Your company doesn't have "a" hiring process. It has ten.

In the early days of Pinpoint, we won a postal service as a customer. I remember it clearly because of one detail: on that same morning, the talent team was hiring two completely different kinds of people.

On one side, they were recruiting the couriers who deliver the mail, hiring at volume, where success means moving quickly and getting someone trained and out on a route.

On the other hand, they were searching for their next CEO, a process that would take months, involve a tiny shortlist, and be scrutinized by the board every step of the way.

The same organization, the same talent team, and, on paper, the same hiring process.

But in reality, these are two jobs that share almost nothing.

Run both through the same hiring process and you make both worse. The courier gets an experience designed for executive search: slow, over-engineered, and full of friction. Before you've made a decision, they've accepted a job somewhere else.

The CEO gets the opposite. They're asked to navigate a process built for volume hiring, complete an application that feels irrelevant, and answer questions that have nothing to do with the role. At some point, they start to wonder whether the organization is taking the search seriously.

Everything about these hires is different: the assessments, the interview process, the people who need to be involved, the timelines, the decisions being made. One process, forced onto two completely different types of hiring, serves neither well.

I start with that story because it's an obvious example of something almost every organization deals with. Not just between couriers and CEOs, but across dozens of roles that demand different hiring approaches, yet are still expected to fit inside the same process.

The illusion of "the hiring process"

Ask a leader to describe how their company hires, and you'll hear about "our hiring process," singular.

But it's never one singular process.

Map it honestly, and most organizations of any size are running at least three to five genuinely different shapes of hiring at once. There's head-office hiring, where a recruiter works a small number of candidates carefully. There's high-volume frontline hiring, where you're hiring for stores, sites, or warehouses and speed is everything. There's early-career hiring, where intern and graduate programs run on their own calendar. There's the seasonal ramp, where a retailer or hospitality group hires a year's worth of people in six weeks. And there's high-touch, confidential executive search, where relationships are built over months, not days.

Those are different jobs. Different candidates, different timelines, different managers, different definitions of a good outcome.

This shows up well before an organization hits enterprise scale. You don't need a global footprint to feel it, just a few hundred people spread across more than one site, brand, or business line. A regional retailer with 400 people across a dozen store locations is running head-office hiring for its corporate team and frontline hiring for every store, often on completely different timelines. A professional-services firm with 700 people is running partner-track hiring in one office and graduate intake in another. Nobody designed these as separate processes. The organization grew into needing them, and the hiring process never caught up.

Then multiply that by geography or by a second office. The way you have to hire in one region isn't the way you can hire in the next. Different compliance requirements, different candidate expectations, different norms about what an interview even is.

So the company that thought it had one hiring process actually has its three to five hiring shapes running across however many locations or markets it operates in. 10 is not a stretch. For a lot of fast-growing organizations, it's conservative.

What a one-shape system does to the rest

Almost every applicant tracking system on the market is built, deep down, for one of those shapes. Usually mid-career corporate hiring, because that's the comfortable, recognizable shape that demos well.

It does that shape genuinely well. It does the others badly, or not at all.

So the teams it doesn't fit do the only sensible thing: they route around it. The high-volume team gives up on the system and runs the whole thing out of a spreadsheet because the ATS can't move fast enough. Hiring-manager feedback stops landing in the system and starts living in email or Slack, because asking a busy manager to log in and navigate to the right screen is a fight you lose. New-hire onboarding migrates into a side process nobody outside the HR team can see. Reporting gets stitched together by hand at the end of every month because no single system holds the whole picture. And the candidate experience drifts away from anything you'd have signed off on, because each team is improvising its own.

None of that is a discipline problem. I want to be clear about that, because it's almost always read as one.

The natural conclusion is that people need more training, more reminders, or a stricter policy. But you can't train your way out of this. People route around a tool that doesn't fit the work in front of them, and that's just good sense. The tool was built for one shape, and the organization hires in several.

This is where the cost lands hardest for a People team that's still lean relative to headcount, without a dedicated recruiting-ops function to build the workaround and maintain it properly. The spreadsheet becomes the system of record almost by accident, and it stays that way long after anyone remembers deciding it should.

The cost is fragmentation

Once an organization accepts that the one-shape system can't carry everything, it usually does the same thing: it buys its way out, one gap at a time.

A second ATS for the volume team. Or a second instance of the same ATS, configured differently, with its own data that never quite reconciles with the first. Or, most commonly, a slowly growing fan of point tools and workarounds, each bought or created to patch a place the core system didn't reach.

Now you have the real cost, and it isn't the license fees (though those do add up). The real cost is fragmentation.

Your hiring data lives in three or four places that don't agree. No one can see across the whole organization. Every board update or leadership report is a reconciliation exercise. Every automation or AI tool you try to layer on top works from a partial picture, because the picture itself is partial.

The instinct is to treat that as a tooling problem and solve it with one more tool. But fragmentation isn't the cause. It's the symptom. The organization ended up fragmented because the core system only ever fit one shape of hiring, and it bought its way around all the others.

This shows up at mid-sized organizations as often as large ones. At Pinpoint we work with organizations like Article in consumer goods, citizenM Hotels in hospitality, Davies Group in professional services, Twinings in consumer goods, Grant Thornton in professional and financial services, and Franklin Electric in manufacturing.

Each is hiring in multiple shapes at once: corporate and customer-facing, early-career and experienced, often seasonally, often across more than one location. Some support a few hundred employees. Others support several thousand.

Regardless of size or industry, the gap between "our hiring process" and the shapes an organization actually runs stops being a quirk and starts becoming the thing that determines whether any of it works.

What a system built for many shapes has to do

Running all of that on one system, properly, means supporting those different shapes of hiring without the spreadsheets, side channels, and second instances.

The short version is that a system built for many shapes of hiring has to do something most weren't designed to do. It has to flex to fit each shape, whether that's the volume hire, the executive search, or the seasonal ramp, without forcing them all through one rigid path.

At the same time, it has to stay easy enough that hiring managers will actually use it, while remaining controlled enough that the data stays clean across every team and every location.

Flexibility, ease of use, and control, all at once. That combination is rare, and when a system has it, it's rarely by accident. It's usually the thing it was built for.

The better question

Most ATS buying starts from the wrong question: which one has the best features?

You line up the demos, score the features, and pick a winner. The trouble is that "best" almost always means best at the one shape the demo focused on, which is exactly how you end up back where you started: a great system for one type of hiring, and a fan of workarounds for everything else.

The better question is quieter, and it's the one worth putting at the center of any ATS decision: which one works for the whole organization?

The volume role and the confidential search. The intern class and the experienced hire. Every location, every season, every shape of work the organization actually runs.

We built Pinpoint to be the ATS for multi-stream hiring, a deliberately unglamorous way of saying we built it to fit the whole organization rather than one comfortable corner of it.

But you don't need to take my word for any of it. Pull up your own hiring. Count the shapes honestly, by role type, by season, by location. If the number is more than one, and it almost always is, you already know your company doesn't have a hiring process. It has several. The only real question is whether your system knows that too.

See what an ATS built for multiple hiring shapes looks like and reach out to continue the conversation with Pinpoint! 

‍