Recruiting & Staffing Firms

Run Your ATS, Your Job Ads, and Your Back Office From One Chat

Recruiting firms live or die on speed: speed to source, speed to submit, speed to place. Yet recruiters spend their days clicking through the ATS (applicant tracking system - the database where jobs, candidates, and pipelines live), ops stitches together time and payroll data by hand, and job-ad budgets run on last week’s req list. Mad Fish Elements, the governed gateway we built at Mad Fish Digital, connects Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Gemini to Pinpoint, LinkedIn, Rippling, Toggl, and 29 other platforms - so the whole firm moves at conversation speed, with every action permissioned and logged.

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What Mad Fish Elements Changes

Pinpoint by conversation

Jobs, candidates, pipelines, and reporting in Pinpoint become things you ask for, not screens you navigate. “Who’s stalled in interview stage across our engineering reqs?” “Move these three candidates to submitted and log the note.” “Open a new job for the Denver role from this description.” Batch operations handle the repetitive updates in one pass, per-seat permissions decide who can write versus read, and every change lands in the audit trail. Recruiters get their hours back for the work that closes placements.

Job ads that keep pace with the req list

Because Pinpoint and your ad platforms sit behind the same gateway, the drift disappears. Check open reqs and running campaigns in one conversation: pause LinkedIn and Google Ads campaigns for roles that just filled, launch ads for this morning’s hot req across LinkedIn and Meta, shift budget toward the searches that are hardest to fill. The ad account finally answers to the req list - daily, without a standing meeting between two teams.

Source-of-hire you can defend

With Pinpoint, LinkedIn, Google Ads, Meta, and GA4 connected, source-of-hire stops being a debate. Trace placements back through pipeline stages to their source, line that up against spend by channel, and see cost per placement - not cost per click - by source. Publish it as a governed Data Visualization report and the next budget conversation is short: fund what places, cut what doesn’t.

One gateway across the back office

Toggl hours, Rippling people data, and Bill.com payables join Pinpoint behind the same gateway, each with its own per-seat, per-platform permissions. Ops asks capacity and utilization questions in plain language instead of building reconciliation spreadsheets. Finance sees servicing costs without asking three people for exports. The weekly operational picture becomes something you check, not something you construct.

Client updates that build themselves

With the Data Visualization add-on, each client gets a governed report - pipeline depth, submittals, interviews, time-to-fill from Pinpoint - that scheduled refreshes keep current, updating the same report idempotently (run it twice, get one clean result, never duplicates). Account leads annotate and share instead of rebuilding decks, and on the Agency tier, multi-client management keeps every client’s accounts and reports cleanly separated. The reporting hours go back to billable work.

The Problems Recruiting and Staffing Teams Live With

The ATS is where recruiter time goes to die

Pinpoint holds everything - jobs, candidates, pipelines, notes - but getting anything out means clicking through screens, and putting anything in means more clicking. Recruiters spend hours a week on status updates, stage moves, and pipeline reviews that are pure administration. The candidates who stall in a stage for two weeks don’t announce themselves; someone has to go looking. Every minute spent navigating the ATS is a minute not spent talking to candidates or clients, and in a business billed on placements, that math is brutal.

Job ads run on autopilot while the req list changes daily

Reqs - the open job requisitions your firm is working - open, close, and change priority every day. The LinkedIn and Google Ads campaigns promoting them update on whatever cadence someone remembers. Filled roles keep collecting clicks and spend. Hot new reqs wait days for a campaign. The person running ads isn’t in the ATS, the recruiters in the ATS aren’t in the ad accounts, and the budget quietly pays for the gap between the two systems.

Source-of-hire reporting is guesswork

Where do placements actually come from? LinkedIn says one thing, the ATS source field says another (when it’s filled in at all), and GA4 tells a third story about the careers page. Without a defensible source-of-hire picture, ad budget gets allocated by anecdote. The channels that produce placements can’t prove it, and the ones that produce only applicants keep getting funded. Everyone has an opinion; nobody has the report.

Recruiters, ops, and finance each live in their own silo

Placements live in Pinpoint, hours in Toggl, people data in Rippling, payables in Bill.com. Answering an operational question - which recruiters are over capacity, what a contract placement costs to service, whether the new team is ramping - means someone exports from three systems and reconciles them in a spreadsheet. So the questions get asked quarterly instead of weekly, and everything in between gets managed by feel.

Client reporting eats the hours you bill

Staffing clients want to know what’s happening on their reqs: pipeline depth, submittals, interviews, time-to-fill. Producing that update means pulling from Pinpoint, formatting a deck, and repeating it for every client, every week or month. It’s essential work that earns zero revenue, lands stale, and falls hardest on the account leads whose time is worth the most. Firms either eat the cost or let clients wonder - and both wear down the relationship.

