isn’t as good as it once was,” she says. “It’s over the course of three, four, five, ten, twenty years.”

Holly works mostly with Bullhorn agencies, but this isn’t a Bullhorn problem. It’s a habits problem, and it shows up in every recruitment CRM.

Why nobody gets it right from day one

The easiest fix would be to get the data right from the start. Very few agencies do, and it’s rarely because consultants don’t care.

“I think it’s habits and knowledge,” says Holly.

Often, the information simply isn’t there yet. When a consultant first adds a contact, they may know where that person works but not how to reach them. And if the CRM hasn’t been configured with the right skill and industry codes, there’s nothing to code a record against, however careful the consultant is.

Data also rarely makes the priority list in a young agency, when the focus is on deals and cash in the bank. “If you were setting up a recruitment business from day one, very few people would say our priority is getting the data right,” says Holly.

That’s understandable early on. The problem is that there comes a point where it starts to cost you.

The point where poor data starts costing revenue

That point is usually volume. Somewhere past a thousand candidates or a thousand contacts, nobody can hold the database in their head any more.

“There’s just so much of it,” says Holly. “Once you start to forget people, that’s when it becomes a problem. All of a sudden you’re trying to find someone who hires project managers in London, and you’ve got nobody.”

It bites hardest when an agency starts hiring. A founder carries years of client history around in their head. A new consultant on a new desk, told to win five new clients this quarter, has none of it.

“They’re coming into a brand new desk, or they’re brand new to recruitment,” says Holly. “They don’t know where to start.”

The answer isn’t a better memory. It’s a CRM that remembers for you. “Let the system do it for you,” she says.

When consultants stop trusting the CRM

Poor data has a second cost, and it’s harder to see. Once consultants stop trusting the CRM, they start working around it.

“Bad data contributes to a lack of trust in the CRM,” says Darren. “And once you stop trusting your CRM, you start to work outside of it.” In almost every agency he speaks to, at least one consultant is running their desk from a spreadsheet.

It usually starts innocently. Someone needs to track something, the field isn’t there, so a spreadsheet appears. Then another. Before long, the CRM is only part of the picture.

Consultants rarely raise these gaps with operations, because fixing the CRM isn’t their job. “They’re there to pick up the phone, make calls and place jobs,” says Holly. “They don’t know what they don’t know.”

Hiring is one place to catch this early. Few agencies ask candidates about data or technology at interview, and Holly thinks they should.

“I’d ask them: what’s one feature on your current CRM you can’t live without?” she says. A consultant with no answer may need a different training plan.

Experience doesn’t transfer automatically either. Every agency sets its CRM up differently. “Everybody’s Bullhorn is different, even just the naming conventions,” says Holly. Put new starters through your training anyway, and listen for what they did better somewhere else.

What clean data does for business development

The real cost of poor CRM data lands on business development.

Darren recently spoke to an agency that had blocked out two hours a day for it, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. When he asked what the first hour looked like, it was all research and preparation. Not a single call was made.

This is a common pattern. Consultants are given time for business development and spend most of it working out who to call.

Holly’s fix is to turn those ten weekly hours into ten call lists, each built from data already in the CRM:

• Monday morning: contacts who’ve had a placement in the last three months. Check in on the candidate and ask what’s coming up.

• Monday afternoon: clients you’ve placed with in the last two years but haven’t spoken to in sixty days.

• Tuesday: open leads that have gone quiet, to convert into jobs.

• Wednesday: everyone you’ve met in the last two years. Read the meeting notes. The contact who mentioned a 2027 digital transformation is worth a call in October.

“That means when your consultants sit at their desk at 10am, they’re not spending fifty-five minutes searching,” says Holly. “They’ve got a list.”

It works best when the whole agency does it at the same time. “LinkedIn off, guys. Let’s crack on the phones. This is our call list,” she says. “Everyone’s in it together. They’re accountable.”

Lists like these also surface business that would otherwise slip away. In a recent training session, Holly pulled every contact who had hired validation engineers in the last twelve months and hadn’t had a recent call. One was a client the agency had placed with. The recruiter had since left, and nobody had spoken to them since.

“New business is great, but we don’t necessarily need net new business all of the time,” she says. “There are new business opportunities on your system already.”

Every one of those lists depends on the data being right. “If your data’s not right, you can’t put those lists together, you can’t get the contact information, you don’t know who to speak to,” says Darren.

The same goes for AI. Ask it which contacts your consultants should call today, and it can only answer from what’s been recorded.

Three things to do in the next 30 days

Clean CRM data doesn’t arrive in one go, and “improve the data” isn’t a plan.

“What we’re never going to be able to do is wake up tomorrow and all of these data problems are solved,” says Holly. Instead, she recommends choosing three to five data points that matter and working on those.

1. Find out what your consultants actually need

Start with the people who search the CRM every day. Ask what isn’t good enough, or send a one-question poll: if you could improve one data point, what would it be?

“Believe me, they’ll come back to you,” says Holly. Better still, sit with them and watch them search. The gaps show up quickly: no CV, no skills, no availability date, no job titles.

Some answers will be training issues rather than data issues. If a consultant wants to know whether candidates prefer contract or permanent work and the field already exists, that’s a learning conversation.

2. Measure where you are and set a target

Take a baseline for each data point and track it monthly. Good places to start include:

• Candidates added more than two years ago with no CV, phone number, email, notes or placements. Holly’s advice is to delete them. If they’re relevant, they’ll come back round.

• Candidates with no industry or skill coded.

• Live jobs with no activity in thirty days. If a hundred of your five hundred live jobs haven’t moved in a month, that’s a red flag.

• Candidates without a full location.

Then set a target and a plan to reach it. That might mean asking on calls, enriching records from your phone system, sending automated messages asking candidates to update their profile, or simple logic: a candidate put forward for a contract role probably wants contract work.

The automated ask does more than fill in a field. “It opens the door for an actual conversation,” says Darren. “They might have moved on. They might now be a hiring manager.”

Progress will be slow at first, but it adds up. “You’re not going to get a hundred percent data quality overnight,” says Holly. “But if you can track it, it’s amazing the little wins you get.” Tracked monthly, it also gives operations and marketing leads a clear story for a quarterly review or a conversation about the return on your recruitment tech.

And you don’t need to fix everything at once. “If you’ve got five things, ten things, don’t worry,” she says. “Track where you are and map a gradual plan to improve it.”

3. Train consultants on why the data matters

This is the step most agencies skip. “This isn’t often in recruiter training,” says Holly.

Show consultants the business already sitting in the CRM: candidates interviewed but not placed, clients placed with but not spoken to recently, contacts with past jobs and no recent note. That’s a pipeline of lapsed clients ready to re-engage, and it only exists if the data behind it does.

Once consultants see that, the extra effort makes sense. “If they can just take one more second to skill code it, the impact that has,” says Holly. “And they get it.”

Where this leaves your pipeline

Recruitment has changed. “Ten years ago, Darren and I would not be having a webinar about data,” says Holly. “It would probably have been about advertising jobs.”

Clean data won’t do your business development for you. Without it, though, every tool you add on top is working from the same Joe Bloggs at hello@amazon.com.

Watch Holly and Darren’s full conversation