What's really going on

You already know Venturi isn't working, so you're shopping. But "Atlas" and "Spot" are horizontal CRMs — they treat a candidate the same as a lead. Recruiting isn't that. You track people on both sides of the deal: candidates with CVs, availability, notes, and clients with roles, shortlists, placements. A generic CRM makes your team rebuild that structure in custom fields, and in a year you'll be shopping again.

What to do instead

1. Recruit CRM (per-user/month — check current pricing) — built as ATS + CRM in one, so candidates and clients live in the same system with the recruiting workflow already shaped.
2. Zapier (free tier, paid by task volume) — wire your job board, LinkedIn, and inbox into whatever you pick so no candidate gets retyped.
3. Before you migrate, export everything out of Venturi this week — contacts, notes, placements — into a clean CSV. One person, one afternoon. Do it in Venturi's Settings → Export before your renewal locks you in.

What you're being oversold

Horizontal CRMs like the two you're weighing sell hard to agencies because the market is huge, but they're built for account executives closing software deals, not consultants placing people. You'll pay per seat for pipeline features and still bolt on a separate ATS. Every week you stay on Venturi past the point of deciding, your team keeps updating a system they've mentally left — notes get thinner, follow-ups slip, and placements you'd have made this quarter don't.

When to revisit this

When you hit twelve people or open a second desk (perm + contract), re-check whether Recruit CRM's reporting still holds — that's when agencies outgrow it.

The part worth getting right

The real fork is contract vs perm. If you're mostly perm placements, Recruit CRM fits cleanly and you're done. If a real chunk of your revenue is contract or temp — with timesheets, margins, extensions, rate cards — that's a different tool entirely (Bullhorn, JobAdder territory), and picking Recruit CRM would cost you a second migration inside eighteen months. So: what's your split?