Before you sign off budget for a shiny new applicant tracking system, it’s worth asking a slightly uncomfortable question: is the system really the problem, or is it how you’ve been using it since go-live?
That was the question at the heart of our recent digital session with the RL Community, hosted by The Recruitment Events Co. Udder’s Managing Consultant Ella McEwan and Strategy Consultant Mat Michta sat down with talent acquisition leaders, recruitment operations specialists and employer brand heads to talk honestly about ATS stagnation, workarounds and the hidden cost of work that happens outside the system.
Ella has run recruitment operations for high-volume healthcare hiring and lived through several ATS implementations herself. Mat has spent around seven years leading HR tech transformation, from implementation and data migration to integration, vendor selection and audits. Between them, they’ve seen most of the ways an ATS can quietly drift from “brand new” to “barely tolerated”.
The session was practical by design. As Mat put it, nobody wants to be lectured on getting eight hours’ sleep when they’re looking after a three-month-old. So what follows is a write-up of the conversation: why ATS platforms stagnate, what everyday frustrations are really telling you, a simple framework to find where the work actually happens, and the lessons the community wanted most.
If you’ve ever heard “can you just email me the CVs?” and felt your soul leave your body, read on.
Go-live is not the finish line
Most ATS implementations are run as projects, and projects end. There are workshops, design decisions, testing, training, a go-live date that slips once or twice, and finally the system is live. At that point, everyone is understandably exhausted. The project team steps back, and the system freezes in the shape it was in on day one.
The trouble is that nothing else freezes. The business grows, restructures and acquires. Hiring volumes rise and fall, sourcing channels change, and vendors keep shipping new features.
Very few TA teams have someone whose actual job is to keep the system aligned with all of that. When you’re under pressure to fill roles, and in high-volume environments the answer is usually “we need 20 hires and we needed them yesterday”, stopping to review your configuration can feel like an indulgence. So it doesn’t happen.
The result is ATS stagnation. Configuration that was right for the business at go-live slowly becomes wrong for the business you have now. Not because the technology is bad, but because nobody has been tending the herd.
When the business outgrows the setup
Ella shared a live example that brought the point home. Around five years ago, Udder implemented Pinpoint for a client with roughly 200 employees. Today, that organisation has around 1,500 people and is planning another 500 hires over the coming year.
Pinpoint is perfectly capable of handling that volume. The problem is that the configuration was built for a team of five recruiters making about 50 hires a year. The recruiting team hasn’t grown at anything like the pace of the business, so it now leans heavily on hiring managers. And those hiring managers are doing almost everything outside the system.
Nobody made a bad decision here. The company simply grew fast, and there was never an opportunity to pause and revisit how the ATS was set up, run the change management needed to bring new managers on board, or switch on the features released since go-live.
That pause has now arrived in the form of a hiring freeze. Rather than treating it as dead time, the client is using it to ask some useful questions:
- What did the organisation look like when we went live, and what does it look like now?
- Which locations, brands, approval chains and templates were added later and bolted on rather than built in?
- What new functionality have we been paying for but never adopted?
- How should the process work for 500 hires a year, rather than 50?
The same pattern shows up everywhere, if your business has changed significantly since go-live, your ATS setup almost certainly needs to change too.
Workarounds are symptoms, not quirks
Every organisation has them. The spreadsheet that “just tracks a few things”. The hiring manager who only ever looks at CVs in their inbox. The approvals that happen in a Teams chat. Individually they seem harmless. Together, they tell you exactly where your ATS process has broken down.
Ella’s view is that these frustrations are rarely about a stubborn individual or a bad system. They’re signals. Here’s how to read the most common ones.
“It’s all in a spreadsheet.” This usually means people don’t trust the ATS reporting or tracking, or the system hasn’t been set up to show what they actually need. A leader should be able to open a dashboard and see top-performing sources, average time in each stage, conversion between stages and where candidates are dropping out. If that isn’t possible, or the data isn’t trusted because the process isn’t followed consistently, the spreadsheet fills the gap.
