Your ATS is a week behind and everyone knows it
Interviews happened, candidates were rejected, two went to offer. None of it is in the system, because updating it is twenty minutes of typing at the end of a day when you'd rather be on the phone. This reads what actually happened and drafts the updates.
Happened this week · not in the ATS
17 updates
Stage moves
Nadia Osei → 2nd stage (interviewed Tuesday)
Rahul Kapoor → tech screen (booked Wednesday)
Elena Marchetti → offer (verbal Thursday)
Tom Bradshaw → rejected (client email Monday)
Notes with no home
Nadia: wants hybrid, 2 days max in office
Rahul: counter-offer risk, current employer aware
Elena: available from 1 Oct, not 15 Sep as recorded
Quietly wrong
6 candidates still showing "submitted" since June
Wexley role marked open — filled three weeks ago
Every one of these is knowable from your inbox. None of them is in the system anyone else on the desk looks at.
Works with
- Gmail
- Outlook
- Google Calendar
- Greenhouse
- Ashby
- Breezy HR
Greenhouse, Ashby, Breezy HR and Recruitee can all take stage moves and notes back. Lever is deliberately absent from this page — it publishes no stage-change, archive or update-opportunity tool, so it can receive a note but cannot be moved, and pretending otherwise would break the moment you tried it.
The chore
How this goes right now
The ATS is the system of record for a desk, and on most desks it is a work of historical fiction. Not through laziness — through arithmetic. A consultant running twelve processes generates twenty or thirty state changes a week, each of which is a login, a search, a dropdown and a save. Twenty minutes a day, at the end of the day, competing directly with going home.
So it slips, and it slips in a specific pattern: the good news gets entered and the rest doesn't. An offer goes in because it's satisfying and because somebody asks about it. A rejection from a client on a Monday afternoon stays in the inbox, so the candidate sits at "client review" for six weeks. Interview notes live in the consultant's head or in a Word document on their desktop. The system ends up accurate about outcomes and useless about everything in between.
That gap costs more than tidiness. Your colleague picks up a candidate on holiday cover and re-pitches a role they were already rejected for. A client asks how many people you've put forward and you can't answer from the system, so you count them by hand from your sent folder. And when somebody leaves the business, whatever they knew about their pipeline leaves with them, because the record of it was a person rather than a database.
The difference
Same record, assembled from what already happened
Nothing here is new information. It's the correspondence and the diary you already have, turned into the updates somebody would otherwise type in.
Try it
Walk through it yourself
This is the actual shape of the workflow — the same trigger, the same steps, the same draft waiting for your say-so. Click through it.
Keep the ATS current
Daily catch-up, 17:00
Reads the day's mail and diary on a schedule you choose. It has to be a sweep — no ATS in Composio's catalog publishes a single trigger, so nothing can be driven from the system-of-record side even in principle.
What it does
Read what changed in the correspondence
Client rejection for Tom Bradshaw on Monday. Verbal offer to Elena Marchetti on Thursday. Two candidates confirming availability. One counter-offer mentioned in passing.
GmailCheck which interviews actually took place
3 interviews ran as booked. Nadia Osei's second stage happened Tuesday 10:00. One was declined and never rebooked — flagged separately.
Google CalendarCompare against what the ATS currently believes
11 records out of date. 6 candidates still at "submitted" since June with no activity. The Wexley role is open in the system and was filled three weeks ago.
GreenhouseDraft the moves and notes, each with its source
4 stage changes, 3 notes, 1 role closure, 6 stale records raised for a decision. Every line links to the email or calendar entry it came from.
Greenhouse
Draft comparison — nothing has been sent
| Candidate | Currently | Proposed | Because |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nadia Osei | 1st stage | 2nd stage | Interview ran Tue 10:00, calendar confirmed |
| Tom Bradshaw | Client review | Rejected | Client email Mon: "not progressing Tom" |
| Elena Marchetti | Final stage | Offer | Your email Thu confirming verbal offer |
| Rahul Kapoor | Submitted | Tech screen booked | Invite accepted, Wed 11:00 |
| 6 candidates | Submitted (June) | No change proposed | No activity in 9 weeks — needs your decision |
The six stale records deliberately get no proposal. They're probably dead, but "probably dead" isn't a status change — somebody has to decide whether to close them or restart them, and that somebody isn't a scheduled job.
