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Service

Applicant tracking system development

For HR directors and heads of talent who need requisitions, a career site, hiring pipelines, structured interviews and offers designed around their organisation's approval chain and hiring managers, rather than a generic tracker configured by trial and error.

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The problem

What goes wrong today

Where it usually starts

An organisation with four hundred staff hires sixty people a year through a process that lives in email.

  • A hiring manager asks for a role in a message to HR; HR forwards it to the finance director for budget sign-off; the thread is lost and the role is advertised anyway.
  • Applications arrive in a shared inbox from three different job sites and the company's own careers page, which is a form that emails a PDF.
  • An HR administrator copies each applicant into a spreadsheet with a stage column that is updated when someone remembers.

Where it gets harder

Interviews are the worst of it.

  • A panel of three has to be found, a room booked and the candidate asked to choose from the slots that survive, all by email, with a reschedule starting the chain again.
  • Feedback comes back as a paragraph, or not at all, so two interviewers who disagree have nothing structured to compare.
  • Offer letters are produced from a template with find-and-replace, and the one that went out with the wrong salary was caught by the candidate.
  • When the board asks how long hiring takes and where the good candidates come from, HR cannot say.

Scope of the service

What the build covers

A custom applicant tracking build normally covers hiring from the request to the accepted offer. A requisition approval flow takes a hiring manager's request through the approvers your organisation requires, such as line director, finance and HR, with each decision recorded, before a role can be published. A career site presents live roles with an application form per role type, so a warehouse role asks different questions from a graduate scheme. Pipeline stages are configured per role or role family rather than fixed, and every move between stages is recorded with who made it and when. Interview scheduling checks the availability of panel members and offers the candidate slots that work for all of them, confirming rooms or video links. Scorecards give each interviewer the same structured questions and rating scale, so feedback is comparable. Offer letters are generated from approved templates with the role's data, routed for approval where the salary exceeds a threshold, and sent for signature. Candidate communication templates cover acknowledgement, invitation, rejection and offer, sent from the system and logged. An anonymised screening option hides names and identifying details from reviewers until a chosen stage. Reporting covers time to hire, time in each stage and source of applications.

We map your current hiring with you first: who approves what, which role families need different forms and stages, how panels are formed, what the offer approval thresholds are, and which job sites and HR systems must connect. Each becomes a named stage in the scope document.

Deliberately out of scope

  • The HR record after the hire, which lives in your people system and receives the new starter through an integration
  • Payroll
  • Employment screening services, whose results are recorded against the candidate rather than carried out by the system

When the scope grows

Scoping scenario

A group with three operating companies wants one career site with a brand per company, a requisition chain that differs by company and by salary band, panels drawn from a shared pool of trained interviewers, and a single hiring report for the group board. The per-company approval rules and the shared interviewer pool make this a custom build, and the scope document says so plainly.

Deliverables

What you receive

  • Discovery notes from mapping a hire in each role family from request to offer
  • A written scope document naming the approval chain, the pipelines, the interview and offer stages and what is left out
  • Designs of the career site, the application form, the pipeline board, the interviewer scorecard and the offer approval
  • The build, including anonymised screening and reporting where in scope, deployed to your hosting or ours
  • Migration of open roles and active candidates from your current tracker or spreadsheet
  • Training for HR administrators, a session for hiring managers and a short guide for interviewers
  • Handover material and full ownership of the source code and your data

Process

How a project runs

Each stage maps onto the project view in your client panel. Durations are set in your proposal, never on this page.

  1. Onboarding

    Access to your current tracker, careers page, calendar platform and people system; a list of role families, approvers and job sites in use.

    Project stage: Onboarding

  2. Planning

    Discovery with the HR director, a hiring manager and an interviewer; approval chains, pipelines, scorecards and offer thresholds are written into the scope document.

    Project stage: Planning

  3. Design

    Career site and application form designed for candidates on a phone; pipeline board, scorecard and approvals designed for managers who have five minutes between meetings.

