An ATS keeps every open role and every candidate in one structured pipeline instead of scattered across inboxes, spreadsheets and chat threads. The core loop: publish a job, collect applications, move candidates through stages — screening, interviews, offer — and end each one with an explicit hire or an archive with a reason.
What a 5–50-person services company actually needs from one:
- A Kanban pipeline per job — where every candidate stands, and what has been stuck for a week, visible at a glance.
- Structured interview feedback — scorecards instead of "seemed strong" in a chat thread.
- A careers page fed by the same data — the job is published once, not maintained in two places.
- GDPR hygiene — CVs are personal data; consent tracking and retention limits are the ATS's job, not an annual cleanup.
- A handoff into HR — the hired candidate becomes an employee record without retyping their details.
The classic mistake at this size is buying an agency-grade ATS built for thousands of applications a month, then abandoning it because maintaining the tool costs more than the hiring. For a team hiring a handful of people per quarter, process discipline beats feature count.
In Helia, the Recruitment pack is the ATS: jobs with AI-drafted descriptions, CV parsing and screening, a Kanban pipeline per job, per-interview scorecards, a hosted careers page, and a hire→employee handoff that creates the employee record straight from the candidate.