Count the contracts your talent team touches and you'll likely reach a dozen. The way most teams consolidate just rearranges the sprawl. Here's the simpler answer: two platforms, not twelve.
Open every contract your talent team touches and count them. No, not just the big ones. All of them.
The applicant tracking system, of course. Then the careers-site builder. The scheduling tool. The assessment vendor. The video-interview platform. The background-check provider. The texting tool. The sourcing extension. The notetaker. The reporting add-on someone bought to make sense of everything else.
By the time you reach the end of the list, most organizations are running a dozen separate tools to fill a single role. Each has its own login, its own contract, its own security review, and its own copy of the candidate.
But that sprawl is starting to come under scrutiny. And the way those organizations are approaching it risks creating a different version of the same problem.
It's worth being honest about how the stack got this big, because I'm sure it wasn't carelessness. At some point , every one of those tools was bought to solve a real problem the core ATS couldn't: the careers-site builder because the built-in one couldn't handle multiple brands. The volume-hiring add-on because the system was designed around corporate recruiting.
In plenty of cases, maybe even a second ATS was purchased, because no single platform could support both head-office hiring and frontline hiring across hundreds of locations.
The stack grew because the core platform only fit part of the organization. Everything else got added to fill the gaps. And that's the context behind a conversation I'm hearing more often.
A CFO or CIO looks at the renewal list, counts the number of vendors involved in hiring, and asks a perfectly reasonable question: why are we paying for all of these?
The trouble is that “we have too many tools” can quickly become “let's fold everything into something we already own.” Which is where consolidation often starts heading in the wrong direction.
The first is to make the HRIS the center of everything.
You already own it for payroll and core HR, so the logic feels straightforward: run hiring through the recruiting module and consolidate around that.
The problem is that recruiting modules inside HRIS suites are rarely strong enough to handle every aspect of hiring on their own. So the careers-site platform stays. The scheduling tool stays. The assessment vendor stays. The sourcing tool stays.
The stack is still there. It's just been rearranged around a different center.
The second approach is to go the other way and build a best-of-breed stack.
Pick the strongest tool for every stage of the process and connect them together.
In theory, that sounds sensible. In practice, it leaves you managing a dozen vendors, a dozen integrations, and a dozen places where candidate data can drift out of sync. Every tool might be excellent individually, but the hiring process still ends up spread across more systems than anyone would choose from scratch.
Both approaches address part of the problem without really addressing why the stack became so large in the first place.
I think the answer is simpler than either of those approaches. Most organizations don't need twelve tools. But they don't need one giant suite trying to do everything either.
What they need is a platform that genuinely covers the pre-hire side of the employee lifecycle, paired with an HRIS that genuinely covers what comes after.
One platform for sourcing, careers sites, applications, scheduling, interviews, assessments, communication, and offers.
One platform for employee records, payroll, workforce management, and everything that follows.
And one deep, reliable integration between them.
When I say two platforms, I don't mean two products that happen to be large. I mean two systems that each do their part of the job well enough that you're no longer constantly reaching for another tool to fill the gaps.
The pre-hire platform should be broad and deep enough that point solutions become exceptions rather than necessities. The HRIS should be able to focus on what happens once somebody becomes an employee.
That's a very different proposition from trying to stitch together a dozen overlapping products and hoping they behave like one system.
The cost saving is the obvious part, and it's real. Fewer vendors, fewer contracts, fewer security reviews. All of that matters. But the bigger return shows up later.
Every tool you remove is one less place your data can scatter to. The fewer systems your hiring process runs across, the easier it becomes to maintain a complete picture of what's happening, and the easier it becomes to trust that picture when you're making decisions.
That's valuable for reporting, for automation, and it's increasingly valuable for AI.
The Josh Bersin Company arrives at a similar conclusion from a different direction. Their research argues that fragmented hiring data becomes siloed and duplicated, and that the real value comes from creating a connected view of the organization that leaders can reason over.
That's easier to achieve when your stack is simpler.
Fewer integrations also means fewer points of failure. Fewer logins means people are more likely to use the system in front of them instead of finding another workaround. Over time, those benefits compound.
Consolidation done well leaves you with cleaner data, fewer operational headaches, and a clearer view of what's actually happening across hiring.
Of course this doesn't mean that every organization will run exactly two tools forever, there will always be genuine edge cases.
But the point is the niche use cases shouldn't become the foundation of how the organization hires.
And handling those exceptions is getting easier. As open MCP standards mature, connecting a genuinely specialist tool into a broader workflow is becoming less painful than the brittle integrations most teams have lived with for years.
The principle is fairly straightforward: consolidate the core and integrate the exceptions.
That's a very different environment from a dozen essential tools all trying to act as part of the same platform.
Obviously, I have a point of view here.
We built Pinpoint as a pre-hire platform because we believe organizations shouldn't need a fan of point solutions around their ATS. We also believe the integration that matters most is the one into the HRIS, which is why we invest heavily in it.
But I don't think you need to agree with any of that to see where this is heading.
Pull up your own renewal list. Count the vendors. Then ask how many of those tools exist only because the core platform was never quite capable enough on its own.
That's the question more organizations are starting to ask. Because every extra tool brings another contract, another integration, another security review, another place for data to drift, and another thing for somebody to manage.
Which is why I think the move towards consolidation is already underway.
The more interesting question shouldn't be “what happens when my tech stack gets smaller?”, instead we should be asking, what survives?
My guess is that most organizations end up with a pre-hire platform, an HRIS, and a small number of genuinely specialist tools at the edges. Everything else gets absorbed, replaced, or simply stops being necessary.
The organizations that get there successfully won't be the ones that picked the cheapest option or the most convenient one. They'll be the ones that consolidated onto platforms that genuinely removed the need for the extras in the first place.
Tom is the CEO at Pinpoint, he's passionate about building world-class teams and world-class products for organizations around the world.
