*Co-authored by Ritu Mohanka and Tycho van Paassen
For many ATS, CRM and HCM providers, the commercial logic of the SMB market has traditionally looked limiting: lower contract values, greater price sensitivity and less room for extensive services.
That logic changes when the platform becomes more than a system of record.
Salesforce’s latest global study of 3,350 small and medium-sized business leaders across 26 countries points to a segment that is investing in technology, adopting AI and willing to spend more with providers it already trusts.¹ It also exposes one area where smaller businesses still feel markedly disadvantaged: hiring.
For HR technology providers, these findings raise a significant commercial question: how much more of the customer’s hiring spend can be brought into the platform they already use?
Three findings help answer it.
Trust creates a commercial advantage
SMB leaders have limited time to compare long lists of vendors, manage complex integrations or introduce another contract and workflow every time their needs change.
Trust therefore has a measurable value.
Some 81% of SMB leaders say they would spend more on technology from a trusted vendor, while the same percentage would pay more for technology that can scale with them. A further 77% prefer working with vendors with which they already have a relationship.¹
For an ATS or HCM provider, that creates an advantage that a standalone recruitment vendor must build from scratch: an established relationship, a place inside the customer’s daily workflow and, often, an existing commercial agreement.
The way SMBs prefer to purchase software strengthens that position. According to Salesforce, 62% would rather buy software through self-service than through a sales representative.¹ For frequent and repeatable hiring needs, activating an additional service inside an existing platform may suit both the customer’s workflow and its preferred buying experience.
This does not mean that every recruitment purchase belongs inside the ATS. Executive search, specialist recruitment and advisory work sit outside the normal platform experience.
Job advertising and distribution, Social content generation, candidate conversion, screening and interview orchestration are different. They are repeatable activities that begin with a vacancy and depend directly on the data and workflow already held in the ATS.
That is the realistic wallet-share opportunity: expanding from managing the hiring process to enabling more of the work required to produce a qualified shortlist.
SMB AI priorities map closely to hiring
SMBs are already adopting AI where small teams feel the greatest pressure: repetitive work, limited capacity and decisions that need to be made faster.
Salesforce found that 75% of SMBs are evaluating or using AI. Among those using it, 90% report more efficient operations and 85% expect to see a return on their investment.¹
The leading use cases include campaign optimisation, content generation and automated recommendations. Although these findings are not specific to recruitment, the overlap with hiring is striking.
For smaller hiring teams, the practical value of AI is capacity. It can handle repetitive work, accelerate decisions and allow people to concentrate on the parts of hiring that require judgement and human interaction.
Applied inside the recruitment workflow, campaign optimisation becomes smarter job advertising and media allocation. Content generation supports clearer job descriptions and stronger recruitment creativity. Automated recommendations can improve channel selection and help recruiters identify relevant candidates more consistently.
Screening and structured interviewing can then help smaller teams manage the resulting candidate response without creating another layer of manual work.
The opportunity for ATS, CRM and HCM platforms is therefore larger than adding another generic AI feature. It is to make AI useful within the context of the role, campaign, application and candidate data already held in the platform.
Hiring is where SMBs still feel the gap
SMB leaders believe they can compete effectively with larger companies in several areas.
Growing businesses feel advantaged in meeting customer expectations, operating efficiently and building customer loyalty. Hiring is the conspicuous exception.
Only 58% of growing SMBs believe they hold an advantage over larger companies in attracting and hiring talent. Among stagnant or declining SMBs, that figure falls to 27%.¹
This matters when 63% identify a larger company as their principal competitor.¹ Smaller businesses are competing for many of the same people without the same recruitment brand, specialist teams, technology or media resources.
The pressure remains visible in the wider labour market. ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Global Talent Shortage Survey found that 64% of employers with fewer than ten employees still experience difficulty filling roles.²
For a smaller employer, the challenge is rarely one missing feature. It is the machinery surrounding the vacancy.
The role must be written clearly enough to compete. It must reach candidates beyond the job boards the business already knows. The application journey must keep those candidates engaged. When applications arrive, someone must identify the strongest potential fit quickly and consistently, often without a dedicated talent acquisition team.
Larger employers can spread that work across specialist teams, agencies, media partners and enterprise technology. Asking an SMB to assemble the same capability through several standalone products creates more contracts, more interfaces and more disconnected data.
An embedded platform can close that operational gap.
The SMB opportunity is growing
Market estimates differ significantly in size, but they point in the same direction: adoption of cloud-based recruitment technology among smaller employers is growing.
Mordor Intelligence expects SMEs to be the fastest-growing customer segment in recruitment software, forecasting annual growth of 10.23% through 2031 as modular products and accessible pricing lower the barriers to adoption.³
For ATS providers, the strategic opportunity extends beyond adding more subscriptions. It lies in increasing the value of every customer relationship by bringing adjacent, frequently used hiring services into the existing workflow.
Smaller customers are unlikely to want an ATS provider to spend another roadmap cycle building job advertising, recruitment marketing or AI screening from scratch. They need those capabilities to be available when the hiring need arises, inside the platform they already know and at a price appropriate to their scale.
This is where an embedded ecosystem becomes commercially important. It allows the platform to expand quickly while preserving one coherent experience for the customer.
