ATS for Recruitment Agencies: 5 Pain Points That Cost You Clients

A candidate applies in the morning and is already interviewing with another employer by lunchtime. For a recruitment agency this is not unusual, it is an ordinary weekday: while the recruiter works through yesterday's applications, the best candidates leave, and the client asks why there is silence on their vacancy. An ATS for a recruitment agency has to handle five jobs: answer applications fast, keep the vacancies of several clients in one place, show the client only what the client may see, keep your own candidate database within reach, and measure results per client. Below we walk through how HRStream handles each of them.

Why agencies lose candidates in the first few days

According to an hh.ru survey of 2,200 specialists (October 2023), 40% of job seekers lose interest in a vacancy if the employer does not reply within three days (source in Russian). Among those who applied for retail and sales vacancies, 54% are not willing to wait longer than three days; in administration and logistics, 50%. The survey was conducted in the Russian market and reflects the opinion of job seekers, but for high-volume hiring in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan the picture is a familiar one.

It is harder for an agency than for an in-house HR team. Dozens of vacancies from different clients run in parallel, applications arrive from several job boards and messengers, and there are never enough recruiters. The typical losses in high-volume hiring are covered in the article 5 mistakes in high-volume hiring. For an agency they turn into a lost vacancy and an unhappy client.

Five agency pain points and how HRStream answers them

The agency model: clients, vacancies and fees in one place

In the organization settings you choose the "Recruitment agency" type. After that a "Clients" section appears in the menu, and vacancies are linked to a client.

The client card

• Name, legal entity, BIN or INN, country (Kazakhstan, Russia, Uzbekistan), city, website, industry and logo.
• Client status: lead, active, on hold, former. An archive for clients you have finished working with.
• The account manager responsible for the client.
• The client's contact persons: full name, position, email, phone, primary contact.

Terms of cooperation and placements

The client card records the terms: a fee as a percentage of salary or annual income, or as a fixed amount, the currency, the replacement guarantee period, the payment term and the contract details. Every hire for a client's vacancy goes into placements with the statuses "Expected", "Invoiced", "Paid", "Cancelled" and "Refund". The recruiter marks the invoice and payment dates, and the system stores the guarantee period and flags cases where the candidate left during it. The financial fields are visible to the owner, administrator and recruiter, but not to the client.

Vacancies by client

When creating a vacancy, the recruiter picks a client from the list or adds a new one right in the form. The vacancy list has a "Client" filter and a "Group by clients" mode, so the vacancies of ten clients do not get mixed up. A new vacancy can be created from an existing one: the pipeline stages and fields are copied, and only the details need adjusting. For several identical positions a multi-vacancy with a hiring plan and a deadline works well.

A client can send a request on their own through a "Hiring request" with approval, and the recruiter turns it into a vacancy.

The client in the system: sees what is needed, not what is not

The client has a role of their own. It is linked to a contact person of the client, and that person sees the vacancies and candidates of their own company only. The link is made by the owner, an administrator or the client's account manager, and every change is written to the audit log.

• Decisions on a candidate. The client can suggest inviting the candidate to an interview, moving them to the next stage, making an offer, keeping them in reserve, requesting information or rejecting. Recruiters receive a notification, and the pipeline stage is moved by the agency.
• Confidentiality. For an agency, the following are hidden by default: phone, email, messengers, profile links, the original resume file, conversations and transcripts, and the candidate's salary. Full name, experience, skills and scores are visible. The setting can be changed for an individual vacancy, and edits are written to the change history.
• A single pipeline. The standard pipeline has the stages "Presented to the client", "Final interview", "Offer made", "Offer accepted" and "Started work". Client analytics is built on them.

Contacts stay with the agency, while the client sees the profile and makes a choice. For a service whose value lies in its candidate database and its recruiters' work, this is an important condition.

High-volume hiring: reply to everyone before they leave

In high-volume hiring (sales assistants, couriers, warehouse workers, call center operators) the one who starts the conversation first wins. HRStream builds that conversation from the vacancy script.