    Project stage: Design

  4. Development

    Built in layers: requisitions and roles, then the career site and pipelines, then interviews and scorecards, then offers, templates and reporting.

    Project stage: Development

  5. Client review

    HR and two hiring managers run live requisitions through the system for a fortnight and tell us where it does not match how hiring works.

    Project stage: Client review

  6. Revisions

    Changes from the review are made and re-checked against the scope document.

    Project stage: Revisions

  7. Ready for launch

    Open roles migrated, job site postings and calendar connections verified with test accounts, templates approved, launch checklist signed off.

    Project stage: Ready for launch

  8. Delivered

    Hiring runs through the new system; hosting and maintenance continue under their own agreement if taken.

    Project stage: Delivered

Integrations

Commonly integrated

Systems this kind of business usually asks us to connect. Each integration is confirmed during discovery; none is assumed.

  • Calendar platforms for panel availability and interview invitations
  • Video meeting platforms for remote interviews
  • Job sites and aggregators for publishing roles and receiving applications
  • HR and people systems that receive the new starter record after acceptance
  • E-signature providers for offer letters
  • Employment screening and reference providers, as a record of the result and date
  • Single sign-on providers for staff access

How we would approach it

Worked example

Concept demo

A three-company group with a shared interviewer pool

In this scoping scenario, a group with three operating companies wants one career site showing each company's brand, a requisition approval chain that differs by company and by salary band, interview panels drawn from a shared pool of trained interviewers across the group, and a single hiring report for the group board. The scope we would propose: a company attribute on every requisition that selects the approval chain and the career site branding, approval thresholds set per company, an interviewer pool with availability and interview load visible to HR, and reporting that rolls up time to hire and source by company and for the group.

The custom route is needed because of the per-company approval rules and the cross-company interviewer pool, which go beyond the single approval chain and per-role panels the package assumes.

Concept demo: a scoping scenario written to show how we would approach the work. It is not a delivered client project.

Pricing

What affects the price

Every proposal is priced on scope. These are the factors that move it most for this kind of build.

  • Number of role families with their own forms and pipeline stages
  • Depth of the requisition approval chain and whether it varies by department or salary band
  • Panel interview scheduling and the calendar and video platforms to connect
  • Offer letter templates, approval thresholds and e-signature
  • Anonymised screening and the stage at which details are revealed
  • Job sites to publish to and receive applications from
  • People system to receive new starters, and the volume of open roles and candidates to migrate
  • Hosting choice: your own hosting or ours

Start from a package

Applicant tracking package

Requisition approval, career site with forms per role, configurable pipelines, panel interview scheduling, scorecards, offer letters, candidate templates and hiring reports for in-house teams.

Custom build
View the package

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

When is the package enough and when do we need a custom build?

If one approval chain, configurable pipelines per role family, panel scheduling and standard offer templates cover your hiring, the applicant tracking package is the right fit and we quote for that. Approval rules that vary by company or band, shared interviewer pools across entities or reporting that draws on your people system point to the custom route.

Can hiring managers use it without training?

That is the design aim. A hiring manager sees their own requisitions, their pipeline board and the interviews they are on, and nothing else. A short session covers requesting a role and completing a scorecard; HR administrators get the longer training.

How does anonymised screening work?

Names, contact details and any fields you choose are hidden from reviewers until the stage you set, typically after the first screen. HR administrators can always see the full record, and the system logs when details were revealed.

Will accepted candidates appear in our HR system?

Where your people system has an interface we can connect to, yes: the accepted offer creates a new starter record with the role, start date and salary from the offer. The scope document states how the connection works once we have confirmed the system.

Does the system make hiring or employment-law decisions?

No. It records who decided what and when, generates documents from templates your organisation approves, and stores screening results as dated records. Decisions about selection, terms and what checks are required stay with your team and your own advisers.

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Answer a few questions about your business, your current systems and what should change. We reply with a clear, competitive proposal.

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