She'd already had the vendor health check. She had the report filed somewhere: seven pages, a list of underused features, some configuration recommendations.
When she first made contact about an audit, she was direct about her scepticism: "I already know the system is underutilised. I can't justify paying several thousand pounds to be told that in more detail."
The number she walked out of the debrief with was £155,200.
What follows is a composite scenario, drawn from the types of findings that surface regularly in ATS and HRIS audits. The figures come from the methodology we use to calculate ROI. The client is constructed: a Head of TA at a mid-market technology business, around 400 employees, roughly 80 hires a year. The gaps, and the costs attached to them, are the kinds of gaps we find.
The ATS had a structured feedback module. The configuration had been there since implementation: rating scales and a structured debrief template the team was supposed to use. Nobody used it.
Interview feedback lived in email threads and Notion docs. When the debrief came around, someone chased it. Sometimes the same day, sometimes over the course of a week.
The audit tracked average time between final interview and hiring decision across their engineering roles for the preceding 12 months. The average was 9 days. For comparable engineering roles at companies running structured feedback through the ATS, the benchmark sits around 3.
Six days of additional vacancy time per role. Across 40 engineering hires, at a fully-loaded daily vacancy cost of £600, those 6 days added £144,000.
She'd been treating it as a process inconvenience. The audit attached a number to it.
The feedback finding was the largest item. The audit went further.
The ATS had an onboarding module that was never configured. The team ran new starters through a Notion checklist instead: manual steps, coordinated by HR, repeated for every hire. The recoverable cost across 80 hires in the preceding year: £2,100.
The HRIS had self-service functionality for leave requests and personal data updates. The configuration was incomplete. Employees couldn't navigate it reliably, so requests came to HR manually. The cost of avoidable manual transactions across the year: £9,100 in HR coordinator time.
Three gaps. Total identified cost: £155,200.
The audit cost £6,250.
The identified cost of three gaps: £155,200 in recoverable value, before a single fix was implemented.
The debrief document made the business case. She left with something she could take to her CEO and to IT: a prioritised roadmap with the cost of each gap attached and a clear argument for why the configuration investment would pay back within months.
Leadership signed off within a fortnight.
The feedback-in-Notion workaround is close to universal in TA functions that haven't revisited their ATS configuration since go-live. The onboarding checklist sitting alongside an unconfigured ATS module shows up in more companies than most HR leaders expect. Self-service failures in the HRIS surface in almost every review.
What's unusual is having the cost calculated. Most of these gaps get managed around indefinitely, because the cost stays invisible until someone measures it.
That's what the Optimization Audit does. We go into your ATS and HRIS, find the gaps, attach a cost to each one, and produce a prioritised roadmap with the ROI case made explicit. The output is a findings report with real numbers and a roadmap with the sequence made clear.
If your system has gaps you suspect are costing more than you've calculated, that's where an audit starts.