ATS (Applicant tracking system) investment is holding up. Customer expectations are moving much faster.
Nine in ten organisations are maintaining or increasing their investment in their ATS, yet 82% say their current platform still has significant gaps.
Those gaps are rare in traditional applicant tracking. They sit around the edges of the workflow: scheduling, analytics, candidate engagement, sourcing and talent attraction.¹
That creates a difficult equation for ATS, HCM, CRM and other recruitment technology providers. Customers expect more capability inside the platforms they already use, while engineering teams face increasingly crowded roadmaps.
During our recent webinar, 72.7% of attendees told us that engineering or integration demands are already slowing their product roadmap.² The answer cannot simply be to build more.
The more useful question is: what genuinely differentiates your platform, and what should you embed instead?
That was the focus of our latest webinar, The ATS Roadmap Reset: Why the Next Hiring Advantage Is Embedded, with Madeline Laurano, Founder of Aptitude Research, VONQ CEO Ritu Mohanka, and CTO Bill Fischer, hosted by Joren de Koning, VP Partnerships at VONQ.
It also comes at an important moment for VONQ. Our Hiring API (HAPI) is now embedded in 100 ATS, HCM and CRM platforms. Across those partnerships and ATS integrations, we increasingly see the same challenge: platform providers want to deliver a broader hiring experience without turning every customer request into another multi-quarter engineering project.
Customers are still investing in the ATS. They simply expect much more from it.
The ATS remains the system of record for talent acquisition. Organisations are not walking away from it.
Aptitude Research found that:
- 34% of organisations are increasing ATS investment
- 56% are maintaining current investment
- 82% say their ATS has significant gaps
- only 28% are satisfied with the ATS decision they made
- one in four plan to replace their ATS this year
- just 22% believe the ATS alone can support talent transformation¹
Perhaps the most telling finding is that almost half of organisations are evaluating their existing ATS for additional capabilities.¹ Most are not necessarily looking for another core platform. They want the platform they already use to do more.
As Madeline explained during the webinar:
“We’re never going to do a webinar that says the ATS is now obsolete.”
The ATS is not disappearing. Its role is expanding.
The agentic AI in recruitment is accelerating that shift. Customers increasingly expect technology to support better decisions, automate more of the hiring journey and connect previously fragmented workflows.
For platform providers, that creates opportunity, but also pressure.
The biggest gaps sit around the ATS core
The gaps customers identify are remarkably specific.
Scheduling is cited by 48% of organisations, followed by analytics at 36%, candidate engagement at 30% and sourcing at 30%.¹
These are areas adjacent to traditional applicant tracking rather than the core system-of-record capabilities most ATS platforms were originally designed to deliver.
Recruiters still depend on their ATS for requisition management, stage progression, compliance, audit trails and record keeping.
Yet they frequently leave the platform to schedule interviews, source candidates, manage recruitment marketing, run job advertising campaigns, nurture talent or access deeper recruitment analytics.
That fragmentation creates what Aptitude Research describes as an “integration tax”.
Poor integration across systems is recruiters’ leading technology frustration, while 54% of enterprises are managing multiple ATS platforms at the same time.¹
Every additional tool introduces another interface, another integration, another dataset and another supplier relationship.
For the recruiter, the recruitment technology stack becomes harder to navigate.
For the platform provider, every time a customer leaves the platform to solve part of the hiring journey elsewhere, part of the customer relationship leaves with them.
Build, buy or embed?
For years, product strategy has largely been framed as a build-versus-buy decision.
That framing is becoming too narrow. There is a third option: build what differentiates your platform and embed the capabilities your customers expect, but which do not need to become another internal product development programme.
The distinction matters.
A capability that helps win a competitive platform deal may deserve proprietary investment.
A capability customers simply expect to be present may need to be delivered quickly rather than reinvented.
And capabilities such as global job distribution, programmatic job advertising, recruitment media buying, campaign optimisation and local market connectivity require specialist infrastructure that can take years to build and maintain.
The practical framework Madeline shared is simple:
- Does the capability differentiate your platform in a competitive deal? Build it.
- Is it expected rather than chosen? Consider embedding it to reach parity faster.
- Is it outside your core competency? Use specialist infrastructure.
- How quickly does the market expect it? Speed needs to be part of the product decision.
A feature available through an embedded partner next quarter and the same feature available through internal development in 18 months are not equivalent choices.
The opportunity cost matters.
Every quarter a capability waits for engineering capacity is another quarter in which the customer may solve the problem elsewhere.
Embedded capability only works if the platform stays in control
Embedding does not mean giving up ownership of the experience. The strongest embedded models are almost invisible to the end user.
The recruiter stays within the platform they already know. The experience remains under the platform’s brand. Customer relationships, commercial ownership, data and pricing remain with the platform provider.
Underneath that experience, the embedded partner operates the specialist infrastructure.
