Which ATS can handle multiple recruiters and role approvals? #

Short answer: The best applicant tracking system for a growing company with multiple recruiters is one where adding people costs nothing, where user roles and permissions control exactly who views and edits which candidate data, and where recruiters and hiring managers review candidates together in one place. Recruitis has unlimited users on a flat price, six ready-made roles plus custom roles at no extra charge, ownership that is handed over by sharing, and a full history of who changed what.

Once hiring involves more than one recruiter, two things matter. The first is the pricing model: look for a system where you don't pay for each user account separately but one price for a chosen scope of features. The second is role approvals via requisitions – i.e. requests to open a role, from which a job posting is created and published to boards only after approval. Systems built for multiple users also bring SSO (single sign-on, which corporate cybersecurity now often requires), roles and access rights, a shared talent pool, and candidate recommendations from other recruiters' hires. Requisitions are also the only way to meaningfully track FTE in an ATS – i.e. how many full-time roles you're actually hiring for.

⚙️ Switch the guide to company mode Requisitions, approvals and the FTE report concern internal hiring – they unlock in the catalog once you select company.

With multiple recruiters, the pricing model decides #

If the ATS charges for each user account, you'll start counting licenses. And once you start counting them, you'll start cutting them: you won't add a junior recruiter, you won't add a hiring manager, you won't add a colleague who takes part in hiring only occasionally.

But that takes you right back where you were running from – to forwarding candidates over email. A system you can't afford to give to everyone involved in hiring doesn't fulfill its main function.

So look for a model where you pay for a scope of features, not per head. For a growing team, it's by far the most important line in the contract.

Features that only appear with multiple users #

As the number of people in the system grows, requirements appear that a single recruiter never missed:

• SSO (single sign-on). Users log in with their corporate identity, and accounts are created and removed centrally. It's not just convenience – at larger companies cybersecurity usually requires it, and without SSO the system won't pass IT approval.
  SSO · Azure SSO · Google SSO · Two-factor authentication
• Roles and access rights. Not every recruiter should see every role and every candidate.
  Roles and access rights · Audit log
• Tracking candidates across stages. With multiple recruiters, it's easy for a candidate to get stuck somewhere and no one notices.
  SLA on candidate processing · Automatic reminders
• Shared talent pool. A candidate found by one recruiter is an asset of the whole company – the system should offer them to others when a new role opens.
  Talent micro-pools · Candidate recommendations for a new role · AI search in the talent pool

User roles and permissions: who views and edits which candidate data #

Recruitis comes with fixed roles you can pick from right away. If none of them fits, we create a custom role for you.

Extended recruiter is the most typical role. Recruiters do not want their list of positions cluttered with colleagues' roles. But sharing the whole talent pool is key for them, because they reuse candidates from earlier searches.

The plain recruiter role is common in holding structures, where a group wants to keep its individual entities separate. Most companies also use roles to separate their branches.

The two hiring manager roles are different people. The first is usually the budget owner, a manager who needs to approve the candidate and the offer. The second is most often a future colleague who evaluates expertise. They should grade the candidate, not see what the candidate is asking for or being offered.

Sharing one candidate or the whole position. A recruiter can assign a hiring manager a single candidate: the manager then sees the position with just that one person in it. Or the recruiter shares the whole position, and the manager sees all its candidates, including those who arrive later.

Custom roles at no extra charge. Need a recruiter who must not see salary data? Ask, and we create that role for you. It is part of the service.

Ownership is handed over by sharing #

Roles define the default. Sharing changes it on purpose. A recruiter who cannot see a colleague's position gets access the moment that colleague shares it with them, and with it direct ownership. Companies use this all the time: to cover for someone who is out, or when a position turns out to have candidates who would suit a colleague's search.

Following a tag. Say you have five team leaders who all hire IT people. You share a candidate with the manager you are hiring for. But you want the other four to see such candidates in the talent pool too, so they can say "this one could fit my team", or look there first when they open their own position. Tag the candidate "IT", and everyone who follows that tag has access. A micro-pool inside the talent pool does the same job for a defined group of colleagues.

Who can edit a candidate record, and how you see what changed #

Only someone with direct ownership of a candidate can edit the record: the recruiter through their role, or a colleague or hiring manager who received the rights through sharing.

Every candidate has a complete activity feed: who changed what and when, who moved the candidate, who communicated with them, who added what. On top of that there is a system audit log you can download and see exactly who did what and when. It helps you get oriented on a candidate, and it serves your cybersecurity requirements too.

What is the best ATS for recruiters and hiring managers to review candidates together? #

One where they work on the same record, grade candidates on the same criteria, and talk to each other inside the system instead of by email.

• Share one candidate with several managers at once. This is unusual, and some companies rely on it heavily. Share a candidate with three managers and they discuss that person together: who wants to interview, who does not, or that all three want to be in the room because the candidate looks interesting.
• Scorecards and question sets go both ways. The manager sends the recruiter the questions they need answered up front. The recruiter prepares a culture-fit cross-check the manager completes in a few clicks.
• Shared candidate notes with @mentions. Mention a colleague and they are notified. Mention several and the note becomes a discussion thread. Notes follow the candidate across positions, within each user's permissions.
• Soft reject. A hiring manager can soft-reject a candidate. The candidate leaves the manager's view while the recruiter finishes the communication. No artificial "on the bench" stage is needed.
• SLA tracking. The system watches the SLA for each hiring manager and stage, and the recruiter can assign tasks under the same SLA.

All of this only works if everyone has their own account. With a flat price and unlimited users, they do. For every recruiter, count on roughly ten hiring managers, plus people who only watch.

Several recruiters on one position #

This is no problem at all, and companies run it in two ways.

A team leader assigns candidates. One of our customers is a government organization that works this way. The team leader, think of a head of a recruiting branch, owns the position and sees all its candidates. The recruiters have a lower role and see no candidates until the team leader assigns one to them to work on.

Recruiters share the position. Several recruiters share one position and all take part in the active search. They divide candidates among themselves with identifiers such as tags, or simply with notes.

It depends on how the company wants to process its candidates. Recruitis covers all of these scenarios, and because each person works under their own account and their own rights, nobody overwrites anyone else's data.

Role approvals: what a requisition is #

A requisition is a request to open a role. In it a manager describes who they need and why; the requisition goes through approval – typically by a superior and finance – and only after approval does a job posting come out of it, which is published to the career site and job boards.

That order is the whole point. Without a requisition, a posting appears the moment someone writes it. With a requisition, it appears only when the role is genuinely approved and funded.

Related features: Requisitions to open a role · Role-opening approvals · Notifications for the manager

Why requisitions are the key to FTE reporting #

FTE (full-time equivalent) expresses how many full-time roles a company is actually hiring for. It's not the same as the number of postings – one posting can mean ten roles, and three postings can mean one.

Because the number of roles being filled is tracked in the requisition, the ATS can build reporting on top of it that you otherwise have nowhere to get: how many roles were filled in a given period against approved requisitions, and how many are still open.

Without a requisition you don't know how many people (FTE) you're actually hiring for. You only know how many postings you have live.

Related features: FTE report · Open and closed roles · Overview of hired candidates · Time to fill

The complete list of questions for an ATS vendor →

About the author: Štěpán Bartyzal studied systems engineering, which taught him to see recruitment as a system and to design it as one. He has worked in talent acquisition for more than 20 years, including several years as an external talent acquisition specialist and recruiter for different companies. As Managing Director of Recruitis.io he has seen inside the hiring processes of hundreds of companies, across countries and across labor-market cycles. He writes about modern recruitment and the trends that change how companies hire.

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