Most firms know whether their recruiters like the system. Very few know whether they are actually using it.<\/p>\n
Those are different questions, and the second one is rarely answered by complaints. It is answered by the parallel system: the personal notes file, the spreadsheet that never gets shared, the browser tab where the real work happens. Nobody announces that they have stopped using the database. The workflow just quietly evolves to route around it.<\/p>\n
MBR Partners had reached exactly that point before they changed platforms. What happened next is the useful part: placements rose 75%, and the thing that changed first was not sourcing or headcount. It was whether the team opened the system at all.<\/p>\n
This post covers what working around your own database actually costs, why teams do it, and what changed for MBR.<\/p>\n
MBR Partners was founded in 2001 by Mike Barrell and works globally across telecom, security, finance, mobility, enterprise software, and ITO and BPO. They place C-level and leadership roles alongside sales, delivery, marketing and technical hires.<\/p>\n
Neil Martin, Partner and MD of Talent Acquisition, describes the position they were in before the move: a cloud platform they had inherited through an acquisition, a workflow that had gradually evolved to exclude it, and a team that had reverted to their own notes and to LinkedIn.<\/p>\n
“As a business owner, it was important to find a product that the team saw a benefit in using, enhancing collaboration across the business and for us to scale with.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Neil Martin, Partner and MD Talent Acquisition, MBR Partners<\/em><\/p>\n
<\/span>What working around the system costs<\/span><\/h2>\n
The cost is not the licence fee, though that is the number most people reach for. The cost is that the firm stops accumulating.<\/p>\n
Around 71% of placements come from candidates already in the database before the job opened (Source: The Economics of Recruiting<\/a>)<\/em>. That number only holds if what your recruiters learn actually lands somewhere findable. A conversation recorded in someone’s personal notes is not in the database. It is in a file that leaves when they do.<\/p>\n
Three things follow, and they compound quietly.<\/p>\n
The record develops holes in the middle<\/h3>\n
Names and titles usually still get entered, because those are the fields a colleague will ask about. What goes missing is the reasoning: why a candidate said no, what they actually wanted, which client contact makes the decision. That is the layer that makes a database worth searching, and it is the first thing to move into a private file.<\/p>\n
Reporting becomes a description of the system, not the desk<\/h3>\n
Any report is only a picture of what was logged. Once a meaningful share of the work happens outside the platform, the numbers stop describing the business and start describing data entry habits. Decisions get made on them anyway.<\/p>\n
Handovers stop working<\/h3>\n
A desk that lives in one person’s notes cannot be covered during leave, split when it grows, or transferred when they leave. This is invisible right up until the week it matters.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Why teams work around it<\/span><\/h2>\n
Recruiters are not avoiding the system out of stubbornness. In almost every case the shortcut is genuinely faster on the day, and three things make it so.<\/p>\n
The workflow belongs to the vendor.<\/strong> When the platform enforces its own sequence rather than adapting to how the desk actually runs, every task carries a translation cost. People route around translation costs.<\/p>\n
The shortcut is cheaper per action.<\/strong> If adding a profile takes six clicks and a tab change, and pasting it into a personal file takes one, the file wins every busy afternoon. Adoption is decided by this comparison, repeated a hundred times a week.<\/p>\n
The part that would have helped is sold separately.<\/strong> Discovering that the functionality you assumed was standard requires a partner integration and a second invoice is how a rollout stalls. The team concludes the system does not do the thing, and stops looking.<\/p>\n
None of these are training problems, which is why more training rarely fixes them.<\/p>\n
<\/span>What changed for MBR Partners<\/span><\/h2>\n
Neil did not start with a rollout. He signed up, sourced a few candidates himself using Recruiterflow’s Chrome extension, and worked them before anyone else was involved. Only then did he invite the team, who got going without a training programme.<\/p>\n
That sequence is worth noting on its own. He tested the thing that decides adoption, which is whether an ordinary day’s work is faster, before committing anyone to it.<\/p>\n
Three specifics made the difference in practice.<\/p>\n
The work happens where the work already is.<\/strong> Profiles get added, jobs assigned and notes written from the inbox and from LinkedIn without changing tabs. The shortcut and the system became the same action, which is the only reliable way to win that comparison.<\/p>\n
Qualification happens before the call.<\/strong> Automated recipes collect most of what a recruiter needs from a candidate ahead of the conversation, so the call starts further along instead of covering ground a form could have.<\/p>\n
Compliance runs on its own.<\/strong> GDPR obligations are handled by the platform rather than by someone remembering, which removes a class of work that is pure overhead and gets skipped under pressure.<\/p>\n
Placements rose 75%.<\/p>\n
<\/span>What transfers<\/span><\/h2>\n
You do not need to change platforms for this to be useful.<\/p>\n
Measure adoption, not licences.<\/strong> Pick a week and check what share of candidate contacts have a note, and how many of those notes contain anything beyond the fact that a call happened. That number tells you what your database will be worth in two years.<\/p>\n
Judge a system by the shortcut it removes.<\/strong> Feature lists do not predict adoption. Count the clicks between where a recruiter finds a candidate and where that candidate is recorded. If the answer is more than a couple, the private file will keep winning.<\/p>\n
Test it the way the desk will run it.<\/strong> Work a real search end to end before any rollout plan exists. A demo shows you the intended workflow. A live search shows you the one you will actually get.<\/p>\n
The underlying point is the same one that shows up whenever a firm’s output changes without its headcount changing: the constraint is usually somewhere nobody is measuring. For PAC Solutions it sat in the middle of the funnel<\/a>. Here it sat at the point of entry, which is upstream of everything else, because a database you can actually work<\/a> has to be populated first.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Check what your database is actually holding<\/span><\/h2>\n
Pull twenty candidates your team spoke to last month and see how much of each conversation a colleague could reconstruct from the record alone.<\/p>\n
Bring what you find to a demo and we will show you which of those gaps are process and which are the system charging your recruiters too much per action.<\/p>\n
You can read the full MBR Partners case study<\/a>, and if you are weighing a move, what a migration does and does not carry across<\/a> is worth reading first.<\/p>\n
<\/span>FAQs<\/span><\/h2>\n
Why do recruiters not use the ATS?<\/h3>\n
Usually because the shortcut is faster per action. If recording a candidate takes more steps than keeping a private note, the private note wins under load. Enforced vendor workflows and functionality sold as paid add-ons make the gap wider.<\/p>\n
How do you improve ATS adoption?<\/h3>\n
Reduce the cost of the action rather than mandating the behaviour. Adoption follows when adding a candidate, assigning a job or writing a note happens inside the tools recruiters already have open, and when the system adapts to the desk’s workflow rather than the reverse.<\/p>\n
How do you measure ATS adoption?<\/h3>\n
Not by licences or logins. Check what proportion of candidate conversations produced a note with substance in it, and how much of a desk a colleague could pick up from the records alone. Both describe whether the database is accumulating anything.<\/p>\n
What happens when recruiters keep their own candidate records?<\/h3>\n
The firm stops compounding. Structured fields stay roughly complete while the reasoning behind decisions moves into private files, reporting starts describing data entry rather than the business, and desks become impossible to cover or hand over.<\/p>\n
Is low ATS adoption a training problem?<\/h3>\n
Rarely. Training changes what people know how to do, not what is fastest on a busy afternoon. If the workaround remains cheaper per action after training, the workaround returns within a few weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"