Not a rip-and-replace. Not an ATS migration.

Recover the placements your ATS doesn’t catch.

For founder-led specialty staffing teams: stale candidates, missed follow-ups, and client-submission gaps add up to placeable revenue you’ve already paid to source. I run a 14-day audit that maps where placements are leaking — and surfaces the top 1–2 fixes you can ship this month.

Book a 30-minute audit call

A staffing pipeline diagram showing where placements leak and how the audit recovers them.

Where placements leak

Stale candidates

Sourced once, contacted once, never followed up. Sitting in the ATS, still placeable.

Missed follow-ups

Clients waiting for status updates that didn’t come. Submission cycles that quietly stall.

Client-submission gaps

Placements that fall through the cracks around the ATS workflow. Not what Bullhorn, Crelate, or Loxo are designed to catch.

For a 15–50 person staffing firm, this can add up to hundreds of candidate threads that went cold and dozens of submissions that quietly stalled. The audit’s first job is putting a real dollar estimate next to each.

What I check in 14 days

  1. 14-day audit

    Read-only access to a sample of stale-candidate threads and recent placements. NDA available. Least-privilege; no credentials handed off on the call.

  2. Leak map

    Where revenue is leaking, how much (sized estimate), what can be fixed in one focused delivery.

  3. One fix shipped

    Picked from the top 1–2 fixes from the leak map, scoped to ship inside the same 14-day window.

  4. 30-day recovery experiment plan

    What to track after the fix is live so we can tell if it worked.

Founder note

I’m Gustavo Silva

I run Northbound Signal.

I’ve mapped manual revenue-leak workflows inside a 200+ person specialty professional-services firm: where follow-up fell through, where handoffs broke, and where the team needed a fix they could actually run.

Northbound Signal applies that same operational audit method to staffing: sourced candidates, recruiter follow-up, client updates, submissions, and reactivation. The paid pilot stays scoped to a small sample and a real pipeline: an honest leak map, one useful fix, then a clear decision on whether a bigger project is worth it.

What it costs

Step 1

Pilot

Placement Leak Audit

$2,000–$4,000

  • 14-day audit
  • Leak map
  • 1 fix shipped
  • 30-day recovery experiment plan

Step 2

Sprint

Implementation

$8,000–$15,000

  • Build the top 1–2 fixes
  • One focused module
  • 14-day delivery

Step 3 · optional

Retainer

Monitoring & iteration

$1,500–$3,500/mo

  • Monitoring
  • Ongoing improvements

Final scope and exact fee confirmed during the 30-minute audit call.

Questions I’d ask too

Will I need to change my workflows or migrate my ATS?

No to both. The audit reads what your team already does inside Bullhorn, Crelate, or Loxo and finds where revenue leaks around the existing workflow. Nothing gets ripped out or replaced.

What happens on the call, and how much time does it take?

30 minutes. We walk through your placement pipeline together, identify 2–3 leakage hypotheses, and decide if a paid audit is worth your time. No slides, no pitch deck.

What access do you need to my data?

For the audit: read access to a sampling of stale-candidate threads and recent placements. NDA available. No credentials shared on the call itself.

What’s the 14-day output, and what does “one fix shipped” mean?

You get a leak map (where revenue is leaking, how much, what can be fixed in one focused delivery), one fix delivered live, and a 30-day recovery experiment plan. “One fix” might be an automated stale-candidate reactivation sequence, a missed-follow-up alert when a recruiter goes quiet on a placement, a daily client-submission status digest, or a CRM-cleanup pass that re-surfaces buried opportunities — whichever has the highest dollar recovery for your specific pipeline.

How much team time does the audit need?

Roughly 60–90 minutes total: a 30-minute kickoff to walk us through your pipeline, an async 30-minute review of the leak map mid-audit, and a 30-minute readout at the end. Outside that we work async.

What if we just want the audit, not the sprint?

You keep the leak map and the experiment plan. Some firms ship the top fix themselves with the spec we deliver. The audit isn’t a tripwire for the sprint — there’s no auto-charge and no pressure on the readout call.

What if you don’t find meaningful leakage?

That itself is the answer. The audit fee is the cost of finding out, not a bet on a guaranteed outcome.

Want me to look at your placement pipeline?

30 minutes. We walk through it together and decide if a paid audit is worth your time.

Book a 30-minute audit call