IT support for London recruitment firms: everything you need to know.

Written for owners and ops managers at independent recruitment firms with no in house IT team.

Most guides to IT support are written for general offices. Recruitment is not a general office. You run on a CRM your whole team is logged into all day, your consultants change laptops and logins more often than most businesses, and the data sitting in your ATS is the thing a candidate or a client would be most upset to see mishandled. This guide covers what actually matters for a firm like yours.

What IT support actually needs to cover for a recruitment firm

Strip away the jargon and IT support for a recruitment firm comes down to three things: keeping the CRM and phones running during the hours you bill against, controlling who has access to candidate and client data as people join and leave, and having someone to call when hardware fails on the morning of an interview.

A generalist IT provider will happily support any of these in isolation. What tends to be missing is the recruitment specific judgement: understanding that a CRM outage during a live placement is a revenue event, not just a ticket, and that staff turnover in this sector means access control has to be routine, not an afterthought.

What it costs

UK managed IT support generally runs from around £30 to £150 per user per month, depending on what is included. The wide range exists because "IT support" means very different things from one provider to the next: some quotes are remote helpdesk only, others bundle 24/7 monitoring, onsite dispatch, and security baseline work into the same fee.

For a firm this size, the more useful question is not the headline number but what it buys. We've broken the full pricing down, including what a 20 person team should expect to pay, in a separate guide.

What to check before you sign with anyone

Whoever you choose, the same six questions apply: do they understand recruitment specifically, is pricing published or hidden behind a call, what's the contract commitment, do they cover onsite as well as remote, how do they handle access and data security, and do they actually know London.

The moments that actually matter

Beyond the buying decision, there are five recurring situations that decide whether your IT support is doing its job. Each one gets its own guide below, but here's the short version of each.

Onboarding a new consultant

A new starter who can't log into the CRM on day one is losing billable time before they've made a single call. Provisioning should be a checklist, not a scramble.

A consultant leaving

Recruitment has some of the highest staff turnover of any sector, and every departure is a window where old access sits open on systems full of candidate and client data.

Support quietly getting worse

Most firms don't switch provider because of one bad incident. They switch because the small signs stack up: slower replies, the same issue recurring, nobody able to explain what's actually being monitored.

Data security and GDPR

An ATS full of candidate CVs, contact details, and sometimes salary history is personal data under UK GDPR, whether or not anyone in the firm thinks of it that way.

The CRM or phones going down mid campaign

This is the single most expensive failure mode for a recruitment firm, because it stops the whole desk at once, not just one person.