What to do when your CRM or phone system goes down mid campaign.

Part of our complete guide to IT support for recruitment firms.

The CRM goes down mid placement. A deal is moving, a candidate's about to sign, and the system locks up. This is the single most expensive failure a recruitment firm can have, because it stops the whole desk at once, not just one person's laptop.

Why this hits harder than any other outage

A broken laptop affects one consultant. A CRM or phone outage affects every billing consultant in the building simultaneously, at whatever moment it happens to fail. Every minute it's down is a minute every live placement in the pipeline is at risk.

In the moment: what to actually do

• Report it immediately, through whatever channel is fastest, rather than waiting to see if it resolves itself.
• If a placement is actively at risk, say so explicitly when you report it. That should change how urgently it's picked up.
• Fall back to phone or email for anything time sensitive while the system is down, rather than letting it sit.
• Keep a note of what was affected, so nothing falls through once the system is back.

What good coverage actually looks like

24/7 monitoring should catch most outages before your team even notices, with remote support aiming to resolve the rest within minutes rather than hours. If your current setup means you're the one discovering the outage and then waiting for a callback, that's a coverage gap worth addressing directly with your provider.

Reducing how often this happens

Most CRM and phone outages trace back to a small set of causes: an unpatched update, a connectivity fault, or a hosting issue on the software provider's side. Proactive monitoring catches the first two before they become an outage. The third is worth asking your CRM or ATS provider about directly, including what their own uptime commitment actually is.