Use Cases

The morning pipeline sweep

“Show me every candidate in Pinpoint who’s been sitting in the interview stage for more than 7 days across our open engineering reqs, with their recruiter and last activity.”

Platforms Pinpoint

The stalls surface themselves before the daily standup instead of during the client escalation. Recruiters start the day with a worklist, not a hunt.

Stop paying for filled roles

“Cross-check our open jobs in Pinpoint against active campaigns in LinkedIn and Google Ads, and pause any campaign promoting a role that’s filled or closed.”

Platforms Pinpoint, LinkedIn, Google Ads

The silent budget leak - ads for jobs that no longer exist - gets closed in one governed pass, and the reclaimed spend moves to reqs that are still open.

Launch ads for the hot req before lunch

“Create the job in Pinpoint from this description, then launch a LinkedIn campaign targeting senior DevOps engineers in the Denver metro and a matching Meta campaign, using our standard job-ad budget.”

Platforms Pinpoint, LinkedIn, Meta

A new req goes from intake call to live campaigns in one conversation. Speed-to-market on hard searches becomes a firm-level advantage instead of a scramble.

Settle the source-of-hire argument

“Pull placements from Pinpoint for the last two quarters by source, line them up against LinkedIn and Google Ads spend, and show me cost per placement by channel.”

Platforms Pinpoint, LinkedIn, Google Ads, GA4

The budget meeting gets a real answer: which channels produce placements, at what cost, and which produce only applicant volume. Allocation follows evidence.

See capacity before you promise delivery

“Compare hours logged in Toggl by recruiter over the last month against their active req count in Pinpoint, and flag anyone over 45 hours a week with more than 8 open reqs.”

Platforms Toggl, Pinpoint, Rippling

Overloaded recruiters surface before quality slips or people burn out - and before the firm commits to a new engagement it can’t staff.

The client update that’s already done

“Refresh the Acme Manufacturing report with this week’s Pinpoint pipeline data and add a note about the two interviews scheduled for Thursday.”

Platforms Data Visualization, Pinpoint

The client sees a current, annotated view of their reqs without the account lead losing Friday afternoon to deck-building. Trust goes up; reporting hours go down.

Five Prompts To Steal

Try any of these on a live req list and watch the clicking disappear.

“List every req in Pinpoint that’s been open more than 30 days, with days open, candidates by stage, and the owning recruiter, sorted oldest first.”

An aging-req worklist for the Monday meeting - the searches at risk of going stale, surfaced before the client calls about them.

“Compare our pipeline conversion rates this quarter against last - screened to interview, interview to offer - by req type, and tell me which stage got slower.”

A bottleneck read across the whole desk, so you fix the stage that’s actually leaking instead of the one people complain about.

“For the five reqs with the highest LinkedIn job-ad spend this quarter, show applicants, interviews, and placements from Pinpoint next to the spend, so I can see which ads earn their budget.”

Spend-to-placement truth at the req level - which job ads are producing hires and which are just producing resumes.

“Move the remaining November budget from our three LinkedIn campaigns with the highest cost per applicant to the two accounting reqs we’re struggling to fill.”

A budget shift executed in one governed action - permission-checked, logged, and done before the next status call.

“Publish a weekly ops dashboard with open reqs and time-to-fill from Pinpoint, recruiter hours from Toggl, and headcount from Rippling, refreshing every Monday morning before the partner meeting.”

A standing Data Visualization report that turns the weekly ops review into a five-minute read instead of a three-export scramble.

Data Visualization for Recruiting and Staffing Firms

Placement Velocity Dashboard. Time-to-fill, submittal-to-interview and interview-to-offer rates, and placements by recruiter and req type, all from Pinpoint, trended by month. Audience: managing partners and delivery leads steering the firm week to week.

Source-of-Hire Report. Placements by source from Pinpoint against spend from LinkedIn and Google Ads and careers-page behavior from GA4, resolving to cost per placement by channel. Audience: whoever owns the job-ad budget

and the partners who approve it.

Recruiter Utilization & Capacity. Toggl hours against active reqs and pipeline load from Pinpoint, by recruiter and team, with Rippling roster data keeping headcount current. Audience: ops leadership planning assignments and spotting burnout early.

The chart types that tell your story

Recruiting data is pipeline data, and pipelines have shapes that certain charts show better than any table. Here’s what works:

Funnel

Applied to screened to interviewed to offered to hired, with conversion at every step. One look tells you whether the problem is top-of-funnel volume or an interview stage that’s quietly leaking good candidates.

