The applicant tracking system category has a problem: most of it was designed for the wrong customer.
If you watch how an SMB actually hires (a founder reviewing applications between two customer calls, an HR lead drafting a job ad while running payroll, a hiring manager sneaking interviews onto a Friday afternoon), almost nothing in the typical enterprise ATS makes sense. Procurement approval flows. Twelve-stage default pipelines. Compliance dashboards built for a chief people officer who doesn’t exist. Permissions models that assume a recruiting team of fourteen.
We’ve spent the last several years building for the SMB end of the market specifically (companies with fifteen to two hundred employees, hiring three to thirty roles a year), and the most reliable lesson is this: scale-down hostility is real, and it shows up everywhere. SHRM’s 2025 recruiting benchmarking found 42% of small and medium enterprises name integration barriers as the top ATS adoption hurdle. That number is not a coincidence. It is the symptom of tools designed for a different scale.
What scale-down hostility looks like
A 30-person company configures their ATS like an apartment dweller assembling Ikea furniture for a mansion. You buy a tool sized for hundreds of recruiters, then spend two weeks turning off the parts you don’t need:
- The five-stage interview pipeline you’ll never use, because three stages is plenty
- The “diversity dashboards” that need an analyst to interpret
- The default email templates written in the corporate voice of a Fortune 500
- The org-wide reporting that requires a permissions matrix the size of a payroll spreadsheet
By the time the tool is usable, you’ve lost a week. And every quarter the vendor adds three more features that you also have to disable.
What respecting your size means
Software that respects your size starts with defaults that are right for you, not for someone four orders of magnitude larger. Three-stage pipelines by default. Plain-language email templates. One permission level for small teams, with the more granular options tucked behind an opt-in. Reporting that fits on one screen and answers the questions a founder actually asks: “How many candidates? Where are they coming from? Why are we losing them?”
It also means pricing that doesn’t punish you for being efficient. The enterprise-ATS pricing model (per seat, plus per role, plus per integration, plus per feature module) exists because enterprise procurement teams are equipped to negotiate. SMBs aren’t. Honest tier-based pricing, with the basics included and the upgrades clear, takes a category of friction off the table entirely.
And it means building for the actual person doing the hiring. Not the persona on a slide deck. The actual founder, HR lead, or hiring manager whose ATS is one of fifteen tools they touch in a day. If using your product feels like a job, you’ve built it for the wrong job.
The test we run on every feature
When we evaluate a new feature, the question we ask first is: does this still make sense for a 30-person company?
If the answer is no (the feature only earns its keep at 300 employees), it goes into a different tier, or it doesn’t ship. We’d rather have a smaller product that fits your company than a bigger one that asks you to fit it.
That principle has cost us features. It’s the right tradeoff. The companies we serve don’t need more software; they need software that gets out of the way so they can hire the next person and get back to the rest of the business.
That’s the bet. And so far, that’s the bet that’s working.
