How Baker Thornton runs clients and candidates from one HubSpot platform
A specialist accounting recruiter working across the UK, USA, and Canada needed one system to manage client firms and candidates simultaneously — without a separate ATS. Webcite.ai rebuilt HubSpot to do both.
HubSpot was in place — but nobody had built it for recruitment
Baker Thornton places audit, tax, and accounting professionals into accounting and CPA practices across the UK, USA, and Canada — working with Top 10–100 firms, regional practices, and niche tax and audit boutiques. As the business scaled internationally, they needed a single system to manage both sides of their operation: client firms on one side, candidates on the other.
HubSpot was already in place. But it had been set up as a basic contact database — not configured to handle the dual nature of specialist recruitment. The system wasn't the problem. The way it had been built was.
Client data, candidate profiles, and job mandates were fragmented
Information was spread across spreadsheets, inboxes, and disconnected tools. There was no single, reliable view of any live search, client relationship, or candidate journey — consultants had to piece together context from multiple places before every interaction.
HubSpot wasn't configured to handle clients and candidates simultaneously
The platform was being used mainly as a contact database. It had no structure to differentiate client firms from candidates, no recruitment-specific pipelines, and no way to link a candidate's journey to a live role and its hiring firm in one place.
Consultants were drowning in manual admin
Too much time was being spent manually updating records, searching through email threads, and patching together candidate journeys. Time that should have gone into relationship-building and filling roles was going into administration instead.
Leadership had no visibility across regions or practice areas
There were no dashboards showing live roles, pipeline stages, candidate progress, or key metrics like time-to-shortlist and time-to-fill. Across three international markets, leadership was operating on instinct rather than data.
HubSpot rebuilt as a purpose-built recruitment engine for accounting practices
Webcite.ai reconfigured HubSpot from the ground up to operate as a fully integrated CRM and ATS — tailored specifically to Baker Thornton's model of specialist accounting and CPA practice recruitment across three international markets. No additional platform was needed.
A structured data model was designed to clearly separate client firms, live roles, and candidates — each with practice-specific properties covering service line, seniority level, geography, and billable focus. Every live role was linked to its hiring firm, and every shortlisted candidate was linked to the role they were being considered for. For the first time, all three objects — firm, role, candidate — were connected in one place.
Two distinct pipelines were built — one mirroring real recruitment stages from Briefed through to Placed for live roles, and one tracking individual candidate progression from Screened through to Placed or Rejected. Both pipelines were designed to reflect how Baker Thornton's searches actually run, not a generic default. Consultants can now see at a glance exactly where every role and every candidate stands, across all three markets.
Key touchpoints were automated — candidate acknowledgements, interview reminders, and follow-up sequences — so that nothing falls through the gaps during busy hiring seasons. Task automation prompts consultants to review candidates, schedule calls, and advance roles at the right moment, without requiring manual tracking. The result is a consistent process across the team regardless of individual working styles.
Notes, emails, calls, and documents — including CVs and job specifications — are now logged and accessible directly on the relevant client, role, and candidate records. Consultants have a complete interaction history in one place before every call or meeting. No more searching through email threads or shared drives to reconstruct context.
Custom dashboards were built to give leadership real-time visibility into pipeline health, active mandates, candidate progress, consultant activity, and time-to-fill — broken down by region (UK, USA, Canada) and practice area. For the first time, Baker Thornton's leadership team can see the full picture of what is happening across the business, not just hear about it in weekly calls.
One platform. Two functions. Zero compromises.
By rebuilding HubSpot as an integrated CRM and ATS, Baker Thornton eliminated the need for a separate recruitment platform entirely — reducing tech costs, improving consistency, and giving the whole team a single source of truth across three international markets.