“Can you just email me the CVs?” This is rarely about a difficult hiring manager. Many managers hire once or twice a year. New managers inherit a process with little context. Training stops after go-live and nobody reinforces it. If the system isn’t intuitive and the expectation isn’t clear, the path of least resistance is the inbox. The recruiter then ends up on the phone walking them through it, at which point they might as well have done it themselves.
“Where do I find that?” If users can’t find what they need, the setup isn’t intuitive and the support materials aren’t doing their job. Think about the systems you rarely log into yourself, and how frustrating they are.
Using tools outside the ATS. Mat shared a story from a recent audit. The client discovered that a hiring manager had downloaded CVs from the ATS and uploaded them to his personal ChatGPT account to generate interview questions. When asked why, the answer was simple: he didn’t know the ATS already had a built-in question generator. That’s not only an adoption problem. It’s a data protection problem too.
These workarounds are expensive. They create data silos, undermine the integrity of your reporting and quietly eat hours every week. But many have simple fixes, and the fix isn’t always in the ATS. Sometimes the system is surfacing CVs perfectly well and the manager just doesn’t know what’s expected of them. That’s a process and communication fix, not a reason to buy new software.
The features you’re already paying for
We all get the quarterly release notes. We glance at them, think “that’s nice”, and archive them. Mat has even had clients ask him whether those emails were legitimate or spam.
That’s a missed opportunity. When Udder works with clients, we regularly find that the thing the whole team grumbles about has already been solved by a new feature. Sometimes all it takes is switching it on. Other teams turn features on in their sandbox, have a play, and never get round to working out which real problem it could solve.
Across our projects, these are the capabilities that most often go underused:
- Candidate matching
- Automatic offer letter creation
- Interview scheduling automation
- Self-service video interviewing
- Interview scorecards
- AI-supported summaries, question generators and self-service dashboards
Not all of them are equal in effort. Many AI-supported features are relatively easy to switch on. Others, such as interview scorecards, need groundwork and become small transformation projects of their own. Mat also noted a clear trend towards automation over AI agents in HR, because automation lets you aim for specific, predictable outcomes, which matters a great deal in recruitment.
The common objection is “we’re not ready, managers will resist it” or “it’ll hurt candidate experience”. That may be true. But if the feature is already in your package, it’s worth asking your vendor three things: what’s the best use case, how do similar clients get the most from it, and how much effort will it really take on our side?
Your vendor relationship matters more than you think
A good customer success manager who understands your pain points can proactively flag the features that will help. They can also connect you with other customers in your space. The reality is that not everyone gets that level of support. For some, the CSM appeared once on a call, said hello and was never seen again.
And sometimes the value is hiding in plain sight. Mat recently worked with a client whose contract had been signed three years earlier by someone who had since left. Nobody knew what was in it. When they finally looked, they found an optimisation package that had never been used. Know your contract, and know who owns it.
Step one: map where the work actually happens
The most expensive work in recruitment is often the work you can’t see. Take a monthly report prepared before a business review. If it’s built outside the ATS, someone is holding it all together like Atlas, pulling data from multiple spreadsheets every month. That’s silent, costly effort.
You don’t need a full-blown process audit to find it. Sketch the main stages of your hiring process, from requisition and approval through to offer and onboarding, and ask three questions of each stage:
- Does this process happen in the ATS? Or are approvals collected by email or in Microsoft Teams, feedback gathered on WhatsApp, offers drafted in Word?
- Is the process clearly defined and repeatable? Or does it depend on a single person, carry multiple exceptions, or work differently in each business unit?
- Can we report on it directly from the ATS? Or does someone have to chase data across sources with VLOOKUPs and a prayer?
