Enterprise recruitment telephony for 50+ seat agencies
Above roughly fifty consultant seats, a recruitment telephony project stops being a purchase and becomes a programme. There are numbers spread across providers, legacy contracts with staggered end dates, a CRM with years of configuration behind it, managers who depend on existing reports, and an information governance process that will ask hard questions. We work at that level without the overhead of a systems integrator, because the same team designs it, delivers it and answers the phone afterwards.
- Migration by desk or site — no all-or-nothing weekend cutover
- PhasedMigration by desk or site — no all-or-nothing weekend cutover
- Phones, connectivity, IT and cameras under one accountable supplier
- One contractPhones, connectivity, IT and cameras under one accountable supplier
- A named point of contact through design, rollout and afterwards
- Named contactA named point of contact through design, rollout and afterwards
- A documented design with acceptance criteria, agreed before anything is ordered.
- Phased migration desk by desk or site by site, with numbers ported in planned tranches.
- Consolidated reporting across brands, desks and sites for board-level visibility.
- Security and data-handling documentation for your governance and client due-diligence processes.
What changes at scale
The requirements that distinguish a fifty-seat-plus recruitment business from a ten-seat one are mostly about risk, governance and the cost of getting it wrong.
- Small agency reality
- One evening, everyone moves
- What a larger group needs
- Phased by desk or site, with rollback at each stage
- Small agency reality
- A handful of DDIs
- What a larger group needs
- Multiple ranges across providers, audited and ported in tranches
- Small agency reality
- One agreement
- What a larger group needs
- Staggered end dates and notice periods mapped before anything is signed
- Small agency reality
- One view of the floor
- What a larger group needs
- Consolidated group reporting plus per-brand and per-site views
- Small agency reality
- Informal
- What a larger group needs
- Security questionnaires, data-handling documentation, DPA and sub-processor detail
- Small agency reality
- Call the supplier
- What a larger group needs
- Defined response expectations, escalation path and a named contact
- Small agency reality
- Ad hoc
- What a larger group needs
- Change control, planned windows and documented configuration
How we run a larger deployment
The sequence below is what we would follow for a multi-desk group. Each stage has a clear exit point, so you are never committed further than you have been shown.
- Discovery: full audit of lines, numbers, contracts, notice periods, CRM configuration and existing reporting.
- Design: documented solution covering numbering, routing, CRM integration, recording policy, resilience and reporting, with acceptance criteria.
- Commercial review: your current spend set against the proposal, including anything in your existing contracts that is finance rather than service.
- Pilot: one desk live, on real calls, with the CRM write-back and reporting validated.
- Rollout: remaining desks and sites in agreed waves, with ports scheduled and parallel running at each cutover.
- Embed: manager training on recordings, analytics and wallboards; reporting tuned to what your directors actually read.
- Review: a scheduled service review rather than silence until renewal.
Want this looked at on your own setup?
A review is free, there is no obligation, and you keep the written summary either way.
Resilience, because a floor of silent phones is revenue
At fifty seats an outage is not an inconvenience, it is a measurable loss. Resilience is a design decision made in advance, not an apology afterwards.
- Cloud voice platform, so a failure at one office does not take the phone system down.
- Primary connectivity sized for concurrent calls plus everything else the office does, with automatic failover.
- Leased lines with service level agreements where the site justifies it.
- Instant re-routing of numbers to mobiles or another site if a building becomes unusable.
- Consultants able to work from home on the same numbers and the same CRM integration, with no reconfiguration.
- Documented failover behaviour, so managers know what happens rather than guessing on the day.
What your clients’ due diligence will ask for
Larger recruitment groups supply into clients with procurement and security teams, and increasingly into public sector frameworks. Those clients ask about your systems. We support that process rather than leaving you to answer alone.
- Data-handling documentation covering where call recordings and call data are stored and who can access them.
- Retention and deletion policy for recordings and call data.
- Access control model, including how leaver access is revoked.
- Support and incident response arrangements.
- Assistance with Cyber Essentials requirements on the IT side, where certification is asked of you.
Consolidating suppliers without consolidating risk
Larger agencies usually have four or five technology suppliers and a habit of each blaming the others. Consolidation is only worth doing if accountability genuinely improves.
- Phones, broadband and leased lines, managed IT, Microsoft 365 and cameras from one team means one number to ring when a call drops.
- A single view of what you spend on technology, with nothing hiding in a finance agreement.
- One design authority, so connectivity is sized for the voice traffic and the Wi-Fi is built for the softphones.
- Migration handled in stages, so you are never depending on a single supplier relationship you have not tested yet.
What to bring to a first enterprise conversation
- Seat count by desk, brand and site.
- Recruitment CRM and any secondary systems consultants dial from.
- Recent bills from every telecoms and connectivity supplier.
- Contract end dates and notice periods, where known.
- Existing reports your managers and directors rely on.
- Any client or framework security requirements you already have to satisfy.
- Planned changes — new offices, acquisitions, headcount growth.
Frequently asked questions
We have contracts ending at different times across sites. Can you still help?
Yes, and this is normal at scale. We map every end date and notice period first, then design a migration that follows them rather than paying to break them. In some cases a site moves now and another follows in eight months; the platform is the same either way.
Will you work alongside our existing IT provider?
Yes, if that is what you want. We can take the whole estate or work to a defined boundary — plenty of larger groups keep an internal IT team and use us for voice, connectivity and call intelligence. What we will not do is design something where nobody owns the outcome.
Can we run a proper pilot before committing the whole business?
Yes, and we prefer it. A single desk on real calls answers more questions than any demonstration, particularly on CRM write-back and reporting.
Do you provide project management for the rollout?
Yes. A larger deployment gets a documented plan, scheduled port dates, agreed cutover windows and a named contact through delivery. You are not managing a queue of separate suppliers.
How do you handle our information security review?
We provide the documentation your governance process needs on data location, access control, retention and incident handling, and we will complete client security questionnaires where our services are in scope.
Related recruitment guides
Book a recruitment telephony review
For agencies of 50 seats and above: a structured review of your numbers, contracts, CRM integration and resilience, with a written summary you can act on whether or not you use us.
- Full audit of every line, number and contract you hold
- Honest view of what your CRM will and will not integrate with
- The call data you are not currently seeing, including missed inbound
- A written summary — yours to keep either way