Hire Data Engineer for Recruitment Agencies
Senior, direct, no layers

Ask for a number in a recruitment agencies business and the answer often takes days: someone exports from one system, another person reconciles a spreadsheet, and the result is questioned before it is used. That is how shortlists sent late becomes normal and how candidates ghosted after interviews goes unnoticed until it is expensive. Pipelines exist to remove that manual middle step.

What gets pipelined depends on how recruitment agencies work really runs. The agency runs on pipelines: roles briefed, candidates sourced, interviews arranged, offers negotiated, and clients who judge the agency on the first shortlist. So the build starts from the decisions the team actually makes: what they need to know each week, which numbers they argue about, and which reports they rebuild by hand.

Nothing is built on a single export. Pipelines run on a schedule, errors are logged and surfaced, and the business can see when a source failed rather than discovering it in a wrong report. Reliability is treated as a feature, not an afterthought.

The reports that matter are the ones the team already rebuilds by hand: time to shortlist and to fill, interview-to-offer rates, offer fall-through causes, candidate response times, and placements per consultant. Each is rebuilt once from modelled data and then refreshed on a schedule, so the weekly meeting starts from numbers everyone trusts instead of a debate about whose spreadsheet is current.

Most recruitment agencies businesses already run on applicant tracking system (candidates and roles), job boards (postings), CRM (clients and relationships), sourcing tools (candidate search), and accounting software (placements and fees). The pipeline work starts from those systems as sources, not by replacing them, and lands the cleaned data in a warehouse the business owns, with dashboards on top for the team.

The first build is usually the report the team rebuilds by hand most often, often interview-to-offer rates. When that report arrives on schedule, correct, and without manual work, the case for pipelining the remaining sources makes itself.

Take CRM client activity. It is the kind of source every recruitment agencies business has and nobody quite trusts. Once it flows through a tested pipeline with error logging, interview-to-offer rates stops depending on whoever happened to build last month's spreadsheet.

applicant tracking system handles candidates and roles. job boards handles postings. CRM handles clients and relationships. sourcing tools handles candidate search. accounting software handles placements and fees.

The realistic outcome is a weekly meeting run on trusted numbers: time to shortlist and to fill and interview-to-offer rates arrive on schedule, definitions are no longer debated, and shortlists sent late becomes visible early enough to act on. That is the standard this engagement is measured against, not a dashboard launch.

Over time the warehouse becomes an asset of its own: every new question starts from modelled data instead of a fresh export, so analysis gets faster the longer the system runs. Browse all hire engagements or discuss your data setup directly.