First submission wins
Ownership attaches at duplicate-check time, to whoever got there first. There is no queue to appeal to and no discretion to lobby.
CheckedIn · ownership and fees
Two agencies. One candidate. One of them is about to argue.
Every company hiring through more than one partner has this argument eventually, and it is always about money. Here is exactly what happens, day by day.
Day 0, 09:14
Acme Staffing submits Arjun M. to the Backend Engineer role
Ownership attaches at duplicate-check time, to whoever got there first. The server stamps the time, not Acme, because submission order decides money.
Owns · until 12 Oct Day 0, 11:47
Bright Path submits the same person to the same role
Told plainly: owned by Acme Staffing until 12 October. Not a silent rejection. They decide today whether to spend more hours here.
Second · sees the reason Day 12
A bulk re-import runs, and nothing moves
No re-import, bulk action, re-score or admin shortcut can reassign it inside the window. Enforced in the core, so bypassing the interface does not bypass the rule.
Window holds Day 38
Arjun accepts, then joins
Joining is what the money waits for. An acceptance that never became a joining raises nothing, because a 90-day notice and an offer drop are the normal case here.
Placement Day 38
The invoice reads the ownership record, not the paperwork
Calculated from who owned the candidate, at the version of Acme's terms in force then. Renegotiating next quarter does not change this placement.
Fee to Acme Day 61
Bright Path disputes the fee
You produce the submission-order history: who submitted, when by the server clock, who won, until when. A log in order rather than a field that was overwritten.
Evidence, both ways Fig 1
Illustrative timeline. Dates and names are examples; every behaviour shown is how the
product works, including that the second submitter is told the position rather than silently
rejected.
Fig 2 The company view. Every submission carries its ownership position, so the answer to who gets paid is on the row rather than in somebody’s inbox.
Definition
Candidate ownership is which agency holds the right to a fee on a candidate, decided once at the first submission and sticky for the window in your fee agreement. Ninety days is common, but it is whatever the MOU says. This is not a Right to Represent: an RTR is a candidate-signed US document authorising one agency to present them to one named client. Ownership here is the client's own attribution record, which is a different instrument doing a different job.
The rules, exactly
Five of them, and none has an exception for convenience.
The server stamps the time
Not the submitter. Agencies have an obvious financial reason to want to control that timestamp, so they do not get to.
Nothing automatic reassigns it inside the window
No re-import, no bulk action, no re-scoring, no admin shortcut. A transfer after the window expires is explicit and recorded, never silent.
Someone you already knew about is not a placement
If the candidate was already in your database from a non-agency source they are flagged in-house, and no agency gets ownership or a fee.
Fee terms are versioned
The invoice uses the version of the terms in force when the placement happened. Renegotiating next quarter does not retroactively change what you owe on this one.
The history is a log, not a field
Ownership is not a value that gets overwritten as the situation changes. It is an append-only record of what happened, in order, which is exactly what makes it usable in a dispute.
If you run the desk
Where an agency's margin actually goes, in order.
Ranked by how much it hurts. Two of these CheckedIn addresses directly, one it helps with, one it does not solve.
01
A duplicate submission that loses the fee
You sourced, screened and submitted. Someone got there three days earlier. Not a thin margin, a total loss on work already paid for.
02
Wasted submissions
They cost recruiter hours and quietly downgrade your standing on the panel, which costs you next quarter's mandates. Score before you submit and the ratio moves.
03
Back-outs and DOJ no-shows
No joining, no invoice, after six to ten weeks of work. CheckedIn does not prevent this. One chase task at five days, one confirm-joined task at the start date. Prompting, not retention.
04
Fee erosion at renewal
Clients push 8.33% down, or split a role across eight agencies so nobody invests. A per-client scorecard changes that conversation: submissions, pass rate, submission-to-placement, TAT.
The arithmetic of a desk
A recruiter's month is a fixed cost. Their output is submissions.
Which is why submission quality is not a soft metric. Every submission that never reaches an interview is money already spent with nothing against it.
◆
Cost per submittal
Loaded recruiter cost divided by submissions in the period.
◆
Cost per interview
Cost per submittal divided by your submission-to-interview ratio. This is the number that actually moves.
Worked example
Loaded recruiter cost₹45,000 / month
Submissions in the month30
Cost per submittal₹1,500
At 1 interview per 10 submissions₹15,000 per interview
At 1 interview per 4 submissions₹6,000 per interview
Same recruiter, same salary, no new headcount. The only thing that changed is which eight profiles went out instead of which thirty.
Illustrative figures. Substitute your own loaded cost and ratio.
Both sides of the same record
The honest framing: unarguable in both directions.
We will not tell an agency we protect them: the client configures the window and the client's system holds the record. What is true is more useful than that.
If you are the agency
You can see where you stand before you spend the hours
You are told immediately if someone already owns this candidate, and until when. Your own submissions, ownership positions and invoices are visible to you. You never see another agency's anything, and they never see yours. That is scoping, not filtering. Honest limit: ownership starts at submission, not while you are still screening. Screening slowly is still a commercial risk. If the client revokes your access the feed stops, but you keep the candidates you sourced. The work was done.
If you are the company
You pay once, to the partner who was genuinely first
The payable reads the ownership record, not whoever filed the most recent paperwork. Empanelment is explicit: a partner you approve, then access granted to specific roles rather than everything by default. Revoking access is recorded, so “we never gave them that role” becomes an answerable question. A rejection needs a reason, and an agency-sourced rejection needs feedback for that agency, so your partners actually learn what you want. Every agency's scorecard is yours to see at renewal: submitted, pass rate, submission-to-hire, time to fill.
Before you ask in the demo
What the invoicing side does not do.
You might expectRealityWhat you do instead
GST, TDS and e-invoicing Not computed anywhere in the product. It raises the fee invoice against versioned terms and tracks its state. Your accounting stays where it is.
Credit notes Not a concept the product has. Invoice states cover ready to raise, awaiting approval, due, overdue and disputed. A replacement case is handled as a dispute.
Contract staffing economics No timesheets, bill and pay rates, payroll or margin tracking. Fee terms here are placement-fee-on-joining shaped. If contract is most of your book, this covers sourcing to placement, not the billing engine.
Chasing an unpaid invoice No dunning sequences. Overdue invoices are flagged and routed as tasks, and a report lists what is due. The phone call is still yours.
Ownership
Ask us to produce the submission history for a disputed fee.
It is a two-minute demo and it is the one thing an email thread can never do. Bring the messiest duplicate argument you have had this year.