Change your careers site before you change your ATS

If hiring feels broken, change the careers site and the application first, and decide about the ATS last. The front end is where candidates are won and lost, it can change in weeks on the ATS you already have, and it should outlast whichever system of record sits beneath it.

That runs against the usual instinct. Hiring is slow, the team is stretched, candidates complain, and the ATS takes the blame. A replacement project follows, and everything else waits for it. Three years of application data suggests that order is usually backwards, for a reason most ATS business cases never see.

Where candidates are actually lost

Follow what happens between someone tapping apply and an application landing in your system, and three things stand out.

• Most applications start on a phone. 74% of the 2.23 million application starts in our data were made on one, usually away from a desk and often between shifts.
• A third of the people who start never finish. In the year to September 2026, 67% of 3.96 million application starts ended as a finished application. That is roughly 1.3 million people who wanted a job enough to begin, and then stopped.
• The losses gather at a handful of steps, and you can name them. A sign-in or create-an-account step loses about one in ten of the people who reach it. A CV upload loses about one in sixteen. Every extra screen of questions costs roughly another four in a hundred.

Who leaves, at the step itself

• Sign in or create an account9.8%of 621,063 who reached it
• Upload a CV6.3%of 776,847 who reached it
• Each extra question screenabout 4%at every screen added

0%10%

Who finishes, by how long the application takes

• Under 5 minutes78%of starters finish
• 5 to 15 minutes63%of starters finish

Those costs compound. Put an account wall, a CV upload and five more question screens than the role needs into one application, and rough arithmetic on the rates above says close to a third of the people who started are gone before a recruiter sees anything. Length tells the same story from the other side: fifteen points of finished applications separate a short application from a long one.

Your ATS can’t see any of this

Here is the part that changes the conversation. In every application behind these numbers, the losses happen before the candidate reaches the ATS. The ATS’s reports start with the applications it received, so the people who left on the way were never there to count.

Every 100 people who start an application

67finish. Your ATS records every one of them.

33leave on the way. Your ATS never knows they were there.

That has three consequences, and each of them cuts against starting with the ATS.

• The business case is built on the wrong data. ATS reports count the people who applied. The biggest leak in hiring sits upstream of them, so a case for a new ATS is usually argued from numbers that leave out a third of the candidates.
• The costliest steps are often the ATS’s own. Accounts, CV uploads and one long form for every role tend to be there because the system of record wants them, not because the candidate does. The record’s needs leak into the front door.
• A new ATS often brings the same front door. Most come with a bundled careers page and application, built for the same job as the one you are replacing, so the leak moves house with you.

Your ATS tells you who applied. It can’t tell you who nearly did.

Two systems, two jobs

An ATS and a careers site look like parts of one thing. They do different jobs, and they pull in different directions.

A good system of record is stable, standardised and changes rarely. A good front door changes all the time. When one product tries to do both, one of the jobs loses, and it is almost always the candidate’s.

What the careers page your ATS came with costs

Most ATSs come with a careers page. It looks like a saving, because it is already in the contract. The cost shows up elsewhere.

• One application for every role. The same questions, the same login and the same request for a CV, whether the role is a weekend kitchen porter or a regional manager.
• Every change is a ticket. A seasonal campaign, a new location or a new brand waits in the vendor’s queue, so the site falls behind the business.
• The brand stops at the apply button. People who know you as customers move from your own site to something that looks like a different company.
• The story stops at the application. The ATS knows who applied, but rarely where they came from or what they cost, so the budget cannot follow the results.
• It is tied to the contract. Change the ATS and the careers site changes with it: new pages, new addresses, and a history of what worked that starts again from nothing.

Apply · Fitness Coach00:58

FCFitness CoachIllustrative role

Basic details

What’s your first name?

Maya

Do you have the right to work in the UK?

Yes

For this role

Do you hold a Level 3 PT qualification?

Yes, Level 3

Thanks, that’s everything. Application complete.

Type your answer

Why the ATS project is the slower fix

Replacing an ATS is one of the largest projects a talent team takes on. Before anything changes for a candidate, it needs:

• a business case, and a place in the budget cycle
• a tender and a contract
• data migration, and integration with HR and payroll
• retraining for every recruiter and hiring manager

Plans slip when a budget round is missed, and the date moves by a year. For all of that time, candidates keep meeting the old front door, and the third who leave keep leaving.

The front end runs on a different clock. A standard inploi implementation takes eight to twelve weeks, depending on scope and how quickly your team can review and approve content, and it runs on the ATS you already have. You can measure the effect in the same budget year.

Change in this order

Most teams get further by changing their hiring stack in this order.

1. 1

   Weeks, on the ATS you already have

   Fix what candidates meet

   • A careers site that loads fast on a phone and carries your brand to the apply button
   • An application that asks only what this role needs, and writes every answer into the ATS

   You come away with where people leave, and why

2. 2

   From the first day the new front is live

   Take the admin off the team, and measure

   • Agents answer candidates’ questions and read every application
   • Every applicant and hire traced back to the source that brought them

   You come away with which channels bring hires, and what the ATS is really asked to do

3. 3

   Last, with the evidence in hand

   Decide about the system of record

   • Keep it, change how it is configured, or replace it
   • Whichever you choose, the front stays: same site, same addresses, same reporting

   You come away with a decision, rather than a rescue

Done this way round, step three is a decision rather than a rescue. And because the front end is independent of the ATS, it stays put if the system beneath it changes: the same site, the same addresses, the same application and the same reporting, now writing to a different system of record.

Two of the employers we work with show what the first step can do on its own. Each changed the front and kept the ATS it had.

What to ask before an ATS project

Before you sign off a replacement, answer these with the people who will run it.

Where inploi fits

inploi builds the part candidates meet, as a layer above your ATS and independent of every ATS vendor: careers sites, conversational apply, an agent that answers candidates’ questions, and analytics and attribution from first click to hire. ATS sync runs in both directions across 100+ integrations, so jobs come out of your ATS, finished applications go back in, and the ATS stays the system of record.

WorkdaySAP SuccessFactorsCornerstoneiCIMSOracleTribepadSmartRecruitersEployDayforce

If your ATS is one of the reasons hiring feels constrained, our page on getting more from the ATS you have sets out what that layer does. There is more of our thinking under careers sites.