Apply the 4 stage moves and 3 notes?
You can accept the lot, or take them individually — most consultants approve the stage moves in one go and read the notes, since a note is the bit that carries nuance. Anything you reject is simply dropped; it never comes back asking again.
Written to the ATS, with the evidence attached
Stage moves and notes go into Greenhouse, Ashby, Breezy HR or Recruitee under your user. Each note carries the source it was drawn from, so the next person to open that record can see why it says what it says. Nothing is deleted, nothing is closed without you, and no candidate is contacted at any point.
Friday afternoon, returned to you.
It proposes every change with the evidence attached. Nothing is written to your ATS until you say so.
How it works
What it's actually doing
Reading the evidence that already exists and proposing the record that should match it. The ATS is downstream of your inbox, not the other way round.
- 1
- Gmail
- OuOutlook
Reads the correspondence, not a status field
Client rejections, verbal offers, availability confirmations, counter-offer mentions. The things that change a candidate's state almost always arrive as an email first.
- 2
- Google Calendar
Confirms what actually happened
An interview in the diary that nobody declined happened. One that was declined and never rebooked did not, and the difference matters to the record.
- 3
- GrGreenhouse
- AsAshby
- BrBreezy HR
Diffs it against what the system believes
Every proposal is a comparison — currently this, should be that, because of this email. Nothing is written that you can't trace back in one click.
- 4
- GrGreenhouse
- AsAshby
- BrBreezy HR
Writes back only what you approved
Stage moves and notes into whichever ATS you run. Stale and ambiguous records are raised for a human decision rather than resolved by a guess.
It proposes the record. It never writes an unreviewed change.
An ATS is what your colleagues and your clients rely on, and a wrong entry is worse than a missing one — a missing entry makes someone ask, a wrong one gets believed. So every change is a proposal with its evidence beside it, and none of them lands until you've said yes.
Step one
It drafts
Step two — you
You read it and approve
Step three
Only then does it send
Nothing is written without approval
Every stage move and note waits for you. Bulk-approve when it's obvious, go line by line when it isn't, and reject anything that looks off.
It doesn't reject candidates
It records a rejection a client has already made, in an email you can read. It never originates that decision, and it never marks someone unsuccessful because they went quiet.
It won't guess at ambiguity
"We're going to think about it" is not a stage change. Where the correspondence is genuinely unclear, it shows you the sentence and asks rather than picking the likelier reading.
It never deletes or closes anything
Stale records are surfaced, not archived. Six candidates sitting at submitted since June is a prompt for you to decide, and deciding by timeout is how good people fall out of a database.
Setup
What setting this up involves
- 1
Connect
- Gmail or Outlook — where the state changes actually arrive
- Google Calendar, to confirm which interviews ran
- Greenhouse, Ashby, Breezy HR or Recruitee — whichever you run
- Slack, if you want the daily summary posted to the desk
- 2
Tell it how you work
- Your stage names, since every ATS calls the same steps something different
- Which changes you'll bulk-approve and which always need reading
- How long before a quiet record counts as stale and gets raised
- Whether notes should carry the source email or just the substance
- Whether to run daily at close of play or weekly on a Friday
- 3
Then it runs
About 45 minutes, once
Most of it is mapping your stage names, which only has to be done once and is the thing that makes the proposals read correctly. If your pipeline has custom stages per client, budget a little longer.
Edge cases
Where it's careful, and what it won't do
What it handles
An interview that was booked and never happened
A declined invite that was never rebooked doesn't advance anybody. It's raised as a gap instead, which is usually a process that has quietly stalled.
News that arrives sideways
A rejection mentioned in a paragraph about something else, or a start date corrected in passing. It reads the substance rather than looking for a form of words.
The same candidate in two processes
Someone on two roles with the same client moves in one and not the other. Proposals are per application, not per person, so progress in one never silently drags the other along.
An ATS that can't do what you're asking
Lever has no stage-change tool at all, so on Lever this drafts notes and reports the moves for you to make by hand. Ashby can't take a file. The limits are stated rather than failing quietly at the write.
What it does not do
Write anything you haven't approved
Every change is a proposal. There's no unattended mode, because an ATS full of unreviewed entries is worse than one that's out of date.
