I am Pascal, founder of alluvo and a staffing agency owner myself. With big next step I run my own temporary staffing business in Wuppertal, Germany, with assignments in care and education. Before that I founded and sold two companies in the recruiting industry. And I have been programming since I was twelve.
This post starts our blog. It begins with the question I hear most often: what does alluvo actually stand for?
One job is left
My conviction is simple: in future there will be only one job left at staffing agencies, and it is called talking to people. With the client who needs three nurses tomorrow. With the employee who does not feel comfortable on assignment. With the applicant behind whose résumé there is a story.
Everything in between software can already do today: writing contracts, counting deadlines, collecting hours, issuing invoices, maintaining data, following up, reconciling. Whoever keeps doing that by hand ties up their best people with work nobody thanks them for.
Why I build alluvo
alluvo exists because software in this industry drove me mad. It costs time instead of giving time. It feels like 2006 although we are in 2026. Feature requests take months, bugs overwinter, and sales promises something else in the meantime.
You see it most clearly with the contract. In many offices the temporary staffing contract is still created in Word, copied together from three programs. People make mistakes doing that, which is only human. With a temporary staffing contract in Germany, however, a mistake can be expensive: if the assignment is not designated as temporary staffing or the employee is not named before the assignment, the employment contract is void (section 9 AÜG) and the employee is deemed to be employed by the client (section 10 AÜG). In my own business a contract used to take up to 25 minutes. Today it is created in 3 to 10 seconds from framework contract and booking, without retyped data.
And then the data itself: exports, interfaces and integrations are often sluggish, expensive or not provided for at all in this industry, as if someone feared you might leave with your data. I believe the opposite. Whoever holds on to data loses clients.
What we do differently
One system for the whole assignment. Sales, recruiting, scheduling, contracts, hours, invoice and payroll data hang on the same record in alluvo. When something changes on the assignment, everything calculates with it, instead of someone retyping it four times.
Guardrails instead of hope. Maximum assignment duration, equal pay, working time act: alluvo counts the deadlines from the assignments itself and does not allow what these rules forbid. This applies to German law today, for agencies operating under German law; other countries are planned. What alluvo does not check yet is openly stated on the compliance pages.
AI works, the human decides. alluvo writes contracts, suggests a replacement when someone calls in sick and follows up with clients. Before every change you get a preview, and every action runs with your permissions. You hold the leash, and how long it is is up to you.
Open to your tools. With the free AI plugin you work in alluvo directly from Claude or ChatGPT, and through the public API your data gets to where you need it. Your data belongs to you.
Built in our own business. alluvo is created in the daily work of big next step, with real clients, real employees and real deadlines. What we need there, we build, and what snags there, we notice first.
What tomorrow looks like
I see systems with guardrails, compliant, automated and AI-driven. They work for people so that people can take care of people again.
In sales, relationships arise instead of Excel sessions, because the research, the enrichment and the follow-up are already done when you pick up the phone. In recruiting, the person behind the résumé gets time again. In scheduling, it is about the right employee for the right client instead of the search for the current timesheet. And leadership has room again for its own people.
At big next step we already feel this today: for growth we do not have to look for new people for the office, the existing team gets more done. For me that is the core. Growth should not hang on the next job ad for the back office.
This industry faces one of its biggest challenges: skilled workers are missing, margins are thin, and AI is changing every kind of office work right now. The best will win the race, and those are the ones who talk to people and let AI do the rest. My goal is that soon nobody in temporary staffing has to spend the day in front of a screen, because things simply get taken care of.
How you can measure us
- Listen, then build. Every function in alluvo has a sender: a staffing agency owner who told me what stands in their way.
- Plain talk, even when it is uncomfortable. What alluvo cannot do yet, I tell you beforehand and not after the signature.
- Reachable, with a name. When you call, no call center picks up, but someone who knows the code you are using right now.
Let's talk
Here on the blog we will from now on show how we build alluvo, what is new and how you use it in your daily work. If you see the tomorrow of this industry the same way: Get started for free, or book 20 minutes with me. You show me how you work today, and I show you what alluvo takes over.
And if something is missing for you, tell me. That is exactly how alluvo came about.