Somewhere in your team's Google Drive, there's a spreadsheet.
It has a name like "Active Roles Q2" or "Pipeline Tracker - Live" or just "Hiring DO NOT DELETE." It's colour-coded. Someone built a dropdown for candidate stage. It gets updated more consistently than the ATS does.
The ATS has been live for 18 months.
That spreadsheet is a gap report. Every row in it is evidence that something in the system isn't configured to do what the team actually needs. It just doesn't feel that way, because it works.
Your ATS has a pipeline view. You're not using it.
The candidate pipeline spreadsheet is the most common workaround in TA. It exists because the ATS pipeline view is misconfigured, too rigid for how the team stages candidates, or not trusted enough to rely on in a live debrief. So someone built a better version in Google Sheets, and it stuck.
Every update to that sheet is a duplicate entry. Someone moves a candidate from "shortlisted" to "interviewing" in the spreadsheet and then logs the same change in the ATS separately, because the system still needs to stay current for compliance and reporting. Two touches per stage change, across every active role.
For a team running 50 live requisitions, that's 15-20 hours per week in reconciliation that doesn't show up anywhere as a cost, because it's threaded through everyone's day in 90-second increments.
And the ATS data is always a step behind. Which means any report pulled from it is already out of date. Which means the hiring manager who asks for a pipeline update gets a spreadsheet export instead of a live report from the system you're paying for.
Interview feedback in Notion is a timeline problem
Most ATS platforms have structured feedback forms. Most teams don't use them. The templates haven't been updated since implementation, hiring managers find them awkward on mobile, or the workflow doesn't match how debriefs actually run.
So feedback ends up in a Notion doc or an email thread.
The time spent chasing it is the visible cost. The less visible one is the delay it introduces between final interview and decision. A structured feedback workflow inside the ATS cuts that gap measurably. A mid-level role sitting open for two extra days because feedback is scattered across inboxes runs to about £800 in vacancy cost per hire. The risk-adjusted cost, once you factor in candidate drop-off probability (even at 10–15% likelihood at that delay), nudges the expected value well past £1,000 per hire. Across a team running 50 reqs, if even a fraction of roles hit this pattern regularly, you're burning five figures a quarter on friction that the ATS already has the infrastructure to solve.
When TA and HR maintain separate lists, one is always wrong
TA tracks live roles for pipeline planning. HR maps headcount against budget. Neither list matches the other, and reconciling them becomes a project before every leadership review or board meeting.
The version conflict problem has a real risk attached to it. Hiring against a req that's been frozen in HR's budget tracker but not updated in TA's pipeline is the kind of mistake that creates difficult conversations with finance. A properly configured HRIS with a live connection to the ATS makes this a non-issue. Most aren't set up that way.
So someone builds a master tracker in Excel. Two teams update it on different cadences with different priorities. And the master tracker ends up with its own version history.
Every spreadsheet is a symptom
A spreadsheet sitting alongside a system is evidence of a configuration gap. Usually one that was deprioritised at implementation, or one that drifted as the team's processes changed.
Each one carries a cost: the hours spent maintaining it, and the decisions delayed by data that's never quite current. Those costs compound. A TA team running parallel tools alongside their ATS is carrying a workload the ATS was supposed to eliminate.
The question worth asking is why the spreadsheet exists at all, and what it would cost to fix the underlying gap rather than keep maintaining the workaround.
We write one piece a week on making HR and TA technology actually work. If you recognised your own Google Sheet in here, you'll want the rest.
