ATS: Great for Applicants, Useless for Talent.
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Why Your ATS is Letting You Down
Applicant Tracking Systems were never built for recruiters like us. They’re built for applicants - the active candidates who apply, who feed the machine, who tick the boxes. That’s why an ATS is brilliant for a Robert Walters or Michael Page, but almost useless for a boutique search firm or RPO that lives and dies by proactive headhunting.
If outbound and mapping are 100% of what matters, your ATS covers maybe 70%. The other 30% - the candidate research, the market map, the long-tail pipeline building - is duct-taped together in spreadsheets, marketplace bolt-ons, or worse, forgotten entirely.
The CRM Mirage
You’ve probably seen ATS vendors tout “Candidate Relationship Management” (CRM) features. Sounds good in theory - but in reality, they’re weak, bolted on as an afterthought, and designed to look like progress while the core product stays focused on applicants.
That makes sense if your model is built on active candidates. But let’s be clear: that type of agency is becoming irrelevant. Thanks to the barbell effect, agencies that only push CVs from job boards are being squeezed out. Clients can (and increasingly do) manage that side themselves. It’s not rocket science if they have the resources, and if they don’t, they can outsource it to an RPO.
What clients can’t do is consistently attract, engage, and convert passive candidates - the high-value talent that drives transformation. That requires a different kind of thinking: the right narrative, positioned to the market. Not brand messaging to customers, but brand messaging to candidates.
The Market Map Mirage
A market map should be the most valuable deliverable an RPO can hand over. Done right, it’s a living, breathing asset that shortens future hiring cycles through direct sourcing: referrals and scouting. But let’s be honest: if the client’s TA team can’t work with it, it gathers dust and is eventually lost.
So the cycle repeats. Firms stitch together half-baked “solutions” on top of the ATS, or worse, on the client’s system. Recruiters aren’t technologists, and the result is predictable: poor investment decisions, poor delivery, and zero long-term value once the project ends.
Bullhorn and the Bolt-on Trap
Take Bullhorn. You don’t just buy Bullhorn. You buy Bullhorn plus a half-dozen marketplace add-ons in an attempt to make it work the way you need. Each add-on comes with a price tag, training overhead, and the nagging suspicion you’re still only halfway to something useful. It’s slow, expensive, and painful. The opposite of what good CRM should be.
I saw a post by a Bullhorn marketplace vendor recently that showcased the “Ultimate Bullhorn Workflow” with Bullhorn at the centre of eight other applications. I genuinely thought it was parody. It wasn’t. It was presented as best practice. I’ve been there - leading a company that implemented Bullhorn - and it shaped my view of recruitment technology. The marketplace model serves the ecosystem more than it serves the customer.
Cosmetic AI vs Embedded AI
Legacy ATS and CRM vendors now throw “AI” on their websites like glitter. But unless AI is embedded into the core architecture, it’s just a cosmetic sticker. It’s basically just ChatGPT inside the user interface.
We built differently. Our platform runs on embedded AI from the ground up. It’s not a feature you switch on - it’s the nervous system. It automatically tags, contextualises, enhances, enriches, and merges data from any source. It’s the glue. And while not always 100% perfect, it’s directionally right about 90% of the time – which is exactly how headhunting works. Great recruiters operate with imperfect information. There are always gaps. The skill is in spotting the patterns.
Most of the time you won’t even notice it. But when you do need insights - market signals, candidate scoring, referral mapping - it’s already there, ready to be asked. Every element in the system - whether a company, a job, or a candidate - can pull from related communications, files, notes, and research to give contextualised answers. Konstantin and I even use it to sanity-check our own internal conversations.
Bandaids vs Solutions
I’ve been in RPO for 16 years, recruitment for 20+. I built a successful business on it and sold it. I’ve seen every provider in the market. And the outcome is always the same: once the project ends, the value vanishes. The only value was the recruiter doing the work, so the client ends up back where they started, minus a chunk of budget.
That’s a bandaid, not a solution.
Our approach is different. Yes, we’ll build our own team, but we’ll also partner with fractional recruiters through a modular platform that leaves behind lasting IP. When the project ends, the technology stays. The client keeps the market map, the data, the pipeline - and can actually maintain momentum.
We’ve already had interest in white-labelling the platform. That’s possible in the future, but our priority is to road-test thoroughly and ensure success before scaling. Better to get it right than drown in support tickets.
Recruitment deserves more than applicant-focused ATS bandaids. We also need to care for passive talent and with that in mind, I believe that any credible RPO should do two things:
Maximise value from the client’s existing ATS.
Add value by connecting it to a passive talent pool that’s warmed by the client’s brand message.
Most RPOs fail here. Too many still provide little more than a recruiter armed with LinkedIn and job boards. As an industry, we can do better. That’s what we’re here to offer: long-term value, not short-term fixes.
