Why we built LeadGrid as one API for two pipelines
Most growth teams run a CRM and an ATS for the same motion. Here's what collapses when you model sales and recruitment on one data model — and why we made it programmable by default.
Every growth team I've worked with runs the same motion twice. Sales has a CRM. Recruitment has an ATS. Same pipeline shape — intake, qualify, move, close — but on two stacks that don't talk.
We built LeadGrid because that split is a choice, not a constraint.
The data model is the same
A lead and a candidate are both people moving through stages. Give them a name, a stage, a deadline, an owner, a set of notes, and you've described both. The verbs are identical: create, assign, move, comment, close.
The industry built two product categories around this because it was profitable to do so, not because the underlying work is different. Teams ended up paying two vendors, integrating two APIs, training on two UIs, and reconciling two sources of truth — to track the same thing twice.
What collapses when you unify
Running one platform for both pipelines does three concrete things:
- Hand-offs stop dropping. Sales promises delivery. Recruitment finds the people who deliver. When both look at the same grid, escalations happen before the candidate walks away or the deal slips.
- Tooling cost halves. One workspace, one billing line, one permissions model. Sales and recruitment stop fighting over which tool is the source of truth — it's the same one.
- Reporting becomes honest. Time-to-hire and time-to-close live in the same database. You can finally answer "did we miss this deal because we didn't have the person?" without a spreadsheet.
API-first, not API-afterthought
The other deliberate choice: every action the UI does is a REST call. Create a dossier, move a stage, add a note, assign a member — all scriptable, all documented at /docs/api.
That sounds table-stakes, and it should be, but most CRMs hold their best features back for a higher tier, wrap the API in rate limits designed to push you into professional services, or refuse to document webhooks. We wanted the opposite: the API is the product, the UI is a convenient way to use it.
The practical consequence: your automations don't care whether something is a lead or a candidate. You write one integration once, and it works across both pipelines. Claude, n8n, Zapier, your own backend — same endpoint shape, same auth, same webhook schema.
Free forever on the free plan
One last thing. LeadGrid is free forever on the free plan — not a 14-day trial, not a limited-time promo. You can run a real team on it, ship real pipelines, and never pay us a cent. Paid plans unlock more seats, active dossiers, flows, and API throughput when you outgrow the free limits.
We'd rather have you on the platform building than watching a trial countdown.