Flow diagram

Source of hire traced end to end which channels feed which stages, and which actually produce placements. The channel that floods you with applicants and the one that delivers hires are rarely the same, and this chart makes that impossible to argue with.

Box plot

The spread of time spent in each stage, not just the average. Averages hide the stalls; the outliers sitting past the whisker are the candidates about to take another offer.

Line chart

Time-to-fill trended by month and req type. It shows whether the firm is getting faster, and which kinds of searches are dragging the number the wrong way.

Horizontal bar

Recruiter and req league tables placements, submittals, aging reqs - ranked so the standouts and the stuck are both obvious in seconds.

Gauge

Open-req aging against your SLA (service-level agreement the turnaround you’ve promised the client). Green means breathing room; red means pick up the phone today.

Governed Access Your Compliance Officer Will Sign Off On

Recruiting runs on candidate data, and candidate data demands discipline. Every seat carries read, write, and delete permissions, set per platform and enforced server-side on every call - a sourcer can update candidates in Pinpoint without the ability to delete them, and nobody touches Rippling or Bill.com without an explicit grant. Everyone connects through their own native OAuth sign-in - no shared logins, no API keys - so the full audit trail ties every action on every record to a named person with a timestamp. Automated error monitoring watches the gateway, and the platform is built around documented security controls, which shortens both your compliance review and your clients’ vendor questionnaires.

Per-user OAuthRead / write / delete per seatFull audit trailDocumented security controls

Pricing That Scales With Your Desk Count

Seats cover recruiters, ops, and leadership doing daily work across Pinpoint and the back office; Ad Ops covers managed job-ad spend. Most firms start with a handful of Growth seats and add from there.

Estimate your plan

Ad Ops — managed ad spend

/ mo

Basic read

$299/mo + 0.75% of spend

Standard full capabilities

$799/mo + 1.25% of spend

Premium multi-client · priority · sandbox

$1,299/mo + 1.50% (0.85% above $250K)

Ops seats

Starter $99/seat/mo

read-only · up to 3 platforms

Growth $299/seat/mo

read+write+delete · up to 7 platforms

Agency $499/seat/mo

all platforms · multi-client · priority · sandbox · BYO OAuth

Ad Ops

Ops seats

15% bundle discount (smaller line)

Estimated monthly total

Data Visualization is available as an add-on to any plan — pricing on request.

Growth is $299/seat/month with read, write, and delete access across up to 7 platforms - Pinpoint, LinkedIn, Toggl, Rippling, and GA4 fit comfortably in one seat. Agency is $499/seat/month with all 33 platforms plus multi-client management, priority support, a sandbox, and BYO OAuth - built for staffing firms running separated client accounts. Enterprise is custom. If we manage your job-ad spend, Ad Ops Standard is $799/month plus 1.25% of managed spend for full read-write management; take seats and Ad Ops together and the smaller line gets a 15% bundle discount. Data Visualization is available as an add-on to any plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which ATS do you support?

Pinpoint. Jobs, candidates, pipelines, and reporting are all operable through the gateway - reading pipeline state, creating and updating records, moving stages, and pulling the numbers your dashboards run on, all governed by per-seat permissions.

Can recruiters update candidates without being able to delete them?

Yes. Read, write, and delete are separate permissions per platform per seat, enforced server-side on every call. The setup we see most: read and write on Pinpoint, with delete reserved for admins. No prompt can override it.

How is candidate data protected?

Each person signs in with their own OAuth credentials, permissions are enforced server-side on every call, and the full audit trail records who touched which record and when. The platform is built around documented security controls. Access is individual, scoped, and provable.

Can we manage job ads on LinkedIn and Google Ads at the same time?

Yes - LinkedIn, Google Ads, Meta, and other ad platforms sit behind the same gateway as Pinpoint, so one conversation can check the req list and act across every campaign. Batch operations handle firm-wide sweeps like pausing ads for filled roles.

We staff for multiple clients. Can we keep their accounts separate?

That’s what the Agency tier is for: multi-client management keeps each client’s connected accounts and reports cleanly separated, with a sandbox for testing and BYO OAuth if your clients require it. Per-seat permissions control which team members touch which clients’ platforms.

Sign Up

Every hour your recruiters spend clicking through screens is an hour your competitors spend talking to candidates. Put Pinpoint, your job ads, and your back office behind one governed gateway and let the firm run at conversation speed - with the permissions, audit trail, and documented security controls your clients expect. Bring a live req to a walkthrough and we’ll work it together. Join the waitlist to get started.