One office is straightforward.
The second one changes every question you thought was settled.
Regions, offices and teams, with visibility you control.
Many offices, one system, with visibility you control.
Who sees which candidates, who owns which client, who hears about a signal. Structure is not a settings page, it is how the system is built.
A multi-office recruitment CRM has to answer three separate questions. What does someone do, which part of the business can they see, and what can they change. Signals keeps those three as independent dimensions rather than bundling them into a job title, so an agency can run six levels of structure across countries without giving everyone the same view of everyone else's desk.
Nothing about the first office prepares you for the second.
The client your Hong Kong team has worked for four years starts hiring in Singapore, and now two desks have a claim on it. A candidate sits on both teams' lists and neither team knows. Salary detail that is normal to share in one market is sensitive in another. A recruiter resigns and takes a client list with them, because the system let them see all of it.
None of these are reporting problems. They are questions about who can see what, and a system that treats that as a checkbox will get them wrong. One workspace covers how the record stays single. This page is about who is allowed to look at it.
The second office is where the architecture shows.
Six levels, because agencies actually have six.
Workspace
The business, and everything inside it.
Region
Where reporting rolls up, and where markets differ.
Country
Where the law changes, and with it what can be shared.
Office
Where a desk actually sits.
Team
Where a specialism lives, IT, banking, contract.
Member
A person, in a seat.
Most systems offer two levels and call it a hierarchy. Agencies that stop at two end up running the rest in spreadsheets.
Three dials, not one dropdown.
A recruiter in Singapore who covers the region is not a manager. A manager in Hong Kong who only sees Hong Kong is still a manager. If the only way to give someone wider visibility is to promote them, the system is making an organisational decision that belongs to you.
Role
What someone does. Recruiter, manager, finance, support.
Scope
Which part of the hierarchy they can see. One office, one country, a region, the workspace.
Authority
What they can change. Owner and admin, held separately from both of the above.
Arnold Palmer, Singapore.
The same person in all three lines below. Only the dial in void has moved.
Recruiter. Sees the whole region. No workspace authority.
Same role, wider scope. A recruiter who can see the whole region, without becoming a manager.
Manager. Sees one office. No workspace authority.
Same scope, different authority. A manager who runs one office and cannot change workspace settings.
Recruiter. Sees one office. Administers nothing.
Same role and scope, no authority. Someone who sees everything on their desk and administers none of it.
Three dials, moved independently. Not one dropdown that decides all three for you. What a manager sees when the dials are set is covered on the Manager view.
What you can see, and what reaches you.
These are two questions, not one. A recruiter in Singapore may have no business seeing salary detail on a Hong Kong candidate. That same recruiter should still know when a signal fires on a client both offices work. Signals keeps data visibility and signal reach as separate settings, so an agency can protect the record without cutting the network off from itself.
Collaboration is the reason to have more than one office. The system should not be the thing preventing it.
When someone resigns.
A person and a seat are not the same thing. When a recruiter leaves, the seat frees up for whoever takes the desk, and everything they did stays where it happened. Their placements still count toward the office. Their notes are still on the candidates. Their clients are still worked. The record does not develop a hole where a person used to be, and nobody spends a week reassigning things by hand. The desk record itself is described on Everything on a role.
Leavers move to an archived view. The desk keeps its memory.
Common questions
Yes. Scope is set per member, so a recruiter in one office can be given sight of their own office, their country, a region or the whole workspace. Sensitive fields such as salary detail follow the same structure, so what is normal to share in one market stays inside that market when it is not.
By not showing them everything in the first place. Scope limits what a recruiter can see and export to the part of the business they work in, and every client record keeps its own history of who worked it. When someone resigns their access ends, and the relationship stays documented in the system rather than in one person’s memory.
Only if you set it that way. Cross-office visibility is a scope decision, not a side effect of a job title. You can widen a recruiter’s scope to a region without promoting them, and you can keep two offices separate on the record while still letting signals reach both when they work the same client.
Everything stays where it happened. Placements still count toward the office, notes stay on the candidates, and clients keep their full history. The member moves to an archived view and the seat frees up for whoever takes the desk, so nobody spends a week reassigning records by hand.
Yes. A client can be worked by several offices with ownership recorded per role rather than per company, so a four year relationship in one market is not overwritten when another market starts hiring. Both desks see the activity that concerns them, and fees are attributed to the office that did the work.
Yes. Country sits in the hierarchy as its own level, because law, contract types and what can be shared change at that line. Fees, placements and billings are recorded in local currency and roll up through region to the workspace, so reporting reads the same way at every level.
On what a manager reads once the structure is set, see Manager view, and Signals for agencies for how this lands across a group.