An ATS moves candidates through your pipeline. Tracking candidates isn't the same as making better hiring decisions.
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.
Define. Weighted, role-specific success profiles based on research.
Attract. Structured criteria to evaluate inbound candidates or source proactively.
Assess. DNV-certified psychometric assessments combined with structured interviews.
Decide. Role Fit scoring ranks candidates against your defined criteria.
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
"With Alva's Hiring System, we can manage the entire recruitment workflow in one platform. Automated job criteria and role fit scoring help us prioritize the right candidates and make better data-driven hiring decisions." José Reis, Head of Talent Acquisition, Vend
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.