1. Applications land in one pipeline from HeadHunter, OLX, Avito, the career page, messengers and a link. We covered the integrations on different job boards in the articles about the HeadHunter chat, OLX and Avito.
2. AI conducts the first interview following a script: experience, schedule, district, start date. Channels: WhatsApp, Telegram, MAX, web chat, email, HeadHunter, OLX and Avito. More on WhatsApp and the web chat via a single link.
3. The candidate asks questions about pay, schedule and address, and the bot answers from the vacancy knowledge base. If there is no answer, the question goes to the recruiter.
4. Bulk launch. Accumulated applications can be sent to the interview in a batch, without opening each card.
5. Automatic advancement. According to the pipeline rules, those who pass move on, the rest receive a rejection, and the recruiter starts the day with a list of people worth inviting.

Resumes can be uploaded in bulk in PDF, DOCX and DOC formats, and AI screening assesses the match to the vacancy. How it works is described in the article on AI candidate screening. The system finds duplicates and suggests merging them, and the recruiter confirms the merge, including for several pairs at once.

Executive and specialist search: fewer people, a higher cost of error

For a department head or a rare specialist, what needs automating is not correspondence but the search and the quality of the decision.

• Cold search. A single workspace where the recruiter searches both your own database and HeadHunter, imports candidates and sees possible duplicates. Profiles are shown anonymously, and a contact is revealed by a separate action. More on search in the HeadHunter integration.
• Your own database as an asset. Candidates who did not fit one vacancy stay in the system. Tags help group them by skills and industries, and search across your own database makes the "silver medalists" available for the next order. According to an estimate by the analyst firm Forrester, cited by SHRM, such candidates are often a 70% or better match for a new vacancy. This is an expert estimate, not a measurement, but the direction is clear.
• Candidate profile. Criteria are set for the vacancy, and the assessment is made on each of them, not as a single number.
• Interview and offer. Scheduling interviews online and offline with Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams, a team calendar, offers from templates sent by email with statuses.
• Client work. Comments on a candidate and client decisions are collected in the card, not in three chats and an inbox.

Analytics: from "we seem to be doing well" to numbers per client

The "Analytics" section holds the hiring reports. Three groups matter for an agency.

The "Clients" report

For each client it shows:

• active vacancies, hires and the share of vacancies closed with a hire;
• time to hire and time to the first candidate presented to the client;
• presentations awaiting the client's decision and "stuck" vacancies with no new candidates;
• the "presentation → interview → offer" conversion, offer acceptance and the number of presentations per hire;
• expected, invoiced and paid revenue (visible only to the owner, administrator and recruiter);
• the milestone funnel and the monthly trend.

The "Awaiting client decision" metric is a working argument in a conversation: if the delay is on the client's side, it shows in the numbers.

The recruiter team

The "Recruiter activity" (moves, comments, rejections) and "Recruiter workload" (vacancy distribution, processing speed, dynamics) reports help balance the load and see who needs help. "Recruiter NPS" collects an assessment of the recruiters' work from hiring managers. For roles and access, read the article on managing a recruiter team.

Sources and reasons

"Resume sources" and "Hiring sources" show which channels bring in the people you hire. "Rejections" reveals the reasons and the stages at which you lose candidates. There are separate reports for OLX and the career page, and "Multi-vacancies" shows the progress of group hiring drives.

All reports can be filtered by period, vacancy, recruiter, pipeline, stage, rejection reason and client. Filters can be saved, and many reports can be exported to Excel.

Teamwork without lost agreements

• Six roles: owner, administrator, recruiter, client, observer, employee. A recruiter sees the vacancies where they are responsible, a deputy or an observer.
• A unified messenger: conversations with candidates from all channels in one window, and the reply goes out in the same channel. More in the article on the omnichannel messenger.
• Notifications, comments, approvals and a change log.
• Projects with a board, a table and a Gantt chart for internal tasks, such as starting a hiring drive for a new client.

How to start: an agency checklist

1. Choose the "Recruitment agency" type in the organization settings.
2. Add clients, then contact persons, terms and an account manager.
3. Link vacancies to clients and check that the pipeline has the "Presented to the client" stage.
4. Connect job boards and messengers, and prepare an interview script and a knowledge base for high-volume vacancies.
5. Give clients the role and check that contacts and salary are hidden the way you want.
6. After two weeks, open the "Clients" report and see where vacancies get stuck and who makes decisions the slowest.

If you are choosing a system, there is an overview of the requirements in the guide to ATS systems.

Frequently asked questions