Getting a recruitment agency out of FileMaker.

The situation

Everything the agency did ran through one FileMaker solution: more than 7,000 candidate records, over 700 client and agency companies, and all their live briefs. It cost around £1,500 a year to license, only worked on machines with FileMaker installed, and gave the client no real way to reach their own data.

It was also locked down at every level. The database files were encrypted at rest. The login the client had was heavily restricted, the usual export routes were turned off, and the only full-access credentials sat with the original developer. In practice the business’s own records were held hostage inside a proprietary format. Plenty of companies find this out only when they try to leave.

What we did

Chasing the original developer or paying for another year of licensing would have solved nothing, so instead we worked through every possible way of getting the data out. The live production server was treated as read-only the whole time, so nobody’s working day was disrupted.

The obvious routes were all dead ends. ODBC and JDBC, the FileMaker Data API, and reading the files directly were each blocked by the encryption and the privilege restrictions. We found a way through the application layer instead and recovered the core business data: every candidate, every company and every brief, with the relationships between records still intact.

From there the data was cleaned up, restructured, and loaded into PostgreSQL, an open-source database with no licensing fees and nothing tying the client to a single vendor.

What they got

On top of the recovered database we built a browser-based application the team can use from any device, with nothing to install. It went well past a straight copy of the old system:

• Instant search across every candidate and company at once
• A “My Desk” view per consultant, showing their own candidates, briefs and clients
• A management dashboard with candidate leaderboards, status breakdowns and revenue by consultant
• CV upload and storage attached straight to each candidate record
• Task tracking and placement recording, with running fee totals
• A secure login for every consultant, and an admin console for managing the team

Where it left them

The core migration and a working application were delivered inside a few days. The agency now owns its data outright in an open format, pays nothing to license its database, and runs on a system that can grow with the business instead of one frozen in place by a developer who left.

If this sounds familiar

If your business runs on an ageing FileMaker, Access or similar database, especially one built by someone who is no longer around, your data is almost always recoverable even when it looks locked away. And building a replacement can cost less than carrying on paying to license the old one.