Any stage that gets a “no” is a gap worth investigating. It might be a quick configuration fix. It might be an unadopted feature. It might be a process nobody has properly agreed on. Either way, you now know where to look, which is far more useful than a general sense that “the system isn’t working”.
Step two: talk to admins, users and your vendor
Once you’ve mapped the process, go a level deeper by talking to three groups of people. Each sees a different part of the picture.
Your admins
Whoever owns the system day to day, whether that’s TA operations, HRIS or IT, knows the settings and what should be happening. Ask them:
- What has never been touched since go-live?
- Which parts of the system are never used?
- Where are people creating their own versions, such as offer letters built from scratch every time?
- What still lives in a spreadsheet, and is everyone doing it differently?
Your users
Admins see how the system is configured. Users show you how it’s actually used. Talk to recruiters, hiring managers and onboarding coordinators, and make it clear there’s no judgement. Ask:
- What do you actually do in the system day to day?
- What have you built your own workaround for?
- What do you hate so much that you skip it entirely?
- What feels repetitive, and would save you real time if it disappeared?
Ella’s advice here is counterintuitive but powerful: seek out the noisy ones. The reluctant users and the hiring managers who never follow the process often have the most useful insight. Sit with them and ask them to show you, not how the system is supposed to work, but what they actually do. You’ll often find great ideas being executed outside the system, and quick wins that reshape the ATS around how people really work rather than how everyone assumed they would five years ago.
Mat added that behind “our managers don’t leave feedback in the system” there’s almost always a reason. Perhaps the system is slow. Perhaps they need a separate username and password to log in. Those are integration and automation opportunities hiding in a complaint.
Your vendor
Finally, go to the source. Ask your vendor:
- What are we licensed for that we’re not using?
- What has changed or been released since we went live?
- How do other customers in a similar space use this part of the system?
How much you get from this depends on your CSM and support level. Communities like the RL Community are also a great place to compare notes with peers on the same or similar platforms.
Bringing it together
The answers come back to three simple questions:
- What has changed since we launched, in the organisation and in how we operate?
- Have we had the support we need, from the vendor and in user adoption, to make changes without resistance?
- What does our vendor offer now that we’re not taking advantage of?
If you work through all of this and still conclude the platform doesn’t support how you work, you now have a genuine, evidence-based business case for change. That’s a far stronger position than general dissatisfaction.
From the Q&A: where teams lose the most time
The community had plenty of questions, and the first was a big one: across all the ATS platforms out there, where do teams waste the most time?
Reporting, by a country mile
Ella didn’t hesitate. Almost everyone she speaks to doesn’t trust their ATS reporting. They extract multiple reports, stitch them together, manipulate them manually in Excel and feed them into a dashboard someone else owns. Someone, somewhere, is spending hours every week, and days every quarter, on it.
In one recent audit, a team reported spending around 10 hours on monthly reporting and roughly four days on quarterly reporting. The metrics were cost of acquisition, time to hire and stage conversion rates. Important numbers, but not ones that should take that long to produce.
Sometimes there’s no quick fix, because the ATS reports on what it thinks matters. Often, though, the setup hasn’t been optimised. Which metrics do you actually need? How do you want to segment your data? Are you capturing the right information against each requisition to make that possible? Even when part of the reporting has to happen outside the ATS, getting the setup right, and using AI tools for dashboards, can save a remarkable amount of time.
Interview scheduling and feedback
For Mat, the other big pain point is scheduling interviews and collecting feedback from hiring managers. Many teams resort to Microsoft Teams or WhatsApp, and frankly, any channel will do as long as the feedback arrives. But that’s frustrating for everyone, and it points to an adoption and process challenge as much as a system one.
A useful observation from the session: from the outside, a hiring manager sees a requisition go in and a new starter arrive. Everything in between is where the workarounds live.
If you do implement a new ATS: build on what works
One attendee asked a question many TA leaders wrestle with: when moving to a new ATS, should you keep your current processes or rewrite them from scratch?
