Where an ATS stops
An ATS helps you post jobs, collect applications, and move candidates between stages. It's good at admin: scheduling, emails, pipeline organisation.
But it was never designed to answer the questions that determine hiring quality: What criteria should we assess? How do we measure actual fit, beyond the CV? Are we making consistent decisions? Did our last ten hires actually perform well?
An ATS tracks where candidates are. A hiring system helps you determine who the right candidate is.
“An ATS tells you where your candidate is. Alva Labs tells you who you should hire and why.”
What a hiring system covers
Alva Labs is built around five stages: Define, Attract, Assess, Decide, Improve.
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Define: Weighted, role-specific success profiles based on research.
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Attract: Structured criteria to evaluate inbound candidates or source proactively.
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Assess: DNV-certified psychometric assessments combined with structured interviews.
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Decide: Role Fit scoring ranks candidates against your defined criteria.
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Improve: Tracks which scores predicted performance. Predictions get more accurate over time.
An ATS covers parts of Attract. A hiring system covers all five.
When an ATS is enough - and when it's not
If pipeline management is your only need, an ATS does the job. But most teams struggle with inconsistent decisions, hiring manager misalignment, and no way to measure whether the process produces good hires.
You need more than an ATS when:
- You can't explain why you hired one candidate over another
- Hiring managers run their own process with no shared standard
- You have no data on whether recent hires performed well
- You keep adding disconnected tools to patch process gaps
How Alva Labs works with your ATS
Alva Labs integrates with major ATS platforms: Teamtailor, Lever, Greenhouse, Workable, and others. Keep your ATS for pipeline management and add Alva for structure, assessment, and decision intelligence. Or consolidate into one platform.
Currently using a toolbox approach? Consider this.
ATS vs hiring system
Are you using an ATS and an assessment tool today? Alva works with your existing setup and takes it further. But a collection of separate tools doesn't make a system. And when the process is scattered, hiring quality ends up depending on who's involved, not on what the role requires.
Tools in a stack
Optimizes individual steps
Data lives in separate tools
Criteria can change throughout the process
Final decisions rely on interpretation
Systems can be connected, not made smarter
Alva Hiring System
Designed around decision quality
Shared criteria from role definition to final decision
Comparable evidence across candidates
Clear decision guidance
One interconnected framework throughout
Tools in a stack
Alva Hiring System
Optimizes individual steps
Designed around decision quality
Data lives in separate tools
Shared criteria from role definition to final decision
Criteria can change throughout the process
Comparable evidence across candidates
Final decisions rely on interpretation
Clear decision guidance
Systems can be connected, not made smarter
One interconnected framework throughout
Alva is an end-to-end hiring system that gives you everything you need to make confident, data based decisions, always backed by proven science.
