What's really going on

Recruiting into large corporations is a long-cycle, relationship game. You win by remembering every hiring manager you spoke to, every candidate you shortlisted, and following up on exact dates. A marketing funnel won't place roles — a well-kept pipeline will. Solo means every forgotten follow-up is a fee you personally lost.

What to do instead

1. Recruit CRM (per-user/month — check current pricing) — one place for candidates and client contacts, with the hiring pipeline per role. This is the backbone, not a nice-to-have.
2. Make (free tier) — one scenario: new LinkedIn connection or inbound email → contact created in Recruit CRM with a 3-day follow-up task. Stops leads leaking.
3. Habit: 20 minutes every morning, before anything else, work the follow-up list in the CRM. No inbox, no LinkedIn — just the list.

Do this today: open Recruit CRM's trial, import your last 50 client and candidate contacts from LinkedIn as a CSV, tag each one "client" or "candidate".

What you're being oversold

You don't need HubSpot Marketing Hub, email sequencers, or a "recruiter marketing stack". Folk and Capsule are lovely tools but generic — they don't understand roles, shortlists, or placements, and you'd rebuild that scaffolding yourself. For a solo recruiter, every hour spent on marketing automation is an hour not spent on the phone with a hiring manager. Miss one placement a quarter from a dropped follow-up and you've lost more than any software costs in a year.

When to revisit this

When you're juggling more than 8 open roles at once, or you bring on a second recruiter — then the workflow needs real muscle.

The part worth getting right

One judgment call shapes the whole setup: are you selling to the same 20-50 target corporates over and over, or working whichever role lands in your inbox? If it's the first, your CRM is really an account-based tracker — named companies, named managers, slow nurture, and the ATS side is light. If it's the second, it's the opposite — the candidate database is the asset and the client side is thin. Pick wrong and you'll spend six months filling in the wrong fields, then migrate.