Tackling the Challenges of Temp Recruitment with Panther Software

The problem with recruitment software is that it rarely addresses the challenge of the temp workforce, temp agencies and their clients. The ONS Labour Force Survey counts 1.6 million temporary workers in the UK. HSE UK reports that 14% of the workforce—approximately 3.6 million people—performs shift work regularly.

This workforce operates across critical industries, including healthcare, education, hospitality, plant, and construction. Each industry presents challenges in managing and paying those workers.

Ashling Coyle, Founder and CEO of Panther Software, aimed to address this challenge after failing to find a suitable solution for her own business. The software is now the operating system of many agencies servicing those sectors across the UK. These include Coyle, Mayday Healthcare, Jubilee Talent and Carestaff Solutions and McGinley.

Enterprise Times spoke with Coyle about the company and her ambition for the future. Currently, Panther targets the larger agencies with 1,000s of workers. While the platform works for smaller agencies, its complexity often exceeds their limited needs. However, as they scale, Panther Software has developed a solution specific to their industries and temp recruitment rather than a generic recruitment solution.

The Panther platform

The platform has already filled over 40 million shifts, totalling hundreds of millions of hours. It holds over 300,000 candidate records across over 100,000 locations in the UK, within multiple industries. Compliance is a critical part of the solution, and the platform already holds over 1.7 million compliance documents.

The firm maintains a retention rate above 90%, while sales and growth accelerate. The firm employs 16 people who work mainly remotely, meet frequently in the City of London, and operate a team in South Africa.

I asked Coyle if there is an untapped sector she hasn’t entered yet. She said, “That’s a really interesting question. We started with the sectors we already supplied through the family recruitment group, since we knew them inside out, and that felt like the right place to focus, in the UK first and then internationally. But if a real need came up elsewhere, we’d be very happy to look into what the software would need to support it.”

Origins

Coyle grew up around recruitment. Her father started a recruitment agency in 1988 within construction. Coyle first qualified as an accountant before joining the family business. She later built her own agency, AMC Healthcare.

Here, she identified the core problem. She explained, “I found it impossible to scale. We kept making mistakes with paper application packs, paper timesheets, incorrect payments to candidates, and clients getting annoyed at invoices with the wrong job code on them.”

She searched the market for software to meet her needs, but found only permanent-focused solutions. She decided to build the software herself in 2017.

Initially, the software was used internally, across multiple sectors the group worked within. However, once proven, she realised that there was a market for it: a system built for temp recruitment agencies by people who have built and run one. Around five years after they started the build, they brought on a few clients. They have added more key features over the last few years, and the company is poised to scale.

Why Panther exists

Temporary workers play a significant role in the UK economy. Both as a source of labour, flexibility for employers and as an employment option for millions of people.

Coyle explained her goal: support recruitment agencies to create safer workplaces and cut costs. Panther aims to stay ahead of all legislation and compliance requirements. She cited the increasing requirement for IR35 risk assessments as a key example.

She also explained that one hospital might have 30 compliance documents required; another may need 15 of the same, as well as another, different 15. Managing shift work is also more complex. It is not simply about being available on a specific day; it might be a shift from 10 pm to 2 am, and then another shift from 5 pm to 10 pm. Each shift may have different compliance requirements!

It’s easy to talk about the what and the how. Simon Sinek argues that great leaders in organisations inspire actions by focusing on their purpose, cause, or belief. What is your why?

“For me, the why was that I couldn’t scale my agency without software. There was always something going wrong in one department: I’d put a paper process in place, and another mistake would happen anyway. I couldn’t get anywhere without automation and control.”

On the Mission

The Panther mission is to revolutionise the recruitment process by empowering agencies with advanced, user-friendly technology that enhances efficiency, ensures compliance, and drives profitability. Panther is dedicated to eliminating manual tasks and enabling recruiters to deliver superior service to clients and candidates. What drives that mission statement?

Coyle replied, “We aim to truly support the UK’s temporary workforce and deliver a better service at a lower cost. Making sure workers get paid on time matters enormously, because many live week to week. When I ran a recruitment agency, paying workers weekly was the number one priority: without that money, they couldn’t get through the next week, and if they aren’t paid, they simply leave for another agency.”

On funding

The family recruitment group originally funded Panther, as it planned to use the software internally. The company is now self-sufficient. Profits are reinvested back into the business. Coyle currently does not need funding but did not rule out the possibility in the future.

Panther already has several international clients. It supports a healthcare agency in South Africa, construction clients in Canada and an operation in the Republic of Ireland. However, expansion remains slow as Coyle maps opportunities and compliance issues before launching.