Decide who progresses
It records decisions other people made. It doesn't screen, rank or assess anybody, and it never advances or rejects a candidate on its own reading of a thread.
Contact candidates or clients
This task never sends anything. It reads correspondence and updates a database, and that's the whole of it.
Close roles or archive records
Stale things get surfaced for a decision. Nothing is removed, archived or closed without a person choosing to.
Time back
Five to eight hours a month, and a pipeline that's actually true
- Time back
- 5–8 hrs a month
- Spent on
- Working the desk, not recording it
- What it costs
- $49 / monthGrowthplan — see what’s included
How that’s worked out: Based on fifteen to twenty minutes a day of ATS admin per consultant, which is what desks report when asked honestly rather than what the process assumes. The harder-to-price return is accuracy: a pipeline your colleagues can read is the difference between covering someone's desk for a week and starting from their sent folder.
Fair questions
The questions consultants ask first
How can it possibly know what stage someone is at from an email?
It works from unambiguous evidence and refuses the rest. A client writing "we're not progressing Tom" is clear. An interview in the diary that nobody declined is clear. "We'll come back to you next week" is not, and that one gets shown to you with the sentence quoted rather than turned into a stage change. The proposals you'll reject are the ones where the underlying email was genuinely ambiguous, and you'd have had to read it either way.
I don't want anything touching our ATS automatically.
Nor would we. Nothing is written without you approving it, and there is no setting that changes that — the review step is the product, not a safety option layered on top. If you'd rather it never wrote at all, run it in the mode where it produces the list and you make the changes yourself; plenty of desks start there and most move on once they've watched it be right for a fortnight.
Our ATS has automation and integrations already.
Those work on events inside the ATS — a candidate moves, so send an email. This is the opposite direction: something happened outside the system and the system doesn't know. That gap is structural, and it's worth knowing that no ATS in Composio's catalog publishes a single event trigger, so nothing can be driven from that side by anybody. The inbox is where the truth arrives first.
More off the same desk
Other things that keep falling off the list
Write up interview notes
The write-up drafted from the recording, in your format, quoting what was actually said — so notes exist while you still remember the call.
Chase hiring manager feedback
Every interview with no feedback after 48 hours gets a nudge drafted to the client, and you get one list of what's outstanding across the desk.
Chase candidate availability
Every candidate sitting on an availability request gets a nudge with real slots in it, before the client's window closes and you have to ask for new ones.
Send weekly client updates
A per-client summary of what moved, what's waiting and what you need — drafted Friday morning from the week's real activity.
Re-engage dormant candidates
Your database stops being a graveyard — people you've already met are surfaced against live roles, with the reconnect drafted from your own history.
The same admin drag elsewhere
FAQ
Questions worth answering properly
Which ATSs can it actually write to?
Greenhouse, Ashby, Breezy HR and Recruitee all accept stage moves and notes. Lever accepts notes but has no stage-change, archive or update-opportunity tool, so there it reports the moves for you to make by hand. Those limits are published capabilities, not our preferences, and we'd rather name them than have you find out mid-run.
Does it need an ATS at all?
No. Plenty of desks run this against a spreadsheet, and it works the same way — read the evidence, propose the update, write what you approve. The ATS integration is a convenience for desks that have one, not a requirement.
What happens to candidates sitting at a stage for months?
They're surfaced with how long they've been quiet, and deliberately given no proposed change. Nine weeks of silence usually means the process died without anyone saying so, but closing someone out is a decision with consequences for a real person's expectations, so it stays yours.
Can two consultants use this on a shared pipeline?
Yes, and it's more useful there than on a solo desk. Each consultant reviews and approves their own updates, and everything is written under their user, so the audit trail in the ATS still shows who changed what — which matters when somebody is covering a colleague's roles.
Will it move a candidate forward on its own reading of a thread?
It proposes; you approve. And it only proposes where the evidence is unambiguous — an interview that demonstrably took place, a client stating a decision in plain terms. Everything softer than that is shown to you as a question with the source quoted.
Does the note include the original email?
By default it carries a link to the source and a short summary rather than pasting the full text, so records stay readable and you're not duplicating correspondence into a database. You can set it to include more if your compliance process wants the whole thing.
Have an ATS that tells the truth
Connect your mailbox and your ATS. Today's updates are drafted by close of play, with the evidence attached to every one.
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