The part of the hiring wallet the ATS can realistically own, and perhaps should own
An SMB’s talent acquisition budget extends well beyond software. It may include internal recruitment staff, agencies and headhunters, employer branding, job advertising, assessments, screening tools and several other services.
It would be unrealistic to suggest that all this spend belongs inside the ATS. A meaningful part of it does.
Job content, advertising, candidate application, screening, interviewing and scoring are connected stages of the same workflow. Each begins with information already held in the ATS; each creates data that should return to the candidate record; and each becomes harder for a small team when it requires another vendor, contract and interface.
Illustration 1: Not every part of the recruitment wallet belongs in the ATS. The repeatable, data-connected stages of attracting and qualifying candidates do.
This is the part of the wallet that ATS providers are best positioned to capture.
Through HAPI, VONQ brings these capabilities into the partner’s existing platform. Customers can activate the services they need without rebuilding their hiring process around another collection of disconnected tools.
Direct Apply reduces the loss and duplication created when candidates are sent through fragmented application journeys, while returning complete application data to the ATS. Integrated advertising, content, screening and interviewing capabilities remove further handovers across the hiring journey.
For the end customer, this means less friction, fewer manual steps and better use of a limited recruitment budget. For the ATS partner, it creates additional revenue, deeper product adoption and a more valuable customer relationship.
Salesforce’s findings make the timing clear. SMBs are prepared to invest, prefer providers they already know and increasingly expect AI to deliver practical returns. Hiring remains one of the areas in which they feel least equipped to compete.
The opportunity is larger than another integration or marketplace listing. It is to turn the ATS from the place where applications are managed into the place where more of the qualified shortlist is produced.
The SMB hiring wallet already exists. HAPI helps ATS providers earn a larger, more valuable share of it. Here’s what that opportunity looks like for HAPI partners in numbers.
Modelling the opportunity
An SMB’s recruitment budget rarely sits in one place. It moves across job advertising, recruitment technology, employer branding, screening and, for some roles, external agencies.
Employ’s 2024 and 2025 Recruiter Nation research shows that recruitment technology and job advertising are among the areas where talent acquisition teams expect to increase investment. Spending is also moving towards applicant tracking systems, sourcing technology and AI-enabled recruiting tools.⁴ ⁵
These findings are not specific to SMBs and do not provide a complete breakdown of the SMB talent acquisition wallet. They do, however, indicate where additional recruitment investment is being directed.
Graph 1⁴ ⁵: Share of respondents planning additional spend in each area, Where talent acquisition teams expect to add budget. Source: Employ, Recruiter Nation Reports 2024 and 2025.
What might that opportunity look like for an individual customer?
Consider an illustrative SMB making 40 hires a year and spending approximately €3,750 per hire. That creates a total annual talent acquisition wallet of around €150,000.
Graph 2: The SMB talent acquisition wallet. Illustrative model, not survey data: 40 hires per year at approximately €3,750 per hire. This is a scenario model, not survey data.
Within that total wallet, approximately €40,500 is allocated in this model to activities closely connected to the ATS workflow: creating and advertising the vacancy, bringing candidates into the application journey, screening and interviewing them, and returning the resulting information to the recruiter.
Agency and headhunter expenditure has a different relationship with the platform. It may ultimately generate candidates and data that enter the ATS, but the service itself is usually commissioned and delivered outside the core workflow. That makes it less naturally addressable through an embedded platform offering.
The economics look different again when viewed from the partner’s perspective.
Graph 3: The same customer, from the partner’s P&L. Illustrative model: 25% partner share of the HAPI-enabled spend. The percentage is a modelling assumption, not a standard commercial commitment.
Under this scenario, a 25% share would generate just over €10,000 in annual partner revenue. Compared with an illustrative annual software subscription of approximately €12,000, the adjacent revenue opportunity is potentially significant.
More importantly, that revenue can grow with the customer’s hiring activity, rather than depending solely on additional licences or seats. In a segment where seat expansion may be limited and price sensitivity remains high, this creates a different route to account growth.
These activities are natural extensions of the ATS workflow. Through HAPI, VONQ enables ATS, HCM and recruitment CRM providers to embed capabilities spanning job content, advertising, application, screening and interviewing within their existing platforms.
For the SMB customer, this can mean fewer disconnected tools, less manual work and a faster, more cost-effective hiring process.
For the platform provider, it creates an opportunity to solve more of the customer’s hiring needs and participate in more of the value generated around each hire.
Sources
¹ Salesforce, Small & Medium Business Trends Report, 6th Edition. Global survey of 3,350 SMB leaders across 26 countries, conducted between August and September 2024.
² ManpowerGroup, 2026 Global Talent Shortage Survey. Based on 39,063 employers across 41 countries, with fieldwork completed in October 2025.
³ Mordor Intelligence, Recruitment Software Market Size and Share: Growth Trends and Forecasts, 2026–2031, updated August 2026.
⁴ Employ Inc., Recruiter Nation Report 2024: Empowering People-First Recruiting, pp. 29–30, based on a survey of more than 1,200 North American talent-acquisition decision-makers and recruiters.
⁵ Employ Inc., Recruiter Nation 2025: What’s Shaping Talent Acquisition Today, 2025.
