Most organizations think they have one hiring process. Map it honestly and you'll find several, each with its own shape, and an ATS built for just one of them quietly breaks the rest.
In the early days of Pinpoint, we won a postal service as a customer. I remember it clearly because of one detail: on that same morning, the talent team was hiring two completely different kinds of people.
On one side, they were recruiting the couriers who deliver the mail, hiring at volume, where success means moving quickly and getting someone trained and out on a route.
On the other hand, they were searching for their next CEO, a process that would take months, involve a tiny shortlist, and be scrutinized by the board at every step.
The same organization, the same talent team, and, on paper, the same hiring process.
But in reality, these are two jobs that share almost nothing.
Run both through the same hiring process, and you make both worse. The courier gets an experience designed for executive search: slow, over-engineered, and full of friction. Before you've made a decision, they've accepted a job somewhere else.
The CEO gets the opposite. They're asked to navigate a process built for volume hiring, complete an application that feels irrelevant, and answer questions that have nothing to do with the role. At some point, they start to wonder whether the organization is taking the search seriously.
Everything about these hires is different. The assessments. The interview process. The people who need to be involved. The timelines. The decisions being made.
One process, forced onto two completely different types of hiring, serves neither well.
I start with that story because it's an obvious example of something almost every organization is dealing with. Not just between couriers and CEOs, but across hundreds of roles that demand different hiring approaches, yet are still expected to fit inside the same process.
Ask a leader to describe how their company hires, and you'll hear about “our hiring process,” singular.
But it's never one singular process.
Map it honestly, and most organizations of any size are running at least three to five genuinely different shapes of hiring at once.
There's head-office hiring, where a recruiter carefully screens a small number of candidates. There's high-volume frontline or deskless hiring, where you're hiring hundreds of people for stores, sites, warehouses, or routes, and speed is everything. There's early-career hiring, where graduate and apprentice intake runs on its own calendar. There's the seasonal ramp, where you hire a year's worth of people in six weeks. And there's high-touch, confidential executive search, where relationships are built over years.
Those are different jobs. Different candidates, different timelines, different managers, different definitions of a good outcome.
Then you multiply all of that by geography.
The way you have to hire in one region isn't the way you can hire in the next. Different compliance regimes. Different candidate expectations. Different norms about what an interview even is.
So the company that thought it had one hiring process actually has its three-to-five hiring shapes running across however many markets it operates in. Ten is not a stretch. In fact, for many organizations, it's conservative.
Almost every applicant tracking system on the market is built, deep down, for one of those shapes. Usually mid-career corporate hiring, because that's the comfortable, recognizable shape that demos well.
It does that shape genuinely well. It does the others badly, or not at all.
So the teams that it doesn't fit do the only sensible thing: they route around it.
The high-volume team gives up on the system and runs the whole thing out of a spreadsheet because the ATS can't move fast enough. Hiring-manager feedback stops landing in the system and starts living in email, Slack, or Teams because asking a busy manager to log in and navigate to the right screen is a fight you lose. New-hire onboarding migrates into a side process in a spreadsheet nobody can see. Reporting gets stitched together by hand at the end of every month because no single system holds the whole picture.
And the candidate experience drifts away from anything you'd have signed off on, because each team is improvising its own.
None of that is a discipline problem.
I want to be clear about that, because it's almost always read as one.
The natural conclusion is that people need more training, more reminders, or a stricter policy. But you can't train your way out of this. People route around a tool that doesn't fit the work they're doing.
It's not defiance, it's just good sense.
The tool was built for one shape, and they hire in several.
In my experience, when an organization finally accepts the one-shape system can't carry everything, it starts to buy its way out, one gap at a time.
A second ATS for the volume team. Or a second instance of the same ATS, configured differently, with its own data that never quite reconciles with the first. Or, most commonly, a slowly growing fan of point tools and workarounds, each one bought or created to patch a place the core system didn't reach.
And now you have the real cost, and it isn't the license fees, though those add up. The real cost is fragmentation. Your hiring data lives in five places that don't agree. No one can see across the whole organization. Every report is a reconciliation exercise. Every new automation or AI tool you try to layer on top is working from a partial picture because the picture itself is partial.
The instinct is to treat that as a tooling problem and solve it with one more tool. But fragmentation isn't the cause; it's the symptom. You ended up fragmented because the core system only ever fit one hiring model, and you bought your way around the others.
It's not a niche problem. At Pinpoint, we work with CitizenM in hospitality, Lush in retail, Davies Group in professional services, Everi in tech, Tata Chemicals in manufacturing, and Big Hat in biosciences. Each of them is hiring in multiple forms: corporate, customer-facing, early-career, experienced, often seasonal and often global.
Regardless of industry, the gap between “our hiring process” and the shapes you actually run stops being a quirk and starts becoming the thing that determines whether any of it works.
So, what would it take to run all of that on a single system properly, without spreadsheets, side channels, or second instances?
The short version is that a system built for many shapes of hiring has to do something most weren't designed to do. It has to flex to fit each shape, whether that's the volume hire, the executive search, or the seasonal ramp, without forcing them all through one rigid path.
At the same time, it has to stay easy enough for hiring managers to actually use it, while remaining controlled enough to keep the data clean across every team and region.
Flexibility, ease of use, and control, all at once. That combination is rare, and when a system has it, it's rarely by accident. It's usually the thing it was built for.
Most ATS buying starts from the wrong question:
"Which one has the best features?"
You line up the demos, score the features, and pick a winner. The trouble is that “best” almost always means best at the one shape the demo focused on, which is exactly how you end up back where we started: with a great system for one type of hiring and a fan of workarounds for everything else.
The better question is quieter, and it's the one I'd put at the center of any ATS decision: which one works for the whole organization? The couriers and the CEO search. The early-career and experienced hires. I'm talking every region, every season, every shape of work you actually run.
We built Pinpoint to be the ATS for multi-stream hiring, which is a deliberately unglamorous way of saying we built it to be the system that fits the whole organization rather than one comfortable corner of it. That's the line we hold, and it's the line the rest of this series builds on.
But you don't need to take my word for any of it. Pull up your own hiring. Count the shapes honestly, by role type, by season, and by region. If the number is more than one, and it almost always is, then you already know your company doesn't have a hiring process. It has several. The only real question is whether your system knows that too.
Tom is the CEO at Pinpoint, he's passionate about building world-class teams and world-class products for organizations around the world.