That division of responsibility can be powerful.
| The platform retains | The embedded infrastructure provider manages |
|---|---|
|
Its brand and recruiter experience |
Connections to thousands of job boards and media channels |
|
The customer relationship |
Publisher and marketplace relationships
|
|
Product differentiation |
Local market maintenance |
|
Commercial ownership |
Campaign optimisation |
|
Data and pricing |
AI governance, auditing and compliance |
Done well, embedded hiring infrastructure expands the product without making the product organisation responsible for operating an entirely new category.
This is increasingly a revenue decision, not an engineering decision
The most interesting shift may be commercial.
We asked webinar attendees how partnerships, marketplaces, media, job distribution and AI contribute to their business today.
The answers showed how quickly the model is changing:
- 81.8% already generate revenue from partner, marketplace or media activity
- 45.5% say AI already generates at least some direct revenue
- 36.4% currently generate revenue from job distribution
- 36.4% already use, or plan to introduce, pricing models beyond traditional seat-based licences²
This matters because the economics around the ATS extend far beyond software licences.
As Bill highlighted during the webinar, employers spend almost ten times more on media to attract candidates than they do on their ATS platform.
If recruitment marketing, job distribution, screening and other hiring capabilities sit outside the ATS, much of that spend sits outside the platform relationship too.
Embedding creates an opportunity to bring more of that value inside the ecosystem.
That changes the business case completely.
The conversation moves from “How much engineering capacity will this save?” to “How much more value can this platform capture from the hiring activity already taking place around it?”
For many providers, that is a much more interesting question.
Moving beyond revenue per seat
Embedded capability can also open the door to different commercial models.
Traditional ATS economics are usually linked to licences, users or seats. Hiring activity does not behave that way.
With an outcome-based model such as CPA+, for example, the customer pays a fixed price for a completed, AI-screened applicant delivered into the platform.³
Revenue therefore scales with hiring demand rather than relying entirely on additional software licences.
That creates the potential for ATS and HCM providers to participate more directly in the economics of recruitment activity happening through their platform.
The shift from software system to hiring ecosystem is increasingly a commercial one as much as a product one.
From applicant tracking to an embedded hiring journey
This is also why we are expanding HAPI beyond automated job distribution and recruitment advertising.
Through EQO®, partners can now bring together six connected stages at the top of the funnel into one connected hiring workflow:
Write. Distribute. Attract. Screen. Interview. Score.
The capabilities run through the same HAPI infrastructure and can be embedded individually or together.³
An ATS may choose to add AI-assisted job description creation. Another may start with recruitment marketing or candidate screening. A partner already using HAPI for distribution can extend into additional stages without introducing another infrastructure provider or rebuilding the ATS integration from scratch.
EQO Attract takes a job and turns it into targeted social recruitment campaigns, generating and adapting creative for individual channels and helping employers reach candidates who may never visit a traditional job board. For platform providers, the significance goes beyond the individual product.
It shows what an embedded hiring infrastructure can look like when multiple stages of the journey operate through one platform relationship rather than a collection of disconnected point solutions.
Four questions for your 2027 product roadmap
For product, partnership and commercial leaders planning the next stage of their roadmap, there are four useful questions to ask.
1. What actually differentiates us?
Audit the roadmap and separate genuine competitive differentiation from capabilities customers simply expect.
Building everything internally is not a strategy. Product investment should go where proprietary capability creates meaningful advantage.
2. Where are customers already leaving our platform?
Look at the tools customers use alongside your product.
Every external sourcing tool, recruitment marketing platform, scheduling product or candidate screening solution represents either an integration that should be strengthened or a capability that could potentially sit inside your platform.
Both are strategic conversations.
3. What is the commercial opportunity?
Do not model embedded capability purely through engineering savings.
Consider additional platform revenue, transaction volume, media spend, expansion potential and new outcome-based business models.
In many cases, the revenue opportunity will be considerably larger than the development savings.
4. How much control do we retain?
Embedded partnerships should strengthen the platform relationship.
Brand, interface, data ownership, commercial terms, pricing, governance and exit conditions all need to be designed accordingly.
Customers should experience a stronger platform, not a collection of third-party tools stitched together.
The roadmap has changed
ATS providers do not need to become experts in every part of hiring.
They do need to decide where they want to differentiate, where they need to move faster and where an embedded partner can create more value than another internal build.
The platforms that make those decisions well can broaden their product, reduce integration complexity and create new sources of revenue at the same time.
That is the real opportunity behind embedded hiring.
Build what makes your platform different.
Embed the infrastructure that helps it do more.
Want to explore the full research?
Watch the on-demand webinar to hear the discussion with Madeline Laurano, Ritu Mohanka and Bill Fischer, see the first demonstration of EQO® Attract and explore the data behind the ATS Roadmap Reset.
You can also download the full Aptitude Research report or speak with the VONQ HAPI team about what embedded hiring could add to your platform.
Sources
¹ Aptitude Research, The ATS Roadmap Reset, sponsored by VONQ. Online survey of 358 TA and HR leaders, recruiters and sourcers, and IT professionals; data collected Q1–Q3 2026.
² VONQ, live attendee poll during the webinar The ATS Roadmap Reset: Why the Next Hiring Advantage Is Embedded, September 2026.
³ VONQ HAPI, EQO Hiring API: Embedded Hiring Infrastructure.
