What's really going on

You have two pipelines, not one: past clients to re-warm, and live prospects to close. Gmail plus SMS plus your phone is the raw material — a CRM's job is to stop those threads from disappearing. Vibe-coding this is a trap: you'd rebuild what already exists, badly, and every hour on it is an hour you're not placing candidates. The real risk is a warm client from last year going to a competitor because nobody followed up in month 9.

What to do instead

1. Recruit CRM (check current pricing, per user/month) — built for agencies like yours: clients, candidates, and deals in one place, with Gmail sync out of the box. This is the closest fit to what you described.
2. Folk (check current pricing) — if you find Recruit CRM too heavy and you mostly want a relationship pipeline for past clients and prospects, Folk syncs Gmail cleanly and feels light.
3. Zapier (free tier to start) — later, wire SMS in through your carrier or a texting app so messages log against the contact.

Today, in 30 minutes: open Gmail, export the last 12 months of client threads to a list, and paste every company name into a single sheet. That sheet is your first pipeline. Import it into whichever tool you pick.

What you're being oversold

If anyone points you at Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, or ZoomInfo — ignore them. Those are for 20-person outbound teams running cold sequences; you're a recruiter with real relationships. Building your own is the more expensive version of the same mistake: three months of coding and you still won't have Gmail threading, email tracking, or a mobile app. Meanwhile one forgotten past client at your average placement fee is more than a year of CRM seats.

When to revisit this

When you hire a second recruiter, or when you're managing more than ~40 open roles at once — that's when workflow rules start earning their keep.

The part worth getting right

Decide which side of your business the CRM serves first. If your money mostly comes from placing candidates into new roles, you need an ATS-shaped tool — Recruit CRM — because candidates are half the data. If your money mostly comes from re-selling to past clients and winning new logos, and someone else handles candidates, you need a sales-shaped tool — Folk — and the recruiting side stays in your head or a sheet. Pick wrong and in six months you're migrating everything, or paying for features you never touch.