Mat’s answer was clear: don’t start from a blank page. Udder’s approach is to take the foundations of your current process, then use the new platform’s features to translate, streamline and automate it. For example, if there’s an online assessment between application and shortlisting, look for an integration between the ATS and the assessment provider. Then agree who reviews the results, what the pass score is, and how candidates progress, automatically or manually.
Ella agreed. Mapping your current state against the platform’s known functionality naturally reveals opportunities. Where a process clearly doesn’t work, that’s where to focus on redesign. Everywhere else, enhance rather than reinvent.
Discovery is your anchor
A strong discovery phase sets an implementation up for success more than anything else. When you’re deep in workshops and wrestling with decisions, a clear process map is something to fall back on: what were we trying to achieve?
Ella shared an example of a client who went through about five steering committee meetings trying to decide how to handle interview scheduling. Eventually, the team went back to the design agreed during discovery and realised the answer had been there all along. A longer discovery phase may feel slow at the time, but it saves a great deal of circular debate later.
Phase it: MVP first
The attendee’s real challenge was knowing what to switch on and when. You need to show enough improvement to justify the investment internally and keep your sponsors on side, without changing everything so quickly that the business loses its way.
Mat’s answer is change impact assessment. During process design, list every stakeholder group and understand what will change for each and how big the impact will be. Then decide together which features are too big a step for phase one. Launch a minimum viable product, perhaps automated feedback collection or interview scheduling, and roll out the rest incrementally. That avoids change shock for hiring managers, and gives you early wins to build momentum.
The mistake we see most: leaving stakeholders out
The final question of the session was one every TA leader should ask: what’s the one mistake you see again and again? One attendee, who had also inherited an ATS from someone no longer with the business, reflected that the session had prompted a “re-implementation mindset”: looking at the whole thing afresh every so often.
Mat and Ella gave the same answer: TA teams work in isolation.
It’s understandable. TA teams are measured on tangible KPIs and SLAs, such as time to fill and offer acceptance rate, so the natural instinct is to optimise for speed. But that can come at the expense of candidate experience and a proper look at different hiring models. Mat’s example: adding video interviewing or online assessments for senior roles rarely goes down well with experienced candidates.
The bigger gap is not involving the rest of the business. Hiring managers should be asked what would make their lives easier, what the simplest way to submit feedback looks like and what automation would actually help. Beyond them, pull in HR, onboarding and finance. Do they have the data they need? What’s working for them, and what isn’t?
As Ella put it, an ATS isn’t just a TA system. It’s a system for the whole business. And that doesn’t stop at go-live. Whether you’re implementing or reviewing an existing platform, treat it as an ongoing change, not a project that ends and becomes business as usual.
There is no perfect ATS (and that’s fine)
Ella summed up the session best: there is no perfect ATS. Every platform has its limitations. But if you keep reviewing how you use yours, you’ll find quick fixes that make a real difference.
And if you don’t? You’ll at least know, with evidence, that the business has evolved, the processes have changed and the system is no longer fit for purpose. Given how hard it is to get budget signed off for a full digital transformation, that clarity is valuable in itself.
Here’s the short version to take back to your team:
- Treat go-live as the start, not the finish. Optimisation is a continuous cycle, ideally revisited several times a year.
- Read workarounds as signals. Spreadsheets, emailed CVs and external tools point to broken processes, not just stubborn people.
- Map where the work happens. For each hiring stage: is it in the ATS, is it repeatable, can you report on it?
- Talk to everyone. Admins, users (especially the noisy ones) and your vendor each hold part of the answer.
- Use what you’re paying for. Check your contract, read the release notes and press your CSM for use cases.
- Look beyond TA. Hiring managers, HR, onboarding and finance all depend on this system.
Before you go to market for a replacement, make sure the system is genuinely the problem. More often than not, the cows haven’t left the barn. They just need herding back in the right direction.
Want to dig into your own ATS?
If this sounds familiar, let’s talk.