She explained that before COVID there were few temps in the US. The post-COVID landscape is different, making the US a market she may explore. There do not appear to be any plans to push aggressively in any foreign markets specifically. It is clear, however, that the platform is capable of supporting multiple countries. Expansion in the US might be a reason to get funding and accelerate growth in that region.

In the future

Looking forward to 2027, Coyle aims to stay on top of the imminent legislation for all industries. This includes the Employment Rights Act, which will come into force on January 1^st 2027. She believes change on unfair dismissal claims (reduced from two years to six months) will trigger an increase in temp workers.

In addition, where zero-hour contract workers must be offered guaranteed work will need close monitoring. It means that if an employer commits to giving work to a temp, then they have to be paid even if the work is withdrawn. After these changes, Coyle intends to increase investment in AI and automation within the product.

Coyle envisions a future where a manager learns late at night that a worker is sick and cannot work the next morning. She hopes managers can enter the requirement on the platform and fill the shift by morning, with an available candidate and compliance documented. It would eliminate many of the phone calls they have to do currently.

What’s next for Ashling Coyle? She replied, “Panther, for now. It’s my baby, and I want to see it grow. I want to be part of the journey; we’re at a really exciting stage.”

How Panther will change the market

Looking further ahead, how do you see Panther helping these industries to change?

“No more paper, definitely. Many temp recruitment agencies are still on paper because there aren’t many systems that really work for temp, so spreadsheets and paper end up being the safer option. Centralised, automated compliance for these industries would make a real difference: lower costs, faster and safer shift-filling, and a better experience all round. For workers, the nurses and teachers doing the shifts, that means always being paid on time, maybe even same-day payment on request. For the end client, the hospitals and schools, it means a better experience too.”

On Challenges

What are your key business challenges for the next 12 months?

“I have a fantastic team at Panther. Balancing development for legislation changes against client custom requests remains a challenge. And as we grow as a business, making sure our support stays second to none, including our round-the-clock support, is a real focus.”

What keeps you awake at night at the moment?

“It used to be that we had gaps in the product. Now, it’s more likely to be people not knowing about us and losing an opportunity as a result; that’s probably my biggest worry. It’s genuinely quite hard to explain what Panther does to everybody, because there isn’t much you can directly compare it to.”

Other vendors have faced this same branding issue. Coyle is having to educate the market about not just the software but also what makes temp recruitment software different from generic recruitment software. Of which there are several legacy systems in existence.

On Product

Coyle remains confident in the platform, which now includes most key features, though some gaps remain. I asked whether there was a means for employees to retain their records between employers. She identified this as another problem she aims to solve. She cited the security industry as an example, which has a central registry. She intends to explore the idea of having a central hub for other sectors such as education or healthcare.

Another roadmap element is a rating system for both workers and the end client. The platform does have some customised areas, for instance, favourite locations, such as a School/Hospital/ or even a department/ward. The platform also understands time slot preferences; for each, it will track a candidate’s availability.

I asked Coyle what differentiates Panther from competitors. She replied, “Industry knowledge. We hear back from our clients and the recruitment group about any changes immediately, and we move fast, there’s a real passion for it. It’s built by people who worked in temp recruitment themselves. And then there’s the 24/7 support: temp is a round-the-clock industry with shift work through the night, so the software can’t go down for a second. We take monitoring and support extremely seriously, and that’s key too.”

What about the AI strategy?

On AI, Coyle said, “You’ve got to take it back to basics a bit. You can’t build automation and AI workflows on top of paper, so people need a system first, and that’s where Panther will always matter: getting the data recorded, so it becomes your source of truth, before you can automate workflows to predict issues ahead of time. We already do a lot of that in Panther, giving recruiters more information at their fingertips, and there’s plenty more automation using AI already in the system.”

With regards to Agentic, Panther is adding a compliance agent, a timesheet and an agent to access its extensive knowledge base. With 1,000s of settings and millions of combinations, using AI to help advise on the system setup should cut implementation times. Coyle is excited by the ability to use a natural language interface that advises based on software and industry knowledge.

The Book Question

Coyle would love to read more, but she is more focused on building Panther and sleep. However, she is very into human biology and the human mind, which she studied at University (biomedical Science). One of the most recent books she read is The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda et al (Amazon AUS, UK, US).

What about any takeaways for business from that book?

“If I had to apply it to business, every function in the human body matters; you need every cog to work for the overall picture to work. Having been an accountant and then run a sales team myself, that was a big part of building Panther too: making it work for both sides, whose requirements often conflict, so that both teams are served, and the whole thing works nicely together.”

The post Tackling the Challenges of Temp Recruitment with Panther Software appeared first on Enterprise Times.