Switch from spreadsheets to recruiting desk

Most recruiters do not leave the spreadsheet because it breaks. They leave because it quietly stops helping: the same candidate sits in three tabs, a follow-up slips because it lived only in your head, and a client passes on a submission that never fit the brief. Moving to a recruiting desk is not a data-migration project. It is an afternoon of setup and about a week of running one real mandate on the new system before you switch the rest across.

This guide is the practical version: what to pull out of your sheets, what to leave behind, how to structure the desk so it starts sorting your pipeline from day one, and how to run your first live mandate on it. If you want the case for why the sheet costs you more than it looks, read the honest comparison of spreadsheets versus a recruiting desk. This is the how.

What you actually move, and what you leave

The first instinct is to migrate everything. Do not. A spreadsheet accumulates dead rows: roles that closed, candidates you will never call again, clients who went quiet two years ago. Carrying that into a new system just moves the mess.

You move three things:

• Your active clients, the ones you are working now or expect to work this quarter.
• Your open mandates, the roles you are actively filling.
• Your live candidates, the people in play or worth keeping in your talent pool.

Everything else stays in the sheet as an archive. Keep that file, dated, as a backup. You are not deleting your history, you are choosing what comes with you.

Before you move: one afternoon of preparation

Open your sheet and do a quick audit. Make a short list of the clients you are actively working and, under each, the roles that are genuinely open. For most solo desks and boutiques this is a page, not a spreadsheet. Note the fee terms you have agreed with each client, because that is what the desk will use later to track the money.

Then look at your candidate tabs. You do not need to clean them. You need the resumes. Gather the resume files you have, in whatever mix of PDF, DOC and DOCX you kept, because those import in bulk and the desk reads each one into a candidate record for you.

That is the whole preparation. You are not reformatting columns or writing a migration script. You are deciding what is active.

Step 1: Add your clients and open mandates

Add your active clients first, then the open roles under them. Clients go in by hand, and that is deliberate: an active desk only has a handful at once, hand-entry takes minutes, and a bulk import of years of messy rows would need more cleaning than it saves. Enter the client and the fee terms you noted. For the roles, add each mandate by hand, or, if you keep a tracker of a client’s open requirements (or the client sends you one), import it as Excel or CSV into that client’s mandates in one go, with the client’s requirement ID kept on each. Now every candidate, submission and rupee of fee has a real place to live, linked, instead of a row that refers to a tab three sheets over.

This is the step where the desk stops being a list and becomes a desk: clients, mandates, a talent database and the candidate pipeline as one connected thing, so a candidate is attached to a mandate, a mandate to a client, and a fee to a placement, with nothing to reconcile by hand. If the idea of the full-desk model is new, what full-desk recruiting means covers it.

Step 2: Bring your candidates in

Bulk-import your resumes. Upload the files, as PDF, DOC, DOCX or a ZIP of them, and each resume is read into a candidate record. Duplicates are matched on email and phone, so the same person who landed in three of your tabs becomes one record, not three. If your candidate tab is the better source, import the sheet itself instead, as Excel or CSV: map its columns onto the candidate fields, check the dry-run preview of what would be created, matched or skipped, and load. This is the part of the move that would have taken you days of copy-paste.

You do not need every candidate you ever touched. Import the people in play and the ones worth keeping in your talent pool. The pool is not a graveyard here; it is searchable, and the desk will rank it against new roles for you, which is the next step’s payoff.

Step 3: Set one fitment bar per open role

This is the step most people skip, and it is the one that makes the difference. Before you move candidates through the pipeline, turn each open role into a fitment checklist: the weighted must-haves, the nice-to-haves, and the hard knockouts that end the conversation. In BFSI that knockout might be a lapsed licence; in tech it might be stack depth rather than keyword breadth; in sales it might be the shape of the number they have actually carried.

Setting the bar once does two things. It gates every submission against the brief, so a near-miss does not reach the client as if it were a match. And it lets the desk rank the candidates already in your talent pool against the role, with a fit score, the must-haves met, and knockout flags, so the people you already know surface for the pipeline instead of being re-sourced. If you have never written a weighted checklist from a job description, read a JD and build a fitment checklist walks through it.

A person still decides. The desk ranks, scores and flags; it never auto-rejects and never hires for you. The point is that your judgment is now explainable and the knockouts are caught first.

Step 4: Run one live mandate, end to end

Do not switch everything at once. Pick one open mandate and run it entirely on the desk, from shortlist to submission to client response. Source where you always source, on Naukri, LinkedIn or a job board, pull the shortlist in, score it against the fitment bar, and submit from the desk.

When you submit, the client gets a clean, branded view of the shortlist and a no-login review link to mark each candidate yes, maybe or pass, and those verdicts land back on the mandate. For a longer engagement you can give the client a read-only hiring-status link and a weekly digest, so they see progress without a chasing email. That is a status link and a weekly report, not a full client portal, and it is worth describing it that way to clients so you promise exactly what they get.

Run this one mandate to a real outcome. One live submission, with a real client response coming back into the system, teaches you more about the switch than a week of configuring fields. It also shows you the thing a spreadsheet never could: the whole arc of a role in one place.

Step 5: Move the money and the reporting across

Once a role results in a placement, the desk handles what used to live in a second finance sheet. On a team plan, placements, configurable payout rules and settlements draft the money from the client’s fee terms: a client receivable to raise, track and collect, and attributed payouts for the recruiters involved, editable until finance confirms and clawed back if a candidate exits. The formal GST tax invoice is issued through your accounting system; the desk tracks what is owed and to whom.

For reporting, you get the funnel, source ROI, cycle times and a fee-weighted forecast, with the last six months of trend in the product and CSV export when you want the raw numbers. If a weekly number habit is new, the recruiting metrics that actually matter is a good starting set. The point of moving reporting across is that the numbers now come from the same records you work in, not from a sheet you update on Friday from memory.

Step 6: Decommission the sheet, keep the export

When your open mandates are running on the desk and one has been through a full cycle, stop updating the sheet. Keep the dated backup you made at the start, and keep in mind that your data inside the desk is yours and exportable to CSV from the list screens at any time, so you are never locked in. A switch you can reverse is a switch that is safe to make.

You will know the move is done when you stop opening the spreadsheet to check something. That usually takes a few days of real use, not a formal cutover.

A one-week switch plan

• Day 1: Audit the sheet. List active clients, open mandates and fee terms. Gather resume files. Keep a dated backup.
• Day 1: Add clients by hand, and add or import the open mandates. Import the candidate sheet or bulk-import the resumes.
• Day 2: Set a fitment bar on each open role. Let the desk rank your talent pool against them.
• Days 2 to 5: Run one live mandate end to end, shortlist to submission to client response.
• Day 5: Move reporting across and, on a team, set payout rules so the next placement settles cleanly.
• Days 5 to 7: Switch the remaining open mandates across. Stop updating the sheet. Keep the export.

What you keep from the spreadsheet

You keep the flexibility you liked, in a form that stops working against you. You keep your data, exportable whenever you want it. You keep sourcing where you source. What you drop is the quiet tax of the sheet: the duplicates, the follow-ups held in your head, the submissions that went out because nothing stopped them, and the Friday hour spent rebuilding a report from rows. For one or two mandates the sheet is fine. For a real desk, the switch is barely more expensive than the free setup and far less painful, which is the whole pitch.

If you want to see it on your own roles, start a free trial with no card on the pricing page, move one mandate across, and run it to a submission. That single mandate will tell you more than any comparison page can.