Last week a managing director of a UK recruitment firm turned me down, and his reason was the best sales lesson I've had all year. It wasn't the price. In his words: the investment of time and energy they had put into their ATS over the years (screening scripts, templates, integrations with their website, email and phone system) was the main reason. There simply wasn't enough dissatisfaction to justify walking away from it.
He's right. And if you're in his position, you should stay on your ATS too. Here's how to tell.
Stay where you are if most of this is true
Your ATS is shaped to your process. Years of your own scripts, templates and integrations live in it. That work is real value, not a sunk-cost fallacy. Walking away from it should hurt, and any replacement has to be better by more than the cost of rebuilding all of it.
Your team actually uses it. Not "has logins", uses it. The pipeline in the system matches reality, and nobody keeps a private spreadsheet on the side because the system is where the work happens.
The bill is boring. You know what you pay, it doesn't jump at renewal, and it's a sane share of what a desk earns.
Your complaints are annoyances, not money leaks. Every system has irritations. An irritation is not a reason to spend months migrating.
If that's you, close this tab and go do placements. Genuinely.
Start doing the maths when this happens
The per-seat bill crossed the line. Ten users at a typical mid-market rate is one thing. At 20 or 30 users, rented software quietly becomes a six-figure line item every few years, and you own nothing at the end of it.
The real work moved outside the system. If placements actually happen in spreadsheets, inboxes and someone's memory, and the ATS is just where things get logged afterwards, you are already running a custom system. It's just held together with copy-paste, and you're paying rent on top of it.
Renewal day brought a surprise. A price hike, a feature you rely on moved to a higher tier, an AI add-on priced per seat. And notice the direction: the rent only ever moves up. Next year's increase is coming whether your desk grew or not. Vendors do this because leaving is painful, and they know it.
You've started worrying about your data. Export formats, API limits, what happens to twenty years of candidates if you leave. The moment you feel like a hostage rather than a customer, the relationship has changed, whatever the software costs.
The learning curve flattened. "We're getting better at using it every year" is a great reason to stay, while it's true. When you've plateaued and the gaps are still gaps, that reason has expired.
One thing worth noticing about that sunk cost
The years of scripts, templates and integrations that keep you loyal to your ATS: who actually built them? Almost always, you did. Evenings, weekends, the admin-minded recruiter who slowly became the unofficial system person. That was unpaid development work, done by your team, on software you rent. And the result lives on the vendor's platform, so you lose it the day you leave.
It's still a real switching cost, I won't pretend otherwise. But it changes the "custom is too expensive" objection. You already paid for custom once, in your own hours. The difference with a system built for you is that the building is my job, not yours, and what comes out of it is yours to keep.
The middle path nobody sells you
Here's the part both sides of the market skip: you don't have to switch to fix the gaps. If your ATS does candidates and jobs well, but certificates expire in a spreadsheet, client development lives in Outlook and your old CV archive is unsearchable, the cheaper move is often to build the missing layer alongside the ATS, not to replace it. On infrastructure you already pay for, owned by you. Keep what works, fix what leaks.
That's not a compromise position. A migration risks everything at once; a layer next to the system risks nothing that already works.
The honest summary
Switching an ATS is like moving house: never worth it to escape an annoying neighbour, absolutely worth it when the roof leaks and the rent keeps climbing. Most firms I talk to are somewhere in between, and my honest advice to about half of them is some version of "stay, you're fine".
If you're in the other half, where the bill keeps growing, the spreadsheets keep multiplying and renewal day makes your jaw tighten, that's what I do all day: custom recruitment systems on the Microsoft 365 you already pay for, that you own outright. But bookmark this for renewal day rather than acting on it today. Dissatisfaction, like the MD said, has to be earned by the software.
Not sure which half you're in?
Send me two numbers: what your ATS costs you per year, and how many people actually use it. I'll tell you honestly whether staying is the smart move. One email back, no call needed, and "stay where you are" is a real possible answer.
Send the two numbers →