Between the handshake and the payslip

Every label, its own voice

A label is more than a logo. It is its own pitch, its own circle of clients, its own tone in an email to a candidate. The labels wanted to keep that, and rightly so. At the same time the group wants one view of candidates, placements and margins. And a candidate known to one label today may be a better fit for another label tomorrow.

That was the first tension. Every label wanted to feel at home. The group wanted one foundation.

Every country, its own rulebook

Then there is the border. Placing people across borders means playing by different rules in each country. And what differs per country is exactly what makes a placement lawful:

• The Netherlands: terms equivalent to the hirer's own staff under the agency collective agreement (a full package since 2026), enforcement of the rules on freelance contracting (Wet DBA), and the Wtta licensing regime for staffing providers, in force from 1 January 2027 and enforced from 1 January 2028.
• Other EU countries: their own licensing or recognition rules for staffing providers, sometimes a maximum term with the same hirer, their own equal-pay rules and requirements for a written contract per assignment.

On top of that, licences and recognitions belong to legal entities, not to brands. The label's name is on the contract, but every contract and every invoice has to point to the employer that legally stands behind it. Link the wrong entity and the paperwork no longer holds, however good the placement is.

Month end: the payroll run

Fast forward to the end of the month. In payroll, the run is ready to go. Line after line: a rate, a pay component, an employer. This is where you find out whether Friday afternoon was recorded properly.

In staffing, margin is the gap between what an hour earns and what it costs. Across the industry, a wrong hourly rate often surfaces weeks later as a credit note or a payroll correction. By then the consultant is long busy with the next placement.

And the cost of an hour is more than the hourly wage. In the Netherlands it includes reserves for holiday allowance (at least 8 percent), paid leave and public holidays, plus employer contributions and pension. That differs per collective agreement, per country and per year. On the invoice side, large clients expect a purchase order number, the right VAT treatment and, in the Netherlands, often part of the amount paid into a blocked G-account. Get one detail wrong and the invoice comes back and payment slips.

The lesson is simple and strict: record every rate once, then use it the same way everywhere.

Two roads, both dead ends

Every label works differently: other contract types, other approval limits, other templates, sometimes another language. Off-the-shelf software then forces a choice. Put every label into the same mould, and nobody recognises their own work any more. Or give each label its own package with its own links to payroll and invoicing, and the group loses the overview.

Neither suits a group where every label sets its own course. There had to be a third road.

The turning point: one core, a custom layer per label

That third road starts with two axes: label and country. Access, email and document templates, portals, margin calculation and approval rules all hang off that combination.

Underneath sits a core that is the same across the group: candidates, clients, placements and legal entities. Everything above it we built to fit each label. So a consultant across the border works with their own label's templates and margin rules, while finance sees the whole group. The label keeps its voice. The group gets its foundation.

Front office: the ATS implementation on Salesforce

We implemented the ATS on Salesforce for every label. This is where the consultant's Friday afternoon begins. Among other things, she can:

• create companies from Dutch Chamber of Commerce data and manage contacts, with email and meetings logged automatically
• drop a CV into a form that fills itself in, with a duplicate check across all labels
• search on skills, talent pools and distance
• move candidates through a fixed pipeline, from shortlist to ready to start
• put a candidate forward with a branded CV, a margin calculation and a short pitch in a single email
• publish vacancies on the label websites and on job boards

If another label already knows the candidate, the consultant requests access. That way there is one profile per person, with clear agreements between the labels.

Mid office: from yes to ready to start

The mid office is where most of the custom work sits, and most of the tension. This is where Friday's yes becomes an assignment that holds up legally and financially. For each label we built the steps between the handshake and the first working day:

• Margin calculator per country: cost price, margin in euros and percent, the rate needed for each margin tier and, for the Netherlands, the uplift for equal pay with the hirer's staff.
• Tiered margin approval: a matrix per label and contract type decides who signs off a placement below target.
• Contracts and letters: generated from templates in the recipient's language and sent straight to e-signature.
• Compliance per placement: document types with approval and expiry dates, ID verification and onboarding checklists that update themselves.
• Changes with a fixed route: edits to contract-critical data go to sales for review first, then to legal. Extensions, offboarding and bulk pay and rate increases follow set steps too.

Rates and wages are stored per type of work with an effective date. A rate is recorded once and used the same way everywhere after that. Anyone looking back can see exactly which rate and which contract applied on a given day.

Back office: the right employer, the right numbers

Every placement is tied to a legal employer with its own company code in the ERP system. The platform sends placements, rates and contacts to the ERP system for payroll and invoicing. Every night the payroll and billing data flows back, so by morning the platform shows what has been paid and invoiced.

The people behind the scenes have work queues for payroll, billing, credit control, compliance and legal, mid office and HR. Anything that needs attention is there for the whole team to pick up. Nobody has to wait for someone else to remember.

Portals in each label's branding

Candidates and clients have their own portal in the label's branding. Professionals on assignment also use the candidate portal for their own admin. The portal copy is multilingual, so candidates and clients work in their own language. The portals are not a bolt-on: they are part of the same platform and read from the same core.

How we worked

Qantara is one founder working with trusted developers and specialists. The custom layer for each label follows how a placement actually runs at that label. We didn't impose a standard process. Each label keeps its own way of working, on one shared core.

Friday, half past four, again

Back to the empty office. The phone, the number she knows, the yes she waited all week for. The consultant records the placement. From there, the rest follows a set route.

The platform calculates the margin and, where needed, puts it in front of whoever decides. The contract comes out of her label's template, in the candidate's language, and goes out for signature. The documents run through the checklist. In payroll, the placement arrives with the right employer and the right rate.

She closes her laptop. The rest of the chain knows what to do.

Monday morning, in another country

A label manager in another country opens the same platform. She sees her own label's templates, the margin rules that belong to her country and a candidate portal in her candidates' language. She mostly notices the group when it helps: a candidate another label already knows, a colleague in finance looking at the same numbers.

One platform for the whole group, and still it feels like hers. That was the brief. And the group has one source for placements, rates and margins.

The platform in numbers

This is the scale of the platform the group runs on, in rounded figures:

• every label in the group, with offices in several European countries
• internal users in many roles, from sales to payroll
• several legal employers, each with its own company code in the ERP system
• dozens of teams across the offices
• more than 500 automations and guided screens
• more than 100 business rules that check a placement is complete and correct before it moves on
• hundreds of email and document templates, per label and per language
• more than 10 integrations, including the ERP system, email and calendar, the label websites, job boards, e-signature, ID verification and the Dutch Chamber of Commerce register
• the candidate and placement history of every label on the same platform

What we take from it

This project showed how much work sits between recruitment and invoice, and how little of it fits a standard ATS. That knowledge goes into everything we build for the industry, including Qantara Recruit, our own ATS and CRM for staffing agencies.

A placement starts with a phone call on a Friday afternoon. It is only done when the payslip and the invoice are right. Everything in between is our craft.