Your hiring runs on a system. Someone should have built it on purpose.
We implement the ATS, build the sourcing and screening engine that fills it, and design how your company hires — the levels, the loop, the scorecards. Then we wire it to the rest of your stack so an accepted offer becomes an employee record without anyone retyping it.
Where most agencies hand over and disappear. Ours is soldered: accepted offer, triggered onboarding.
An employee record, not a fresh round of manual entry — and a clean first morning.
You already know the symptoms.
The question is whether anyone has named the cause.
Headcount nobody can reconcile
A req gets opened in the ATS that doesn’t map to a budget line in finance. Multiply by a quarter. Now the hiring plan and the financial plan are two documents that disagree, and nobody can say by how much.
The same job with three names
“Senior Engineer” in the ATS, “Engineer III” in the HRIS, “SWE-3” in the comp band. Every report is a manual reconciliation. Every comp conversation starts with an argument about levels.
A hire that gets typed twice
Offer accepted Friday, someone re-keys name, comp, start date, manager and department into the HRIS on Monday. Sometimes correctly. The first payroll run tells you which.
Integrations nobody owns
It worked when it was built. A vendor shipped an API change and it stopped, quietly, and the first person to notice was an employee who didn’t get paid.
None of this is a recruiting problem. It’s an architecture problem that shows up during recruiting.
Eight parts. The joins between them are the work.
The machine that hires
The ATS, selected and implemented
Not a shortlist in a deck — the system chosen against how you actually hire, then stood up: pipelines, stages, permissions, templates, offer approvals, and every field mapped before a single req goes live. Ashby, Gem and Greenhouse are where we spend most weeks. If you already have one and it was never set up properly, we rebuild it in place rather than sell you a migration.
The sourcing and screening engine
The machine that puts qualified people in front of your hiring managers: sourcing sequences, outreach that gets answered, screening criteria applied the same way to the tenth candidate as the first, and automations that move someone forward without a recruiter remembering to. This is the part that turns an empty ATS into a pipeline.
How your company hires, designed
Levels and scorecards, the interview loop and who sits in it, what each stage is actually testing, the criteria weighting, and the decision rule at the end. Most teams have never written this down, so hiring quality tracks whoever happens to run the loop — and structure is the first thing to disappear when hiring gets busy. We design it with you and leave it as an artifact your managers own, defensible under scrutiny, not a habit living in one person’s head.
The architecture underneath it
Requisition and headcount architecture
Every open role tied to a cost center, a budget line, and a position ID that survives a backfill. Approved headcount, open reqs and filled seats reconcile to the same number in HR and in finance, on demand, without a spreadsheet in the middle.
Taxonomy alignment
One set of job titles, levels, departments and stage definitions, matching across the ATS, the HRIS and the comp structure. Unglamorous. Nobody does it. Everybody pays for skipping it.
ATS to HRIS data bridge
Bi-directional sync, built native where native exists and on APIs and webhooks where it doesn’t. An accepted offer triggers the employee record and the onboarding workflow. We tell you which fields transfer, which documents follow, and what happens when one fails.
What keeps it working
Integration reliability
Monitoring on every sync, alerts on failure, sandbox before production, and a named owner for regression testing when a vendor changes an API. Built to be maintained, not admired.
Security and audit posture
OAuth over stored credentials. Field-level encryption on identifiers. Immutable logs carrying event ID, source system, actor and timestamp — because an auditor asking how a comp figure moved between two systems is a question with a correct answer or an expensive one.
Automation scales an error as fast as a good decision.
Screening, summarization and ranked shortlists work, and we build them. We also build the review layer underneath — because a screening model that quietly filters on a proxy variable is an adverse impact finding with a timestamp on it.
Most people selling you the first half cannot build the second. That is the whole reason to buy this from an HR firm instead of an integrations shop.
Three things we deliberately don’t do.
Not an agency retainer
Scoped work with a start and an end. Audit, design, build, hand over. You keep the artifacts.
Not a tool recommendation in a deck
We select and implement the ATS, then configure it — or rebuild the one you already have. The deliverable is a working stack, not a slide about one.
Not something only we can operate
Your team runs it after we leave. If a build needs our continued involvement to function, we built it wrong.
We can run the searches too.
Some clients want the system built and the seat filled while it beds in. We do that, embedded in your ATS rather than around it, executing the same structured process we just designed.
It is not the reason to call us. Capacity is deliberate and limited, and we will tell you on the first call whether we have it. If your onboarding is broken, hiring faster only makes the problem arrive sooner — we will say that on the first call too.
The handoff stops being a handoff.
Recruiting and people ops break at the same seam: accepted offer, new employee.
A vendor on each side of that seam means a re-keyed record. When we run both, nothing changes hands.
Managed people opsIt also works standalone. You don’t have to move your operations to fix your architecture.
Most clients start with one of the two and add the other once hiring picks up again — usually right after a round closes.
Systems build, from $15k.
Scoped after the first call. Embedded search, when we have capacity, runs as a percentage of first-year salary — quoted in writing before the search opens. See pricing
What people ask about this one.
How is this priced?
The systems build is a fixed project from $15k, scoped after the first call. Embedded searches, when we have capacity, run as a percentage of first-year salary — quoted in writing before the search opens, and it does not move afterwards. The full structure, shared on our first call.
We already have an ATS. What is there to build?
The ATS is rarely the problem. The problem is everything it does not agree with: reqs that do not map to budget lines, a job title that means three different things in three systems, and an accepted offer that becomes an employee record only because somebody retyped it. We work in the ATS you already own — the build is the architecture around it and the joins into your HRIS.
How long does a systems build take?
Most run four to six weeks: an audit, then the design, then the build and the handover. Taxonomy work is the part that stretches, because agreeing one set of titles and levels is a decision your leadership has to make rather than a configuration we can apply for you. We will tell you which parts are waiting on us and which are waiting on you.
What happens when a vendor changes their API after you have left?
That is why monitoring and a named owner are part of the build rather than an upsell. Every sync is monitored, failures alert someone specific, and changes are tested in a sandbox before production. If you would rather we held that ownership, it belongs in a retainer — but the system is built so your team can hold it.
Do you do the recruiting, or just the systems?
The systems are the reason to call us. We do run embedded searches for some clients while a new system beds in, inside your ATS and on the structured process we just designed — but capacity is deliberate and limited, and we will tell you on the first call whether we have it.
How does this pair with managed people ops?
Directly. Recruiting and people ops break at the same seam — accepted offer, new employee. When we run both, that handoff stops being a negotiation between two vendors and becomes one internal step. It also works standalone: you do not have to move your operations to fix your architecture.
20 minutes. No deck. No pitch.
You talk. We map what you’re running and where to start. The fixed quote follows the call, in writing.