The brief lives in one person's head.

Then they go on leave.

So the role keeps the brief, not the recruiter.

Everything on a role, so it does not depend on who took the call.

Why a role needs its own memory

The requirements, the history, the rules nobody wrote down, and the questions still open. All of it on the record, with its source.

What a job brief should carry

A recruitment job brief should carry the requirements, the reasons behind them, the client's process, the commercial terms and the things that would rule a candidate out. In Signals every line on a role carries the call, email or document it came from, so any recruiter can pick up the role and see not just what the client asked for but when and why.

The handover

It is Monday. A live role lands on your desk from a recruiter who left three weeks ago, or who is on leave until the end of the month. The record has a title, a salary band, a job description attached and eleven candidates in various states, sitting in the same one workspace as everything else you own.

Everything that actually matters was said on a call six weeks ago. What the client really means by senior. Which candidate they rejected in the first round, and the reason they gave. The CV format they insist on. The one thing that gets a submission thrown out before anyone reads it.

None of it was ever written down, because writing it down was somebody's admin task, and admin tasks lose to billing. So you call the client and ask them to repeat themselves, or you work the role blind and hope.

Recruiter turnover in this market is high and desks change hands constantly. Every agency has lost a live role this way, and every recruiter has inherited one.

A role should hold its own memory.

Where every line came from

Payments, fintech or financial infrastructure background.

  • Intake call with Jenny Koh, 12 June.
  • Job description, uploaded 10 June.
  • Follow-up call with David Park, 14 June.

Nobody typed any of this in. The requirement is on the role because the conversation happened.

Capture is the architecture, not a feature, see AI-native.

The things you only learn by getting them wrong.

Every account has rules that live nowhere. Upload the CV to their portal before you email it. Always state right to work. Use their template, not yours. Never approach anyone in their Sydney office. A new recruiter learns these one embarrassment at a time, usually in front of the client.

Signals extracts them from the emails, messages and calls that already happened, and puts them on the account.

  • Account rules, extracted from what was already said.
  • Dealbreakers, separated from nice to haves.
  • Culture fit, with the signals it was read from.

The questions still open.

A live role always has gaps. Who signs off the offer. Whether they will look at a candidate on a visa. What happens if the preferred candidate wants four weeks notice rather than two. Signals keeps the open questions on the role instead of letting them sit unasked, so whoever speaks to the client next opens the call already knowing what to ask.

The same role, seen three ways.

A recruiter needs the commercials and the history, the fee, the rejections, the rules. A candidate needs the story, the process and why the role exists. A client needs the shortlist and where each person has got to.

One record, filtered by who is looking, so nothing internal travels by accident. The same applies to the candidate and company profiles in one workspace.

Fees, budget and internal notes are excluded automatically, not by remembering to delete them.

Common questions

At minimum, six things. The role and its reporting line, the salary or rate range and how far it flexes, the requirements with the reasons behind them, the interview process and who signs off, the dealbreakers that rule a candidate out, and the format the client wants submissions in. A brief that lists requirements without reasons can only be worked by the person who took the call.

Ask why now, first. Why the role exists, what happened to the last person in it, what separates a strong candidate from an adequate one, who has been rejected already and the reason given, who signs off the offer, and what would get a submission thrown out. Then ask how fast the process actually moves. In Signals those answers land on the role with the call they came from.

Written handovers rarely survive. The next recruiter needs the requirements, the reasons, the rejections, the client's process and the open questions, not a title and a job description. The practical answer is to stop treating handover as a document written at the end and keep it on the record throughout. In Signals the role already holds its history, so a handover is a change of owner rather than a rebuild.

A dealbreaker ends the submission. It is the condition the client will not move on, right to work, a licence, a sector background, a location. A nice to have improves a candidate's chances and nothing more. Clients rarely label them, they say both in the same sentence on the same call. Signals separates the two on the role, so the next recruiter can see what is genuinely non negotiable.

No, they cannot. Fees, budget, margin and internal notes are internal fields and are excluded from anything that leaves the business. The candidate view carries the story of the role, the process and the timeline. The client view carries the shortlist and progress. It is one record filtered by who is looking, so nothing internal travels by accident.

Yes, all three. Contract roles carry rate, margin, timesheets and extension detail. Executive search carries the longer process, the stakeholder map and the confidentiality rules. Permanent carries notice periods and offer detail. The record is the same shape in each case, the fields and the open questions differ by role type, so an independent agency running all three works them on one desk.