Staffing firms run both sides of every hour

A staffing or recruiting firm sells services to clients while managing a workforce of contractors, temps, or placed employees. That two-sided relationship creates operational demands most business software wasn't built for.

You need a CRM for client relationships and open requirements. Contracts covering placement agreements, rate confirmations, and engagement terms. Time tracking for placed workers. And invoicing that runs two ways: billing the client for the hours, and paying the contractor their share of the same hours.

One thing up front: Nymble is not an applicant tracking system. It doesn't parse résumés, post jobs, or run candidate pipelines. What it does is the operations side once a placement exists: contract, timesheet, client invoice, contractor payable, margin. If you run high-volume recruiting, you'll keep an ATS. If you're a five-to-fifty-person firm whose real pain is the timesheet-to-two-invoices chain, read on.

We make Nymble. Competitor prices are from vendor pricing pages in September 2026. An earlier version of this post claimed a two-way HubSpot sync and quoted a Workamajig price that was wrong. Both are fixed.

What staffing firms need

Dual invoicing from one timesheet

This is the feature that separates staffing-ready platforms from the rest. You bill a client $150 an hour for a contractor you pay $95 an hour. The platform should produce the receivable to the client and the payable to the contractor from the same time entries, with the margin visible per placement.

If your setup means exporting timesheets to build invoices in a separate tool, you're introducing transcription errors on both invoices, and the errors on the payable side are the ones that damage contractor relationships.

In Nymble, each contractor has a payable rate on their workspace membership and each contract has its billable rates. The same hours generate both invoices. Contractors submit their own payable invoices for the period, and you approve them and mark them paid.

A weighted pipeline

Staffing sales are relationship-driven with long cycles, and one client can mean several open requirements at different stages. Track opportunities with a probability per stage, notes on competing firms, and a weighted forecast. The weighted value, rather than the total, is what separates firms that forecast accurately from the ones that are constantly surprised. Sales teams tracking pipeline in a spreadsheet tend to inflate it, because there's nothing making them assign a probability.

Contracts for each engagement type

Temporary placement, contract-to-hire, direct placement, managed services. The platform should hold time-and-materials, fixed-fee, and retainer contracts natively, with performance against budget visible while the engagement runs.

E-signature is not optional. Every placement involves paperwork: engagement letters, NDAs, contractor agreements, rate confirmations. If you're printing, signing, and scanning, that's hours a week.

Time tracking with attestation

Placed workers log time, someone approves it, approved time becomes both invoices. That chain has to be frictionless. Weekly attestation (the worker confirming the timesheet is accurate) is what makes the hours defensible when a client queries an invoice. Availability surveying helps too: knowing which contractors are free next week means faster responses to client requests.

Skills and scoring

Your talent pool is your product. A skills inventory with certifications, competencies, experience, and ratings makes matching faster. When a client asks for a senior DevOps engineer with AWS and Kubernetes, searching the pool by skill and availability should take seconds. In Nymble, skills and scoring are on the Pro plan.

Permissions that keep rates private

Staffing firms hold sensitive numbers: contractor rates, client bill rates, margins. A contractor must not see what you bill the client. A client must not see what you pay the contractor. Role-based access isn't fine-grained enough for that. You need policy-level control, which in Nymble means 46 permission policies assembled into custom roles on the Pro plan.

How the platforms compare

Prices are per user per month, entry plan, monthly billing. Bullhorn doesn't publish pricing.

	Nymble	Bonsai	Workamajig	Bullhorn
Entry price	$29 (Core)	$15 (Basic), $25 with contracts and invoicing	$49 at 10+ seats	Quoted
Applicant tracking	No	No	No	Yes, core product
Weighted pipeline	Yes, with HubSpot import	Basic CRM	Sales CRM	Yes, staffing-specific
Dual invoicing from the same hours	Yes	Receivables only	Via accounting module	Yes
T&M, fixed, retainer contracts	Yes, with earned value	Fixed and recurring	Estimates and budgets	Yes
Timesheets with attestation	Yes	Manual timer	Yes	Yes
Skills inventory and scoring	Pro plan	No	No	Yes
Availability surveying	Yes	No	No	Limited
E-signature	All plans	Essentials and up	No	No
Automation	Triggers, conditions, actions (Pro plan)	Basic	Approvals and routing	Basic
Custom roles	46 policies (Pro plan)	Role-based	Role-based	Role-based

The cost of the disconnected stack

A typical small staffing firm might be paying for a CRM, an ATS, a time tracker, an invoicing tool, an e-signature service, and a project tool. The subscription total is one cost. The bigger one is the handoffs: every manual step between systems is a chance for a rate to be wrong on an invoice, and those get noticed.

A single operations platform won't replace the ATS for high-volume recruiting. For firms in the five-to-fifty range that handle their own placements, consolidating CRM, contracts, time, and both invoice directions removes the biggest bottleneck, and the ATS stays for what it's good at.

What to test in a trial

The invoicing chain, end to end. Enter a contractor's time on a client engagement. Generate the client invoice and the contractor payable from that data. Count the clicks.

CRM depth. Several opportunities per client? Weighted totals? Import from HubSpot (Nymble imports, it doesn't sync back)?

Permissions. Log in as a contractor and confirm the bill rate is invisible. That test takes two minutes and it's the one that matters.

Automation. New contractor onboarding is the same steps every time: agreement, profile, timesheet access, client notification. A record-triggered automation that creates the tasks and posts the Slack message removes the missed step.

Nymble's 14-day trial needs no card. Run one real placement through it, both invoices included. The PSA software post covers the wider category, and the pricing page has the plan details.

Operations Software for Small Staffing and Recruiting Firms