For those of you who use a recruitment CRM/ATS with email campaigns, how does it handle replies?

I’m building a CRM/ATS and I’m currently working through how bulk email campaigns should behave compared with normal 1:1 emails/sequences.
For sequences, I already send emails through the recruiter’s connected Outlook/Gmail provider. That means the message is genuinely sent from their mailbox, appears in Sent Items, and replies naturally remain within the normal mailbox conversation.
We also monitor sending volumes at mailbox level and throttle/queue sequence emails in line with the provider’s API rate limits and mailbox sending limits, rather than simply firing every due sequence email at once.

That works well for sequences, where the number of emails being sent from an individual recruiter’s mailbox is relatively controlled.

The question is what to do with larger campaigns.
Microsoft 365 and Gmail aren’t really intended to be bulk email infrastructure, so for campaigns potentially going to hundreds or thousands of candidates I’m considering using something like AWS SES instead.

For example:
From: Sarah Jones [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])⁠
Reply-To: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

The organisation would verify its domain or provide SMTP credentials, so to the candidate the email still appears to come from Sarah at the agency. If they click Reply, their mail client would address the reply to Sarah’s normal email address and it would arrive in her Outlook/Gmail inbox.

The obvious difference is that the original campaign email wasn’t actually sent through Sarah’s mailbox, so it wouldn’t naturally appear in her Outlook/Gmail Sent Items and therefore the reply would appear without context if the sent message.

The CRM would retain the exact outbound campaign email against the candidate. Because their mailbox is also synced with the CRM, the candidate’s reply could then be associated with that outbound campaign message and displayed as part of the same conversation/activity history inside the CRM.

For people using systems such as Bullhorn, Vincere, JobAdder, Recruit CRM, Loxo, etc., I’d be interested to know how your current system handles this in practice.

- Does a campaign reply simply arrive in your normal Outlook/Gmail inbox as well as the CRM?

- Can you see the original campaign email in Outlook/Gmail, or only within the CRM?

- If you receive a reply and need context, do you generally open the candidate in the CRM to see the original email?

- Does your CRM somehow add bulk campaign emails to your Sent Items? Or are replies routed through the CRM itself rather than directly back to your mailbox?

My current thinking is essentially:

Sequences: connected Outlook/Gmail mailbox, with sending volumes monitored and throttled according to provider/API limits.

Campaigns: bulk delivery infrastructure such as SES, but still using the recruiter’s name/domain and directing replies back to their real mailbox.

I’m trying to work out whether the fact that campaign emails don’t appear in Outlook/Gmail Sent Items is actually an issue for recruiters in practice, or whether people naturally use the CRM conversation history for that context anyway.

I’m in the process of building a CRM/ATS aimed primarily at the UK recruitment market, at least initially. I already supply some software to a few UK recruitment companies, so it felt like a fairly natural direction to explore.

I’ve tried platforms such as Bullhorn, JobAdder, RecruitCRM etc. They obviously do a lot, but I’ve always felt that some of them are quite dated in places and, particularly when it comes to integrations, can feel overly modular. With some platforms, relatively straightforward functionality ends up requiring another product, another account, another implementation and another monthly bill.

I’ve been building mine for a little while now and I’m pretty happy with where it’s getting to. However, recruitment itself isn’t my day-to-day role, and none of the other software I currently supply is a traditional CRM/ATS, so I wanted to get some feedback from people who actually use these systems every day.
So far, I’ve covered things including:

Custom attributes across the main data objects: candidates, contacts, companies/leads, jobs, placements etc.

Configurable document management, including custom folder/file structures and document storage.

Customisable hiring pipelines, with reusable pipeline templates.

Tasks and reminders, including assigning tasks to other users.

Departments and teams, with configurable structures and permissions.

Sequences, allowing multistage outreach/workflows across channels such as email, SMS and internal tasks.

Automations, allowing actions to be triggered against candidates, contacts, jobs, placements and other records.

Email sync with Outlook and Gmail.

Two-way SMS and messaging.

In-app telephony, with a choice of VoIP providers for outbound and inbound calls.

I’ve also built the integration side more as a marketplace rather than forcing everyone down one particular route. At the moment this includes:

- Multiple VoIP/telephony providers
- SMS providers
- Outlook and Gmail
- Various AI meeting/note-taking platforms
- Data enrichment providers, alongside some native company-data enrichment
- Background screening, including digital ID and DBS checks
- Pay & bill/back-office software
- E-signature providers such as DocuSign

I have also built a number of AI driven features too that support with insights, reports, writing, analysis etc.

The intention isn’t necessarily to reinvent absolutely everything. It’s more to make the core CRM/ATS genuinely pleasant to use and cheaper to get going with, while making integrations feel like part of the product rather than something that requires a consultancy project every time you want to connect another service.

For those of you actually working in recruitment: what are the things your current CRM/ATS does badly, or things you constantly wish it could do?

I’m particularly interested in the small day-to-day frustrations that probably don’t make it onto a software company’s feature comparison page but make a big difference when you’re using the system for 8 hours a day.

Also interested in anything you think I’m obviously missing from the list above. I will eventually speak to some existing clients and get their feedback, but it would be nice to approach them with a solid first effort.

Thanks in advance for any advice/feedback/input offered👍